Just Another Art Movie to Torture Myself: Birdman
20 December 2022 | ERT: 1 min
A very arty way of self-loving, from Hollywood to Hollywood with a mild touch of Broadway. For some reason, I would always mistake Birdman for Kingsmen, but today I learned the difference. The movie is a one-shot dramady with a struggling actor who is dying to prove the world he’s more than his signature movie character, the Birdman.
Birdman is the particular movie a shrewd critic would describe as a “cinematic experience”, in that the tension, as we expect something, anything to happen, leads to a painstakingly boring one-and-a-half-hour-long journey edging on the something’s about to happen and the nothing will ever happen in this movie, which in the meantime gets us excited about, if nothing else, a theatre play’s premier.
After two hours’ runtime, the movie serves us a punch in the face.
SPOILER
The camera lands on the daughter's face who stands in the window of the hospital room where the actor is kept after shooting off his nose. Sam gazes to the distance and starts to smile as she notices her father flying in the air. Of course, we just see Sam's face, as the screen slowly fades to black with Sam relieffully laughing in the background. As in "you know, that's been you the whole time".
And even though I’m a huge fan of great “cinematic experiences”, the catharsis didn’t really make me think about the way I’m living my life. The only thing I started thinking about was if I should refrain from watching art movies in the new year… but I doubt that was the point.
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