Film
Birdman
- Director
- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 119 mins
Babel and Biutiful director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s blacker-than-black Best Picture Oscar-winning comedy gave washed-up movie star Michael Keaton his first decent role in years as washed-up movie star Riggan Thomson. The self-referentialism doesn’t end there, as Thomson’s waning celebrity derives from the Birdman superhero flicks, just as Keaton once squeezed into the rubber Batman suit for Tim Burton’s bash at the comicbook franchise.
Thomson is determined to regain some thespian credibility with a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But he’s hampered by a cast that includes movie star Naomi Watts, his occasional lover Andrea Riseborough, and Watts’s egotistical, manipulative boyfriend Edward Norton. What’s more, he’s hired his bitter, fresh-from-rehab daughter Emma Stone as an assistant. Oh, and he’s being tormented by Birdman himself. The whole thing is shot to appear as though it’s one continuous sequence, a la Hitchcock’s Rope. Go here for our full review.
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s January Sunday brunch All the Stage’s a World season of films chosen by Wise Children’s Emma Rice.
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