Terrible, unsubtle story shot in artsy-fartsy vision.
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The acting is good though, Keaton especially. A awful film doesn?t turn into a good one because it is well acted.
I have to partly disagree after seeing it - eventhough I agree with you on "Inception":
I am on record as saying that "Sucker Punch" did many things better than "Inception".
Let me start with the main
good thing about the film: It is unbelievably well-shot. The way the DoP, Emmanuel Lubezki, makes long takes and sweeping steadycam movements work flawlessly, how he actually makes the camera movement help advance the plot, is just awe-inspiring. And I really have to protest against this being called artsy-fartsy, if we understand "artsy-fartsy" as "being overly complicated or putting a visual effect, an attitude before serving the story to be told". Compare the camerawork, for example, with the terrible mess that are the long takes and constant steadycam movements in "Irreversible" (you know, the one where Monica Belucci gets raped for ten minutes).
What I especially liked was how the DoP makes the camera relentlessly switch between subjective and objective perspectives in-shot without it looking gimmicky. The DoP takes a technique that has long been used for special "wow" moments in key scenes (see the "
Library Scene" in "Wings of Desire" for the perhaps most famous example) and makes it look effortless, an everyday device of camerawork. As I said, I am in awe.
Then, as has already been pointed out, there's the acting, which is without fail from start to finish. And even as part of such a top-notch cast, Edward Norton still stands out, giving one of his strongest performances to date. I think what Norton did here is what some people call "career-defining".
Finally, the atmosphere of the movie reminds me of the nouvelle vague. Pro critics have compared the films style to Godard - I was reminded more of Godard's partner in crime, Truffault. That might partly be due to the fact that one of Truffaults films, "
Day for Night", deals with the related subject of a film crew trying to get a location shoot finished on schedule. The nouvelle vague connection for me especially concerns the conscious blurring of the lines between the layers of fiction. We got the play-within-the-film being staged, we got people consciously and unconsciously playing a role towards each other, sometimes the characters seem to be almost conscious that they are playing parts not in life, but in a work of fiction, and finally, there's the dream sequence/film-within-the-film that is "Birdman 4". All these layers seem to bleed into each other all the time. I found that aspect of the film very well-crafted and working much better than the dream layers of "Inception".
Sadly, for all this brilliance in the crafts and theoretical layering department, I have to agree that the film lacked plotting, especially when compared to it's rather more thought-out main Oscar competitor, "Grand Budapest Hotel". "Birdman" isn't a bad film by any means, plot-wise. It's just nothing too special. I don't know much about films about theater, but comparing it with the three standard films about filmmaking, namely "
Living in Oblivion" (about low budget films),
State and Main (about big-budget Hollywood movies) and the aforementioned "
Day for Night" (about European movies), it does not stand out at all. I was entertained (which, to take a final jab in that direction, is more than I can say about "Incepton"), but not blown away the slightest.
All in all, I think the reason this film is Oscar material is because Hollywood loves navel-gazing. My prediction is that "Birdman" will win the supporting actor Oscar for Norton, the Cinematography Oscar for Emmanuel Lubezki and maybe the supporting actress Oscar for Emma Stone. "Grand Budapest Hotel" will walk away with most of the others.