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.