Irreviews

Good Kill is a movie about military pilots at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas who remotely fly drones over the Middle East and blow people up with missiles. It’s the first movie I’ve seen that attempts to explore the phenomenon of drone assassination directly and with a modicum of honesty, rather than simply using them for hackneyed comedic or propagandist effect. It’s an enjoyable movie, well-made, decently written, and featuring an excellent central performance by the highly-underrated Ethan Hawke. But as a piece of political art it took a disappointingly familiar and inadequate approach to its subject.

Good Kill follows what I would call the standard, gutless liberal approach to sociopolitical art – paint everything in endless shades of grey, never directly dispute the status quo, and ultimately reduce the issues to the drama of individuals rather than taking a moral or philosophical stand of any kind. The film first establishes the “positive value” of drones – protecting our troops on the ground while they sleep, etc. – and then very carefully directs its criticism at the safe, and reassuringly opaque, concept of “CIA excess”. Part way through the film, the pilots are suddenly required to start taking their orders from a bunch of weirdly amoral and robotic individuals calling in from Langley. These sinister, disembodied voices direct the pilots to bomb rescue workers and civilians, and Ethan Hawke starts to slowly go crazy as a result, his personal ethics finally violated to a degree where he can no longer live with what he is doing. The rest of the film plays out his internal conflict in the context of his personal life, until he finally comes to a decision about his own moral compass, but even this is done in a way that carefully avoids implying any broader moral or ethical conclusions.

To the film’s credit, it does mention that “they” (again, in the film it’s the CIA) are now assassinating individuals based not on actual wrong-doing or direct association, but rather on data-dredged probabilities of future wrongdoing. But this important topic is only touched on briefly, and is not actually a dramatic focus of the film. The focus is squarely on Hawke’s personal dilemma, and on the silly black and white contrast of the “evil” CIA vs. the “good and honorable” military. Of course this latter narrative is complete nonsense. Our President is the commander-in-chief of the military, and he sits in his now-famous Tuesday morning meetings with his generals and decides who is going to die via drone strike that week – everybody knows this (it was in the New York Times, after all) and everybody’s fine with it, apparently, so why the filmmakers chose to replace it with a cartoonish fiction is beyond me.

Given the political and ethical richness of this subject, as well as its timeliness, such a limited and superficial treatment of it must be regarded as terribly disappointing. Good Kill completely lacks the guts to question and explore the validity of state violence, the terrifying evolution of the world toward skies filled with flying robots that murder people (does anybody remember the premise of Terminator?), or even the much less ambitious, and highly myopic issue of do these constant drone assassinations actually make us, or the western world, safer? In fact, I would submit that the film’s only real message on the subject of drone assassinations is that some people (Hawke) might not have the stomach for it.

I suppose we should be happy that someone made a film that takes the subject of drones at all seriously, but alas, I’m not happy. Who needs another movie that throws up its hands in pathetic relativist resignation and says “that’s life – everything’s part good, part bad, there’s no objective truth to anything, and all that matters is what you yourself choose to believe”?!

Where’s Costa Gavras when you need him?

Citizenfour is without question an extremely important topic for a documentary. I would even go so far as to say that humanity’s decision on Ed Snowden and his whistleblowing/treason will probably presage the future of the entire human race. If humanity decides he was a hero and chooses to defend true democracy and all it stands for (in particular: liberty/privacy), the human race probably has a reasonable chance of dignified survival. If we instead choose tyrannical, secret government aligned with multinational corporations, collecting and permanently storing every writing, utterance, and action of our lives for future exploitation (by whomever, and for whatever reason), I’m pretty sure humanity’s future is quite bleak, and in that case I’ll be glad I have no kids that would have to experience that world. But my first order of business as a film reviewer is to review the documentary itself, not just its topic, so rather than belabor my own personal views let me instead focus on the effectiveness of Citizenfour as a vehicle for these ideas.

Honestly, I was quite disappointed with Citizenfour as a documentary. It has some good points, mainly the atmosphere generated by its use of written narration throughout the movie. But the film is strangely cursory in its treatment of many topics, and the way its information is structured is a bit of a mess. Much of the documentary is shot in Snowden’s hotel room in Hong Kong, but what transpires there is surprisingly uninteresting. There’s a lot of shots of Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill looking at screens or pads, and the discussion between them comes across as weirdly superficial and disjointed. I thought I would come away with a deeper sense of Snowden’s philosophy behind his actions than I had acquired by following the story through the alternative press and YouTube interviews; instead, the documentary is considerably less clear and articulate than what is freely available on the Web, including the short video originally leaked to introduce Snowden to the world (they show the lead-up to Poitras shooting that video, but not the video itself.) Perhaps they figured everyone had already seen that video, but the documentary choose to repeat a lot of other things people had already seen, and I’d much rather they’d chosen to revisit that video than show Ed Snowden combing his hair for 4 minutes.

For all the talk of the suspense the film conveyed, I was surprised to find that there was almost no suspense at all. The actual footage of Snowden is taken before the suspense really began, and the many interesting episodes that followed – the flight from Hong Kong, the actions of the Chinese, the long abandonment in the international zone of Moscow’s airport, the various appeals for asylum to many countries (and their wide spectrum of reactions), and lastly the eventual temporary asylum in Russia – are in this documentary either dashed off with terse, written summaries of what happened (summaries that do not even attempt to give any texture to the happenings) or they are entirely ignored. It’s quite a let-down when you realize that the actual live footage ends with Snowden leaving his hotel room.

As for the structuring of information, the film touches on various important and deep ideas – PRISM, XKeyscore, the spying on Brazil, Merkel’s phone, the GCHQ full-take system, the current U.S. persecution of journalists, the relation of drone strikes to the retrospective mining of data, and so on and so forth – but unless you had never before heard of these topics I doubt the documentary’s treatment of them would enlighten you, as they are little more than mentioned. Other important issues – like the reaction (and non-reaction) of the U.S. Government, or the economic pressure the disclosures brought on multinational corporations – are not even discussed. This is what confuses me about this documentary: what is its goal? If its goal is to introduce people who know almost nothing to what really happened, those people would be better off listening to a Glenn Greenwald or Jacob Appelbaum speech on YouTube, or watching the actual footage from the European Parliament session on these matters. If its goal was to make a serious artistic statement about the extremely deep philosophical and sociopolitical issues in this case, why the cursoriness of its ideas? If its goal was to let people get to know Ed Snowden more, why didn’t they talk to him more?

The most surprising thing I took away from seeing Citizenfour was the question: does documentary filmmaking even matter anymore, in the context of YouTube and the internet? Look up Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, and Jeremy Scahill on YouTube and start watching – the depth and breath of information freely and instantly available on all aspects of state spying and transgression of law is astounding! In contrast, who is going to see Citizenfour, outside of people who already know way more than the content of the documentary? The film has almost zero distribution; honestly, I’m surprised Poitras did not put it up on YouTube so at least people could see it outside of New York City.

I have tremendous respect for Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and all the other independent journalists who brought this story to the world, and who work tirelessly and under constant threat of imprisonment and death to inform us, the public, of things we should want to know about as members of a democracy and of the world community. I just wish Citizenfour had been a better documentary.

Interstellar is an amazingly captivating film. Conceptually sprawling, fearlessly wonky in its ideas and its dialog, and grounded by a superb performance by Matthew McConaughey (he is way better than he looked in the trailer, I should point out), this is a film that has the guts to tell an epic story in truly epic fashion. It is long – pushing three hours – but the pacing is quite good, with very few lulls, and the story covers so much ground you feel like you’ve actually lived the heroic lives of all the individuals in the film. As a work of science fiction art I feel Interstellar falls somewhat short of recent masterpieces like Sunshine and Europa Report, but at the same time Interstellar clearly borrowed key narrative concepts from these two films and took them in fresh, interesting new directions – I’m always impressed when filmmakers show an understanding of great cinema through what they choose to imitate. Whatever small shortcomings Interstellar might suffer from, it is a fantastic, wonderful film, certainly the best and most entertaining thing I saw in 2014.

One of the reasons I took so long to see Interstellar was the film’s weird and confusing trailer. Having seen the film, I now see that the trailer was precisely crafted to hide the many surprises and plot twists which this story features. I’m not about to give away anything in this review; Interstellar is one of those films which deserves a cold viewing. You’ll be astonished, trust me.

But I will make a few general remarks. When it comes to physics, Interstellar really lets it all hang out. This is not a film where a few technical things are mumbled in the beginning and then it’s off the the races. It’s almost like the film aspires to put forth a mathematically coherent view of the universe, incorporating as many of the theoretical predictions of modern astrophysics as possible, and at the same time exploring Einstein’s special and general relativity in as much detail as the narrative will stand. If you like this kind of thing, it’s super fun!

Also, Mackenzie Foy was outstanding in the supporting role of McConaughey’s daughter. She was so good, so effective, she single-handedly smoothed over the occasionally slow pacing in the first part of the movie, and her performance grounds the key emotional relationship between father and daughter for the entire film. I should also point out that her character is an incredibly positive role model for young girls – something you rarely see in films these days.

Lastly, there is a pleasing sociopolitical subtext to the entire film, in which science attempts to save a general population which has retreated into reactionary paranoia, retrogressive hostility toward science, and whacked-out opinions and policies – all very reminiscent of the Tea Party, I might add – in the face of impending doom via environmental collapse. In our current world, where humanity seems to care less and less about science, knowledge, exploration of space, and its own future, and instead cares more and more about wars, xenophobia, religious intolerance, chemical addition, and escapist activities, this kind of challenging, intelligent defense of science and rational thought, together with a parallel defense of the oneness of our species, is extremely welcome.

If you can still see Interstellar on the big screen, don’t miss it. Otherwise, be sure to Netflix it as soon as it comes out. It’s awesome!

I get the impression that large segments of the population absolutely despise Keira Knightley. I think she is one hell of an underrated actress – about the only bad performance I’ve ever seen her give was in The Imitation Game (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award – go figure!) She has an almost magical naturalness and charisma on-screen, and her technique is quite flexible. But what’s more, she clearly has excellent taste in scripts, and as a result is a very good sign in movies. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Begin Again, A Dangerous Method, Never Let Me Go, Atonement – they’re all very interesting, enjoyable and unusual movies, movies in which she shines in very different types of roles. We can now add Laggies to this list of wonderful, off-beat Keira Knightley films.

Laggies is a film about lagging behind a bit in life, as well as not fitting in socially; both themes are cinematic favorites of mine, and although Laggies is not a super-deep exploration of either, it is still entertaining and insightful. Knightly plays a 28 year old who just does not want to grow up, working as a street signboard in her overly-doting father’s tax business. When her boyfriend proposes out of the blue she freaks out, runs away under false pretext, and starts hanging out with random teenager Chloe Grace Mortez and her odd-ball father. It sounds like the kind of film that could be absolutely terrible, so what makes Laggies so successful? First, Knightly is terrific in the role, and the chemistry between her and Mortez (and between her and all Mortez’s teenage friends) is so natural and convincing you can actually believe they would accept this 28 year old misfit into their ranks. Secondly, the character of the father is very unusual in film – one almost never sees a straight, positive, honest portrayal of a successful, quirky, geeky male misfit in his 40s – the concept is so fresh its almost disorienting. All the main characters are nicely drawn and traverse pleasing developmental arcs. The film is structured well, with pretty good dialog (the set up of Knightly’s relationship with her father was a masterpiece of efficiency), and if the humor is not necessary laugh-out-loud, the film is nonetheless consistently charming. The supporting casting and acting is solid. Even Chloe Grace Mortez, who by any standard is an incredibly feeble actress, actually turns in a pretty decent performance, though a big part of this is her being propped up by Knightly’s all-pervading charm.

I loved Laggies. It’s a delightful story for the lagging, retarded odd-ball in all of us. I highly recommend it!

I was quite interested to see Two Days, One Night because it deals with social themes affecting average people. Marion Cotillard plays a factory worker in a small solar panel plant who is laid off when the boss gives her 16 coworkers a choice – either she stays on or they get their bonuses, one or the other. A re-vote is declared for Monday, giving her the weekend to convince half the people to give up their bonus so she can keep her job.

It’s a wicked, stressful little narrative, made worse by the fact that she has been out on medical leave for depression, meaning her coworkers earned those bonuses without her help. The film seems to have tremendous potential to explore a whole host of social and political ideas. Unfortunately, it all plays out in the tedious, dull manner that one fears it might. People have various reactions – some get violent, some cry, some avoid her, some stonewall her – but the reactions are rather literal and not very interesting. You hear the same banal things over and over, and the film never at any point leaps upward to the level of sociopolitical ideas and commentary. It’s a whole lot of “I’m really sorry, but I need the money” or “Sure, I’ll vote for you”, which just doesn’t add up to much – you would never need to watch this film a second time.

The film does have a rather nice ending, however, and I found the realism of Cotillard’s family and home very refreshing; the family of four are crammed into an unspeakably small apartment (so small it’s noticeably difficult to film in), and the husband works at a ignominious place called the “Lunch Garden”). Supporting and incidental acting is quite strong. As for Marion herself, they tried really, really hard to make her look like an average working woman (i.e. ugly), but it didn’t work. She’s still way too beautiful, which led me to thoughts of “why doesn’t this woman just go into modeling if she gets sacked?” – it’s distracting, but not a huge problem. I thought her performance was very good, but not earth-shattering.

I’m not sure how to recommend Two Days, One Night. If you’re a Marion Cotillard freak, I guess you have to see it. If the film’s theme looks really interesting to you, it might be worth Netflixing at some point. But in the end, there’s no escaping the fact that Two Days, One Night undershot its artistic potential by a huge amount.

I honestly can’t believe this film is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (or for Best Supporting Actor, for that matter). I can’t believe that critics are falling over themselves to praise it. Whiplash is worse than a really bad movie. It’s a sick, deeply offensive movie, a movie with a black heart. It’s one of those movies that makes you honestly wonder if you should give up on current cinema altogether. It’s a disgusting, stupidly manipulative piece of absurdity – there’s no better way to put it.

Let’s begin with the fact that the entire premise of this movie, and everything that happens in it, is completely untenable and ridiculous. Any band teacher at a major music college who behaved like the drill sergeant in Stanley Kubric’s Full Metal Jacket  would be instantly destroyed. This is not the Marine Corps, and the victims are not jar heads who are being paid to be abused. It’s a college, and young people nowadays are way too pampered, way too entitled, way too connected to information, and way too socially and legally aware – there is no way any of them would put up with this shit for one second. Either someone would film an HD video of this asshole and put it up on YouTube, or someone would go straight to the administration and report “my band teacher called me a cock-sucking faggot, threw a chair at my head, and told me to get my boyfriend’s dick out of my mouth and start playing better.” Either way, the teacher is fired the next morning, and there’s no need for this ridiculous movie. It might also be the case that before either of these eventualities happened some student simply beats the fucking shit out of the guy, right in the practice room, and the whole thing winds up on Worldstar.

So these filmmakers are clearly living in some sick fantasy world where colleges are run like the Marine Corps or the Mafia. They’re also living in a fantasy world where for someone to be a top-notch jazz drummer they have to leave their drum kit drenched, drenched, in their own blood – blood dripping off the cymbals, blood smeared all over every drum head, blood dripping onto the floor, blood splattering onto fellow band mates – I’m talking Texas Chainsaw Massacre blood! They also want us to believe that jazz drummers practice until they’ve worn their hand-flesh straight through to the bone. But this is all completely absurd. People don’t attend jazz clubs to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre – they’d probably throw up, and the band would be fired. And as for practicing until you’ve worn your hands straight through to the bone, no one would ever do this for one simple reason: it’s counter-productive. No one is going to achieve the subtle improvements in their technique necessary to progress from good to great if they are in blinding pain and ripping themselves to shreds! (This film approaches musical technique like Rocky in Rocky IV.) I’m sure they get blisters occasionally, maybe even bad ones – hell, I got blisters occasionally as a semi-serious guitarist – but no one behaves like these suicide-drummers in this film. The film’s one line to try to convince us otherwise is the story of how young Charlie Parker messed up a gig, some band mate threw a cymbal at him in disgust, and as a result he started practicing really hard to get better. Fine, I’m sure he did. But I’m also sure that he did not drink his own blood out of his saxophone every night after practice. Again: counter-productive.

To all this, you may say “what’s the problem with having a film that is not totally realistic – it’s a movie, after all.” I would respond that it might be okay if the film is a comedy, which this film is most definitely not. This is a serious film with a serious message, and the absurd and highly manipulative story must be judged in terms of the message the film is selling. This is where we enter the dark heart of Whiplash. The message of this movie is a defense of the sadistic teacher and his violent, destructive methods. Its premise is that the teacher is right to carry on this way, because he might accidentally beat someone into becoming Charlie Parker. It seems to believe that this is how great musicians are created – some belligerent asshole thrashes them into greatness. And indeed, at the end of the film we are clearly supposed to believe that the teacher’s methods did in fact turn Miles Teller into a Charlie Parker. But his methods did not create a Charlie Parker, of course, because the studio musician that played that awesome drum solo for Miles Teller in the climax scene is probably a fairly normal guy with a wife, kids, a mortgage, a dog, a cat, a timeshare in Disneyland, and all that crap. And you can bet that he does not practice until his hands are exposed bone and he’s shed a pint of blood on his drum kit. “Why?”, you ask? Because it would adversely impact his ability to earn a living, and feed his fucking family, that’s why!

Nevertheless, violence and sadism, we are told, are the wellspring of talent. There’s this one scene in Whiplash where the teacher makes the three drummers compete against each other for six straight hours, playing a full-out double time riff over and over and over, just to earn the right to play a certain song in a concert – in the end there’s so much blood all over the place it looks like a fucking slaughterhouse! I’m reminded of the scene in the film Jack Reacher where the Russian mafia king makes an underling chew off all the fingers on his left hand to prove his commitment and worthiness and desire to be part of the “chosen few”. This is basically the intellectual and moral level of Whiplash.

So what does it say that critics (as well as the Academy, and virtually everyone I have met) are falling over themselves to praise this film, and what little dissent they dare to put into print is so pathetically muted and noncommittal? Are they all so jaded, so disconnected from reality and from artistic virtue that they simply accept anything they are told at face value, if its told in the trappings of serious art? Are they so in love with violence and sadism, and at the same time so dazzled with the concept of “greatness”, that they watch Whiplash and are actually impressed by its toxic, idiotic message? Do they like JK Simmons’ performance just because he’s dressed like Darth Vader, is disturbingly buff, and spends the whole film yelling obscenities at people and acting like nasty fucking prick? Or are they just bought and paid-for whores to the industry that makes their pampered careers possible? I honestly don’t know – probably all of the above.

My wife and I agreed we would have walked out of this film ten minute in, if it hadn’t been 7 degrees outside in New York City. Whiplash is a rotten, worthless movie, complete trash. My strong recommendation is that you avoid it, unless you really want to rot you mind and blacken your soul with perverse, evil shit.

My main reaction to Still Alice was anger. Anger that our government, and the governments of the world, spend trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars on these endless fucking wars – wars we are told are so damn important, but which are really only important to billionaires looking to get even richer – but cannot adequately fund medical research to cure Alzheimer’s (or Cancer, or Ebola, or AIDS, or ALS, or any other horrible, incurable disease that is currently plaguing average people.) Anger that stem cell research was cut down by religious whack-jobs who think unborn fetuses are more important than living people, and who also have total contempt for science and believe that the world sprung into existence a few thousand years ago. Still Alice is a sad, upsetting movie, even more so than I anticipated. You can’t watch this woman’s life fall apart without getting a little mad at the priorities of people in power.

My second reaction was a kind of disgust, because this movie is really just terrorizing people about something they can do nothing about. The film makes no attempt to put forth a social message about Alzheimer’s, even though it would have been so powerful to do so, and so easy – just have the married daughter get involved in political activism against the religious right, or toward greater government funding, and give her a scene where she’s ranting about the “fucked up priorities” of various political factions. It could also have had a written epilogue about the disease, with links to get people involved in activism. The film does not even offer up an effective character study of the family vis-à-vis the hell they are put through. Indeed, they’re simply pawns in a glorified Hallmark movie of the week, uttering banal lines like “are you sick, mom?”, “oh, I’m so, so, sorry”, “her symptoms are getting much worse”, or “Minnesota will be a much better place for her, I think”, and so on and so forth. They have all the emotional expressiveness of snails, retreating into silent numbness; maybe this is somewhat realistic, but dramatically it’s a crashing bore.

And is Julianne Moore’s performance really so great? She has a couple good crying scenes, but mainly she just sits around looking fashionably disheveled (they don’t want her to look too bad, that’s never going to sell tickets,) and mumbling. As for the rest of the cast, Alec Baldwin is okay, I suppose, but Kristen Stewart is a bad actress playing a bad actress, Kate Bosworth has done something really weird to her face, and the three guys – the son, the son-in-law, and the doctor – contribute quite feeble supporting acting.

Still Alice: It gets across how horrible Alzheimer’s is. It’s just that it doesn’t do anything else, and it should have.

I went into Wild with pretty low expectations, mainly because my wife did not care for the book. We mainly went to see Reese’s performance, both being big Reese Witherspoon fans. But the film exceeded expectations in almost every way, and Mrs. Irreviews felt the movie was in fact a distinct improvement on the book. It’s quite a well-made movie, very fun to watch, and in this year of horrible cinema, it’s a relief to find a film I can actually recommend whole-heartedly.

The formula that makes Wild so good is this: it has strong pacing, good narrative rhythm, strong incidental casting and acting, and the flashbacks (always a risky element in film) are remarkably efficient. The film could have easily lingered too long on many different elements – the details of her unpreparedness on the trail, the details of her failed marriage, the details of her post-marriage debauchery, the details of her mother’s death. But Wild gets all the elements balanced just about right, allowing Cheryl Strayed’s journey (both physical and personal) to take center stage, and allowing Reese Witherspoon’s excellent, understated performance to silently fill in whatever emotional shortfall the film’s approach might have produced (it’s a wonderful performance, taking a heroine who could have easily been a tad insufferable and making her both realistic and likable.) The film also manages to convey well the Pacific Crest Trail itself, and why someone would want to undergo all the hardships necessary to hike it.

The film has, dare I say, I bit of the magic of the 90’s Indie Renaissance about it, not in every way, but in many of the important ways. It’s a film that clearly grasps fundamental elements of great film; the only thing holding it back from being legitimately great is the story itself, which is perfectly fine, but perhaps a bit narrow and limited in scope to support a truly great movie.

I think it’s a travesty that wretched, horrible films like Birdman, Whiplash, and The Imitation Game got nominated for Oscars over Wild, which outclasses all these films in every conceivable area. Ignore the critics and their snarky half-praise for this film. It is well worth seeing and I highly recommend it!

We’re finally kicking off the 2015 movie season here at Irreviews with Black Sea, a movie in which Jude Law plays ex-navy guy piloting submarines for a marine salvage outfit, until he is unceremoniously downsized in the first scene of the movie. Many of his buddies suffered the same fate at the hands of this particular corporation, and they decide to go rogue, accepting a commission from some anonymous rich guy to pilot an old submarine into the Black Sea and investigate a Nazi sub wrecked at the bottom that might carry hundreds of millions in gold (a “pay off” from Stalin to Hitler that never made it, we are told). The wreck is not in international waters, hence the stealth.

I don’t want to be too hard on this film, because honestly I enjoyed it more than Birdman (at least Black Sea has a story) and The Imitation Game and Mr. Turner and Whiplash. It’s a fairly entertaining B-film, perfect for a long airplane ride. The script is badly rushed in the beginning (they’re obviously in a big hurry to get this submarine stranded at the bottom of the sea), and there is too little dialog and too little interesting detail about submarines or deep sea salvage operations. But there is some detail, and even if certain plot elements are a bit strained, the whole thing somehow holds together, barely. It helps that a few of the key actors actually turn in fairly good, understated performances, including Law and Michael Smiley, who everyone will remember as Phil Squod in the fantastic rendition of Bleak House back in 2005 – very nice to see this fine actor getting some work!

But it’s really not a very good movie. From the moment Jude Law assembles his team, you can see the entire narrative opening up before you. He hires a famously skilled deep sea diver who is “crazy” – you know how that’s going to turn out! He hires another diver who is a really nice, likable old man – you know how that’s going to turn out! He replaces a crew member at the last second with some goofy dimwitted teen who turns up out of the blue, totally unskilled – you know how that’s going to turn out! They include a bunch of surly Russians in the crew who don’t speak English – you know how that’s going to turn out! Everything in the story happens basically as you guess it will; only the order of events is unpredictable. Honestly, this script feels like it was conceived and written in an afternoon.

I should add that there is a vague working class sentimentality pervading this film which is unusual in modern cinema, a good deal of angry talk about “rich fuckers”, “they threw us away like trash”, “that fucking banker”, and so on. This might have added a refreshing dimension, had it been developed at all. But none of this talk leads anywhere concrete; in fact, in the end it struck me as just so much filler.

Black Sea: It is what it is. If you like this kind of thing, and just want a fun diversion, go for it.

I’ll give Birdman one thing: they did write a ton of dialog for it. But it’s amazing how little materializes from all that dialog in the course of the film. We are offered an abundance of scenes with various characters engaged in rapt conversation, but the scenes are strangely inconsequential, virtually contentless, making no definite impression on the viewer, and leading nowhere interesting. This movie has no real story and no character development – it’s an example of that other kind of movie, the kind where the audience is invited to ponder an semi-abstract collage of ideas, images and chatter, and then sort it all out for themselves and decide what the hell it meant. To my eyes, Birdman is an empty, pretentious invitation to gawk starry-eyed at the film’s heavy technique and gaudy performances, comforted by its trendy dialog, middle-class titillation, and reassuringly pedestrian set of ideas. In other words, it’s a complete waste of time.

Birdman is one of those films where the filmmakers think they are way more clever than they actually are. It overruns with a wearying flashiness – the frenetic scenes following people around from behind with the camera, the constantly reappearing drummer who is occasionally “playing” the film’s score as a character in the movie, the tiresome and psychologically banal superhero stuff, the over-stylized transitions from scene to scene or day to day, and the extreme and prolonged closeups, which only serve to reinforce the ugliness of Michael Keaton and Ed Norton, and the abnormal largeness of Emma Stone’s eyes. It collectively seems a bit novel at first, but this very quickly gives way to tedium and eventually straight boredom.

It’s also one of those films where the filmmakers think they are way more profound than they actually are. The film’s central ideas – that social media produces empty celebrity, that artists fight some grandiose war in their heads over the conflicting virtues of “art versus success”, that the media is fickle and hypocritical in its evaluation of cinema and actors – honestly, is any of this at all surprising, interesting, thought-provoking, or not already beaten to death! Does this film think it’s telling us something we don’t already have running out of our noses 24 hours a day?

As for the film’s humor, I found it uninspired in the extreme. The “hard-on on stage” was just puerile. The scene where Keaton gets locked outside the theater in his underwear can be seen coming from a million, billion, zillion miles away! The fight scene between Keaton and Norton was some of the most pathetic-looking slapstick I’ve seen in a long time (I think they actually used a better take of this scene for the film’s trailer). Michael Keaton’s inner voice was some truly lame voice-over work, and the scenes of his various superpowers fall totally flat (often looking extremely fake.) There isn’t one decent laugh in this entire film.

I must say, I was not that taken with Michael Keaton’s Oscar Nominated performance – he’s sometimes rather bad, actually, although he’s usually decent when playing a bad actor executing bad acting. I thought Ed Norton’s Oscar Nominated performance was just okay. Emma Stone’s Oscar Nominated performance was pretty good – she was the best thing in the movie. Was it an award-winning performance? Not to me, but the Academy will probably give her Best Supporting Actress as the new young starlet on the block. Poor Andrea Riseborough is saddled with a terrible, empty role, in which she basically gets to walk around about looking “voluptuous”; her best moment is when she kisses Naomi Watts, itself a depressing reminder that marginal starlets must now do a bit of girl-on-girl if they want to be taken seriously (it’s the 21 century version of actresses taking their tops off). Zach Galifianakis is, as he usually is, putridly bad – why anybody casts this guy in movies is completely beyond me.

Birdman feels very long and is quite fatiguing. It has nothing impressive to say about anything. It’s a pig with lipstick on it. I can’t believe it’s generating so much buzz and critical acclaim. But then again, if we take the message of Birdman seriously, perhaps it’s not so surprising to see trash get elevated by the media to the status of art. It’ll probably sweep the Oscars.