Birdman, aka Biggest Pile of Crap of the Year Award

Birdman has been universally acclaimed as the best movie of 2014. It was lauded for its plot, theme, cinematography, score, and direction, of course. Unfortunately this is yet another turn for me in Going Against the Crowd. Reminds me very much of the year American Beauty was released. That film, like this one, was artsy in a way that gives really good art films a bad name. It comes across as so pretentious, so abstract, and so theme-riddled that you feel the need to vomit up its theme like a bad breakfast. That film, like this one, was overwrought to the point where its message became utterly hollow when it should have been provocative and sad. That film, like this one, made mistakes in just about every category, and to my mind was most notable for being hard to sit through.

This film was worse, however. Despite having talented acting (Michael Keaton and Edward Norton were outstanding, as they usually are, and none of this can be counted against them), which ought to have helped, Birdman failed on every level. The viewing experience was nearly unbearable. ...Why? For several reasons. First, the score, which was basically a cacophonous mess, has been called "audacious" because it is almost entirely "...percussion – a careening, ramshackle-sounding drum score that underpins most of the scenes and gives the film the feeling that the whole glorious mess may come crashing down at any second." Yes, and along with it, your sanity. Many of the jazz drum solos have no notes and likewise no meaning, no soul. They just ramble on towards insanity, like the main character Riggan Thomson. I suppose it would be fitting; it could be helpful, if it were actually necessary to show us the problems the main character is having. But we don't need that erratic nerve-shattering so-called "music" because we already have this: the booming voice of Birdman that Thomson is hearing in his mind.

Yes, he is hearing voices, throughout the movie, or rather -- one voice. The booming, inevitable, inescapable, thunderous, hideous, scratchy, domineering voice of Birdman. "You know I'm right. Listen to me, man. You are the original! Let's make a comeback! You're Birdman! You are a god!"

The voice, along with the other hallucinations (Thomson believes he can fly, and can move objects with his mind) proves to us the level of mental decline. We don't need the score, on top of it all. Because of several humorous interludes, and the powerful talent of Edward Norton (portraying another large ego character, an archetype of a dedicated theater actor, for whom staged reality is the only reality), there are moments of relief in this movie (just barely enough to keep us sane). Nevertheless the hammer keeps pounding us on the head. It says in scene after scene: "Actors have big egos!" Pound, pound, pound. "The search for recognition will drive your ego into the ground!" Pound, pound, pound. "Hollywood is the only place an actor can achieve recognition!" Pound, pound, pound. "But the art world and the world of theater has no respect for Hollywood!" And on it goes.

I'd like to know why so many people found this movie "new" or "refreshing" or some such. If you'd like to see a man flying through the air, if that would be an exciting new experience for you, can I recommend Man of Steel? Wouldn't that be ironic? To find what you really want by leaving your art theater behind and going to see a mainstream superhero movie? But wait -- wasn't that the whole point? To remind us of the superhero movies? Yes, sure, yes. But that isn't what we're watching here. So the effect is, Birdman is telling us those films are too lowbrow while still tricking us with the exact same gimmick? Something smells wrong.

The conversation happens about 11 or 12 times -- the conversation about art v. Hollywood. It is truly old; there is no new idea there. Some critics have said the movie is really about Thomson's ego and search for recognition, his lost identity as an artist, his integrity as an actor being equal to his integrity as a human being. However, the movie itself seems to imply that his identification with the superhero is what saves him... The theater is only a place of torture and bloodshed. I figured the main idea was that if he had any sense of himself, in the first place, any true sense of identity, that he would be equally content to work in Hollywood as the theater, and he would have nothing to prove. He would know he was an actor, an artist, regardless of the medium. I figured the Birdman persona was redemptive, given the ending.

So. yes. Then there's the ending of the movie, which I can't say much about except it was 100% predictable. Not only are we sitting, stuck, watching a movie that hits us over the head (psychologically and sonically) and feels pointless and unbearable, but we also can see the end coming from a long, long distance.

All I can really take away from it is, once again, the old saying that "what's old is new again" to the audience. And/or, people really love cacophonous music and people are very much more masochistic than you would have thought just by looking at them.