Well I'm more of the "better late than never" crew checking in right about here. Been busy with some other forum matters lately, you might have
bumped into one such new endeavor if you ventured into the heavies today. Got another coming tomorrow which should be very exciting. But really, Birdman.
It's not that I hate this movie, it's that I felt it was way too soon to watch it again. I still remember it pretty vividly, and although I love the players in it and the idea of it, I don't know, something was missing in it for me to love it. I've never been a fan of loose and unfinished plotlines, and even though I know that's something Inarritu loves to do (I remember how frustrating Babel was) it just feels like I'm being stabbed. It's one thing to leave things up to interpretation, but there is so much that Birdman left hanging and walked away. To me, it felt like the writers said "well we got all we can out from this storyline, so let's just drop it and move on." The way they left them, though, it irritates me to the point that I actively don't want to know. Kind of like the spinning top from Inception, they made it that way to toy with their audience. No sir, I don't like it.
Since this review is much later than I anticipated writing it up, I'll keep it much more brief. I won't deny that I dragged my heels, trying to think of if there was any work I could be doing instead of watching it, but I finally plowed through it and here we are.
The drumming to form the score was very distracting for me in several scenes when I was trying to pay attention to something. It wasn't that it drowned out many voices, but that it just felt like it took away from the scenes. Think of the typical
distracting trumpet from crime/drama movies. Whiplash was one of my favorite films in recent memory, so it has nothing to do with drums (I have a family history of drummers, so that's something).
Something else that bothered me about Birdman is that it was billed as a comedy, albeit a black comedy. Now, I love dark comedies, like Fargo or Office Space or Beetlejuice or a ton of others. In Birdman, though, where was the comedy? They tried to throw in absurdity as a way of being so bizarre that it was comical, but did it achieve that? There were two scenes from Birdman that even struck me as funny - where he says to his daughter it felt like he was being hit repeatedly in the groin by a small hammer, and at the beginning where they made it seem like he dropped the light on the terrible actor's head. One was slapstick-ish but more funny to me because of his exasperated reaction and walking away, and the other because I could picture it. The rest of the scenes I think they intended to be funny, like Keaton and Norton fighting in the locker room, were just eh to me. They must have been too fresh in my mind, or I'm too desensitized to ridiculousness. It was a drama, and a mental health/family drama, and not a black comedy.
The play-within-a-play storyline always intrigues me, as a reformed drama buff, so I get where they were going with the cinematography and I don't hold it against them attempting to make it seem like the whole film (besides the dream sequence after the gunshot) was a single take. It didn't feel like a gimmick like Victoria did at times, and instead like they were actually trying to portray it like it itself was a play. I actively paid attention to the scenes where they had cuts, and kept track in my head of how long some of the scenes were with all the moving parts before they were done and went through a door and did a sneaky cut. Some of them took a long time to get through, and I wonder how many takes they needed.
Last thing: I will always be a fan of Emma Stone. Just saying.
I should be respectable and give this film a high mark, but I'll be petty and say 6/10 because of the issues described above. And then I'll limp through Stalker tomorrow before the big presser that I'm sure we're all looking forward to. Hoo boy.