BIRDMAN MOTHERFUCKAS (2014 film feat. Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, et al)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIxMMv_LD5Q

Looks like it could entertain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdman_%28film%29

i'm rooting for this movie. michael keaton could really use a comeback-vehicle (like a john travolta-style reclamation project).

p good trailer, looks like all that jazz redux

how can he be reclaimed from being awesome

because he's kind of gone quiet since batman returns, at least in terms of commercial success?

Comeback? I remember when his directorial debut (Merry Gentleman) came out he said that he hadn't been acting as much because he wasn't proud of some of his previous performances and was wary of repeating himself too much. Looking at his cv, he has done a lot more than I thought he had.

Aside from Beetlejuice I've never seen any of his early comedies that he built his reputation on, I'm curious about them. Curious about Merry Gentleman too.

i'd be a lot more interested in this if Iñárritu wasn't directing tbh

and writing

really like the look of this

An actor (Keaton) – famous for portraying an iconic superhero – struggles to mount a Broadway play. In the days leading up to opening night, he battles his ego and attempts to recover his family, his career, and himself. The play in the film is an adaptation of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Disappointed that the title of the thread and the title of the film are not the same.

I hope the play in this one is better than that heavyhanded Dan Rush/Will Ferrell Carver adaptation from a few years back

reactions continue, not all raves

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-venice-2014-alejandro-g-inarritus-birdman

Aside from Beetlejuice I've never seen any of his early comedies that he built his reputation on, I'm curious about them.

Night Shift is not exactly a classic for the ages, but man, Keaton is such a wave of energy in that movie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/movies/in-birdman-michael-keaton-confronts-the-nature-of-fame.html

Four Stars from Peter Travers.

Anyone seen it yet? I really want to but it isn't playing here!

I have. I really enjoyed the general atmosphere and camerawork. Felt like a good rattle inside the Keaton character's mind, with great supporting work from the rest of the cast. Not sure about some parts, like the theatre critic, but overall one of my favourites of the year so far.

I suppose the theatre critic provided a neat shortcut to v quickly reveal unambiguously the ~critical~ reception and therefore the worth of the play and underlines the muddled relationship artists have with critics

I thought it was really good and impressive and the camera gimmick not too showy though what is great about it - that it drifts and drifts and sometimes through time rather than space and therefore doesn't feel, so consciously, like the continuous "shot" that it isn't while giving a feeling of continuity and accumulation - is momentarily broken with a few deliberate bits of "camera" sliding though v narrow bars on a window or whatnot which I felt a little showy/unnecessary I guess

my friend designed a tattoo in this, on edward norton I believe.

I love the first sentence of this review:(http://thedissolve.com/reviews/1152-birdman/) "González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence."

this was fun I thought. a bit self-congratulating perhaps. a number of moments which recall other iconic films to I don't know what end.

Holy moly. One of the better movies I've seen about theater (paired oddly in my head with A Prairie Home Companion).

i enjoyed a lot about it, but honestly i found the back-and-forths between keaton, norton and stone way more engaging than all the surreal psychological meltdown stuff. though in that I didn't find the cgi as gratingly superfluous as it was in black swan.

keaton did a good job but i just found his character so much less interesting than norton's and stone's - the irony of casting keaton is i don't believe being a forgotten superhero would drive him to a suicidal breakdown

wish they'd just let him be a b-level actor with a-name recognition facing off against an a-level actor with b-name recognition, and not been so overwrought about it

(referring to their characters i mean, not keaton and norton themselves)

"obstinately unfunny"

http://cinema-scope.com/currency/easy-virtue-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritus-birdman/

As a thtr dude I think you'll like it Morbs

hah i'm not sure i qualify as such

As a dude who likes thtr anyway, you might get something out of the movie, even just for the realistic backstage at the St. James.

Opens this weekend here. Local male critics ecstatic.

were they also ecstatic over Babel and Biutiful?

Edward Norton MUCH more interesting than Keaton.

this was good, but i am that dumb everyman fool who still loves Keaton from those days so of course I would like it

the last half hour was a nothing -- it just ran out of movie

Edward Norton MUCH more interesting than Keaton.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, November 1, 2014 4:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this

tho i m/l liked this; crix raving are prob the 1s who most have to endure all the marvels so i cant really hate

the last superhero movie i saw was Iron Man and this was a fantastic movie imo

It was OK until the last half hour, when it simply ran out of movie.

this is good

35 minutes of this was a pretty good Ed Norton movie, the rest was pretty much bullshit

wasn't he good?

Not only was his character more interesting than Keaton's, he did a more entertaining job of playing off his real-life persona. You feel this more acutely when Keaton really takes over in the back half.

And fuck that "for the lols" lesbian kiss scene and the writing for basically all of the supporting characters, but esp the women

And fuck that "for the lols" lesbian kiss scene

I'd had a grudge against the director ever since Biutiful, because of the incestuous Chinese brothers plotline. Yes, that movie was a sexed-up expansion of the Dardennes Freres formula of globalization and its discontents, but overegged puddings, thy name is González Iñárritu.

As for Birdman, my instinct has been to take the initial shot of Keaton levitating as a signifier of XTREEM Unreliable Narrator. This might explain the differences in the shots that don't include Riggan.

30 minutes of this was quite enough. First walkout in years.

walked out of turdman into Mockingjay which I thought was exquisite so there you go

Come on. This was great.

x2 - great.

I really liked this movie a lot

p much. this movie = http://cinemajaw.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/jon-lovitz-acting.jpg

The movie was not praising these delusional losers I didn't think

I was pretty buzzed coming out of this mostly cause of the showier formal elements like the drumming & fake single shot. A virtuosic movie about failed would-be virtuosi, the pictures of fidelman of film. Even tho the critic scene was fucking stupid as was at least one of the superfluous endings.

Anyway then I thought about if some more and it has not aged well in my head at all

The movie was not praising these delusional losers I didn't think

it's not so much that the movie is praising the delusional losers as the Academy was patting itself on the back for being self-aware enough to acknowledge the delusional losers in their midst (aren't they so clever and grown up - they "get it")

Yeah that's more like it, Hollywood navel-gazing does tend to do well at Hollywood navel-gazing ceremonies but what rational person pays the slightest attention to those anyway

zactly

I'm not telling anyone what I thought about what the academy thought of this, thats p much three levels beyond how I grade movies

kinda feel like all the meta-celebrity stuff in this movie was handled in a better way in Top Five (which was also just a better all around movie imo)

Network's characters have agendas, they have individual desires and motives, they react to each other. Birdman has a handful of unchanging archetypes that exist while things happen around them.

it really meant something back then mannnnnnnn

Network is so much better than this thing come on

Network is so much better than this thing come on

― polyphonic, Monday, April 13, 2015 3:04 PM (29 seconds ago)

Network has teeth and is concerned w the culture at large, this just seemed like navel-gazing

it really meant something back then mannnnnnnn

^Imagining Michael Keaton saying this while drums skitter around jazz beat.

ba-TSCH

Network is fun trash.

Exactly. No small feat.

i didn't really like this

it was very claustrophobic

i felt relieved when it was over

oh and best thing about this was definitely the drum beats

― flopson, Saturday, 10 January 2015 01:11 (1 hour ago) Permalink

^^
This

In retrospect I wish the film had ditched the play and just focused on the drummer.

― RAP GAME SHANI DAVIS (Raymond Cummings), Friday, January 9, 2015 9:42 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

Could've still be a one-shot film.

i started watching it thinking it would be pretty bad, so i ended up enjoying it, actually

AI's next movie: The Revenant: Iñárritu, DiCaprio

I have this DVD checked out of the library atm and expect to watch it some time in the next couple of nights. Opinions here seems to be all over the map so I guess I'll be prepared for anything from greatness to pompous dreck.

it's great and pompous

Antonio Sanchez definitely killed it. And the part where you see Nate Smith playing his parts is better than all the drumming scenes in Whiplash.

it's great and pompous

yes, and it's a celebration of pomposity

not as funny or good as either Black Swan or Maskerade though

I just finished watching it. First impressions:

It was ridiculous without being funny. It tried to play both sides of the street at once and failed as both a drama and a comedy. It did succeed in being pretentious.

It was reasonably accurate in its satire of theater people, but theater are not only an easy target, but their personal inadequacies are irrelevant to what makes the theater worthwhile, so who cares?

The only actor who figured out how to rise above his role as it was written was Ed Norton. The rest of the cast dutifully delivered the caricatures that the script demanded.

I didn't enjoy that review

I enjoyed this film quite a bit. Not sure I'd watch it again, though.

i watched this for the first time last night, the 4th movie i'd watched during an 11-flight, and i was mesmerized. i thought the first 30-minutes or so in particular were really good. i was really surprised that someone upthread walked out after that, but i guess if you're not into birdman after the first half an hour you might as well go grab a taco or whatever. hard to believe all the hate in this thread but i guess i was just more pulled in by its technical achievements. on reflection, the script was sometimes weak but the performances and the way it was shot are so good that they could be reading dog food ingredients and it would still be pretty good. the plot is sometimes a little silly, but everything dips into the surreal so that seems natural. i can understand why some would recoil at its pretensions but it also introduces bob sagat and then kills him off within a minute, as michael keaton admits to the murder while walking back to his dressing room. it's not exactly people whispering in a t malick movie (which i also enjoy fwiw)

anyway, 2 jet-lagged thumbs up, way up

otm otm otm

Thought this was okay. Sat down wanting to be completely drawn into and absorbed in a film after kind of a stressful/distracting day. If it never really got me there, I never wanted to turn it off either. Some nice images, some nice scenes, Keaton was fantastic but it didn't add up too much and the ending felt underthought even before found out it was kind of a late addition. I think the hype, awards, and budget do it a disservice - this is a minor, semi-weird, doesn't-quite-work film and that's not a bad thing, but pumped up to masterpiece status it inevitably feels like the emperor with no clothes.

The thing I come back to is Norton telling Keaton his script has him saying the same thing four times without being sure what the line's really about, and then we have this film where characters say and do the same things over and over. Not sure what to take away from it but it's surely intentional and I think a version shot in flat black and white - or a stage play version - it'd start to feel much more clearly like some kinda Waiting For Godot thing, with Actors wanderiing around repeating hollow dialogue that's meant to come off as discomfitingly detached from normal human behavior etc. Not saying it should have been that, mind.

The Birdman voice was hilarious though. You could tell he really got into the spirit of the schlocky cliche of the comic book split personality - he sounds like Bale's Batman more than his own but the best lines all sounded like they came straight from such classic garbage stories as the Invisible Woman battling her S&M alter-ego Malice, etc.

Best movie I feel like arguing with anyone who says otherwise

It's shallow, showy guff.

Makes a point of it in fact

It makes a point of being guff?

I'm possibly enjoying it on a shallower level, or maybe a deeper one, idk.

Criticism based on relative perspective totally invalid if the piece works consistently from either obv

Inarittu is probably the worst thing that has happened to film in the last twenty years.

Fred not entirely offbase

Sonsabitches have sent in the big guns huh

so how about you tell us what you think is so great about this movie, then we can knock down all your points?

Xp

Renowned film critics

keaton was amazing otherwise this movie sucked

Norton was my pick

To aimless- it worked. But what it aimed for and was funny and touching while not being overly kind on any of its idiot characters.

Norton also my pick

Inarittu is probably the worst thing that has happened to film in the last twenty years.

Did he come up with that thing where the camera slows down and circles around during action sequences and then speeds up? Did he do the "Last Resort" video?

just gonna

Iñárritu

carry on

'Iñárritu' is probably the worst thing that has happened to film critics in the last twenty years.

Don't see u throwing many fadas my way man but u do u xp