This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid on 8th February 2019. If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. At some point in the next couple of years, …
It’s only after Birdman’s finished that you realize something; only one story ends. The entire movie is built on the spiky, frantic ensemble and their desperate attempts to survive long enough to finish the play but, in the end, the only story we see conclude is Riggan’s. That’s both immensely frustrating and completely intentional. Here’s …
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI9E8zwx0ck] Birdman is an intensely complex, often frustrating collision of three separate levels of reality. First off there’s us, the audience, watching the movie through the constantly uneasy camera. Then there’s Riggan and the cast’s struggle to get the play staged which in turn splinters into the action on stage and the action off. …
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJfLoE6hanc] It takes you about ten minutes to notice that there are no cuts in Birdman. The camera is a constant, roving presence throughout the movie that has no respect for the few borders that do exist in the movie. It’s in Riggan’s dressing room, on stage, prowls the streets of New York, never …
The first movie I saw for the first time in 2015 was Birdman. It’s a really, really odd piece following a former superhero actor trying to stage a self-penned adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. He’s also directing and starring in the play which, inside the first ten …
Welcome to Open Mic Mondays, and a late, but sincere and very appreciative thanks to my friend Bryce for pointing out the more…Cronenbergian connotations of this feature’s original title. This week’s column comes to us from a colleague and friend of mine. Laura is a fellow former SFX blogger and a tirelessly …
Open Mic Monday: The Problem with Being Human on BBC America