Birdman (2014) by Alejandro González Iñárritu
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Your loss.
just a funny video (no hate) but I don't find interest in a story of male stripper .... unfortunately
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Channing Tatum isn't a bad actor. Look at his performance in "Magic Mike".
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I don't hate Michael Keaton but he don't have a very impressive career so far ... so I don't very see which of his movie deserved for him a best actor nomination ...
Regardless if he was really deserving of a nomination before, he's a veteran actor, beloved from his 80's comedies like Mr. Mom and Night Shift, and revered for his 2 signature roles as Batman and Beetlejuice. I would say his career is far from unimpressive.
All that matters is that he's going back to the A-list, and I for one am happy for him.
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The movie's press conference at the 71st Venice Film Festival with Alejandro González Iñárritu, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, and Michael Keaton.
Enjoy...
Enjoy...
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Review from The New Yorker...
-------------------------------------------------------------
Illustration by Peter Strain
The Current Cinema October 20, 2014 Issue
By Anthony Lane
Do not go to Birdman to relax. It stars Michael Keaton, who has always behaved onscreen as if he knew that there was a raging mosquito bite somewhere on his person but could not quite locate it. His performance in Beetlejuice (1988) was halfway between a rush and a rash, and what drove his Bruce Wayne to fight crime in Batman (1989), was not so much civic outrage as a rich man’s anxiety and ennui; at supper with Kim Basinger, he confessed that he had never been in his own dining-room before, and, in Batman Returns (1992), he spat out vichyssoise as if it were chilled hemlock. The Bat-Mantle has rested uneasily on Keaton’s shoulders ever since, and something similar weighs upon his character, Riggan Thomson, in Birdman.
Twenty years ago, Riggan, too, played a superhero, with a movie franchise to himself. He was Birdman: he could fly, destroy his foes with a magic whoosh, and use his telekinetic skills to move random objects at will. And look at Riggan now. He can barely summon the energy to remove his own wig. His career path has followed that of Icarus, and, in a bid to avoid splashdown, and to restore his credentials, Riggan has chosen to direct and star in a play, adapted by himself from a Raymond Carver tale, on Broadway. Many folk, like the Times theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), presume that he is heading for a fall, and he certainly surrounds himself with plunging, of every sort. His daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), who is fresh out of rehab, and helping with the production, can often be found on the theatre roof, perched on a perilous ledge. At rehearsal, a member of the cast is felled by a tumbling arc light. A replacement is needed fast, and, as Riggan’s long-suffering friend, Jake (Zach Galifianakis), explains, the choice is narrow: Woody Harrelson is doing another Hunger Games, Michael Fassbender is on X-Men duty, and Robert Downey, Jr., is soldered tight to Iron Man. Luckily, Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), another big name, is free.
The lurking joke here is that, although Mike derides Hollywood for its “cultural genocide,” Norton himself played the Incredible Hulk, in 2008. What Birdman squawks at, though, is not just the comic-book cravings that have convulsed the movie industry of late but the more enduring follies of the dramatic profession, as it brims with special pleading and quivers at the thought of sagging fame. In one pitiful scene, Riggan reminds his ex-wife that “Farrah Fawcett died on exactly the same day as Michael Jackson,” the implication being that he, too, will be open to total eclipse. As for Mike Shiner, the savior of the hour, he soon fulfills the criteria of a d!ckhead, remarking to Sam, as she shows him around, that “your ass is great.” Later, by way of Method-based veracity, he quaffs gin rather than water onstage, and proposes replacing a fake pistol with a real one. You can guess how well that turns out.
Yet Birdman is not primarily a satire. The director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, doesn’t tell us what to mock—or, at any rate, he knows how readily we mock what tempts us most. His film is alive to needs that never die. Even as Riggan wrestles with failure, something of Birdman sings within him. We find him levitating, cross-legged in midair, and, in fury or frustration, he can still cause things to zip across the room. This is a beautiful conceit, of a kind that neither Spider-Man nor Thor would dare to countenance: the idea of superpowers that linger in the impotent spirit, like sudden surges of youth in the middle-aged. At one point, Riggan strolls down the street, clicking his fingers to make cars explode, and balls of flame sizzle from the heavens. There is even a giant black griffin that clings to a skyscraper and screeches down at city life—music to our hero’s weary ears.
You could, of course, treat this as the merest update on Walter Mitty, or as a remembrance of roles past. Riggan is not actually setting New York on fire. But here’s the thing: Birdman, all two hours of it, unrolls—or appears to unroll—in a single take, with sequences spliced together so cunningly that we cannot see the joins. This has been tried before, notably by Alexander Sokurov in Russian Ark (2002), where the seamlessness became a parade of a country’s history. Iñárritu’s ambitions are less sweeping but more intense. Thanks to his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, we cannot tell precisely where Riggan’s daily grouches end and where his imagination starts to take wing. It tends to be cued on the soundtrack, by sudden, shameless bursts of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Rachmaninoff’s Second, and Mahler’s Ninth—all of them absurdly mismatched with the pettifogging wants of our hero. And yet, as Riggan soars along the avenues, in a shabby old raincoat, you do get a kick, as you would from a decent blockbuster. It is deep in the nature of moviegoing, as Iñárritu knows, to be wowed by weightlessness, and raised aloft by the promise of escape.
His previous films, like Babel and 21 Grams, slipped down the crack between the anguished and the po-faced. Birdman, though twenty times funnier, is a more serious work, refusing to stint on the high, human comedy of forever falling short. If Mike is such a noble talent, why does he insist on his own sun bed at the theatre, and then, wearing only his underpants, get into a childish fight with Riggan? How does Riggan, not to be outbriefed, wind up in his underpants, marching through the throng of Times Square with a defiant strut? And what’s the answer to the vicious spiel that Sam rattles off at her father, pointing out that to jack up his C.V. by putting on a play, of all things, based on a story by some dead white guy, will hardly rescue him from oblivion in the eyes—and on the phones—of her generation?
Birdman is not without its flaws. Someone could have told Iñárritu that critics, though often mean, are not preemptively so, and that anybody who said, as Tabitha does, “I’m going to destroy your play,” before actually seeing it, would not stay long in the job. Also, some viewers, hustled and bustled by the action, may find it all too much. Should I need a fix of backstage shenanigans, I will still return to All About Eve, a more feline and less exhausting affair. But Sam, for one, would sneer at such backwardness, and Birdman, right now, is on the money. In Riggan and the rest of the cast, writhing with the dread of being a nobody but appalled by what it takes to be a somebody, we see not just the acting bug but also the New York bug, the love bug, and, if we’re honest, the life bug, diagnosed as what they are: a seventy-year itch.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...intcid=mod-yml
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------
Illustration by Peter Strain
The Current Cinema October 20, 2014 Issue
By Anthony Lane
Do not go to Birdman to relax. It stars Michael Keaton, who has always behaved onscreen as if he knew that there was a raging mosquito bite somewhere on his person but could not quite locate it. His performance in Beetlejuice (1988) was halfway between a rush and a rash, and what drove his Bruce Wayne to fight crime in Batman (1989), was not so much civic outrage as a rich man’s anxiety and ennui; at supper with Kim Basinger, he confessed that he had never been in his own dining-room before, and, in Batman Returns (1992), he spat out vichyssoise as if it were chilled hemlock. The Bat-Mantle has rested uneasily on Keaton’s shoulders ever since, and something similar weighs upon his character, Riggan Thomson, in Birdman.
Twenty years ago, Riggan, too, played a superhero, with a movie franchise to himself. He was Birdman: he could fly, destroy his foes with a magic whoosh, and use his telekinetic skills to move random objects at will. And look at Riggan now. He can barely summon the energy to remove his own wig. His career path has followed that of Icarus, and, in a bid to avoid splashdown, and to restore his credentials, Riggan has chosen to direct and star in a play, adapted by himself from a Raymond Carver tale, on Broadway. Many folk, like the Times theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), presume that he is heading for a fall, and he certainly surrounds himself with plunging, of every sort. His daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), who is fresh out of rehab, and helping with the production, can often be found on the theatre roof, perched on a perilous ledge. At rehearsal, a member of the cast is felled by a tumbling arc light. A replacement is needed fast, and, as Riggan’s long-suffering friend, Jake (Zach Galifianakis), explains, the choice is narrow: Woody Harrelson is doing another Hunger Games, Michael Fassbender is on X-Men duty, and Robert Downey, Jr., is soldered tight to Iron Man. Luckily, Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), another big name, is free.
The lurking joke here is that, although Mike derides Hollywood for its “cultural genocide,” Norton himself played the Incredible Hulk, in 2008. What Birdman squawks at, though, is not just the comic-book cravings that have convulsed the movie industry of late but the more enduring follies of the dramatic profession, as it brims with special pleading and quivers at the thought of sagging fame. In one pitiful scene, Riggan reminds his ex-wife that “Farrah Fawcett died on exactly the same day as Michael Jackson,” the implication being that he, too, will be open to total eclipse. As for Mike Shiner, the savior of the hour, he soon fulfills the criteria of a d!ckhead, remarking to Sam, as she shows him around, that “your ass is great.” Later, by way of Method-based veracity, he quaffs gin rather than water onstage, and proposes replacing a fake pistol with a real one. You can guess how well that turns out.
Yet Birdman is not primarily a satire. The director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, doesn’t tell us what to mock—or, at any rate, he knows how readily we mock what tempts us most. His film is alive to needs that never die. Even as Riggan wrestles with failure, something of Birdman sings within him. We find him levitating, cross-legged in midair, and, in fury or frustration, he can still cause things to zip across the room. This is a beautiful conceit, of a kind that neither Spider-Man nor Thor would dare to countenance: the idea of superpowers that linger in the impotent spirit, like sudden surges of youth in the middle-aged. At one point, Riggan strolls down the street, clicking his fingers to make cars explode, and balls of flame sizzle from the heavens. There is even a giant black griffin that clings to a skyscraper and screeches down at city life—music to our hero’s weary ears.
You could, of course, treat this as the merest update on Walter Mitty, or as a remembrance of roles past. Riggan is not actually setting New York on fire. But here’s the thing: Birdman, all two hours of it, unrolls—or appears to unroll—in a single take, with sequences spliced together so cunningly that we cannot see the joins. This has been tried before, notably by Alexander Sokurov in Russian Ark (2002), where the seamlessness became a parade of a country’s history. Iñárritu’s ambitions are less sweeping but more intense. Thanks to his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, we cannot tell precisely where Riggan’s daily grouches end and where his imagination starts to take wing. It tends to be cued on the soundtrack, by sudden, shameless bursts of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Rachmaninoff’s Second, and Mahler’s Ninth—all of them absurdly mismatched with the pettifogging wants of our hero. And yet, as Riggan soars along the avenues, in a shabby old raincoat, you do get a kick, as you would from a decent blockbuster. It is deep in the nature of moviegoing, as Iñárritu knows, to be wowed by weightlessness, and raised aloft by the promise of escape.
His previous films, like Babel and 21 Grams, slipped down the crack between the anguished and the po-faced. Birdman, though twenty times funnier, is a more serious work, refusing to stint on the high, human comedy of forever falling short. If Mike is such a noble talent, why does he insist on his own sun bed at the theatre, and then, wearing only his underpants, get into a childish fight with Riggan? How does Riggan, not to be outbriefed, wind up in his underpants, marching through the throng of Times Square with a defiant strut? And what’s the answer to the vicious spiel that Sam rattles off at her father, pointing out that to jack up his C.V. by putting on a play, of all things, based on a story by some dead white guy, will hardly rescue him from oblivion in the eyes—and on the phones—of her generation?
Birdman is not without its flaws. Someone could have told Iñárritu that critics, though often mean, are not preemptively so, and that anybody who said, as Tabitha does, “I’m going to destroy your play,” before actually seeing it, would not stay long in the job. Also, some viewers, hustled and bustled by the action, may find it all too much. Should I need a fix of backstage shenanigans, I will still return to All About Eve, a more feline and less exhausting affair. But Sam, for one, would sneer at such backwardness, and Birdman, right now, is on the money. In Riggan and the rest of the cast, writhing with the dread of being a nobody but appalled by what it takes to be a somebody, we see not just the acting bug but also the New York bug, the love bug, and, if we’re honest, the life bug, diagnosed as what they are: a seventy-year itch.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...intcid=mod-yml
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
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Michael Keaton is back in the spotlight.
He's already in the lead for a Best Actor Oscar nomination. And I do believe they (the Academy) better give it to him.
http://news.yahoo.com/answering-bird...xUyucABRVXNyoA
NEW YORK (AP) — When Michael Keaton met Barack Obama shortly before Obama would become president, the then-senator had a question for the actor.
"Why don't you make more movies?"
It's a quandary that has long bedeviled moviegoers just as it has, so it seems, heads of state. Why did the roundly beloved Keaton — a manic comic actor, an intense live wire, a real-deal movie star — become such an infrequent presence on the big screen?
Even at the height of Keaton's stardom in the 1980s and '90s, he was famously picky, usually doing a movie a year and turning down about as many hits ("Splash," ''JFK," among them) as he said yes to. But after a handful of flops in the late '90s and early 2000s, Keaton all but disappeared from movies.
"I did turn a lot of things down. But a lot of the things I turned down, you would have turned down," said Keaton in a recent interview. "It was because I was bored. I was bored with what I would do. Maybe it just didn't interest me for a while, I don't know."
But Keaton's revival, begun with a handful of supporting roles, reaches a blistering, wildly meta crescendo in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance." In it, Keaton stars as a washed-up, middle-aged actor, Riggan Thomson, trying to mount a serious play on Broadway based on a Raymond Carver story when all his fans want is for him to make a fourth "Birdman" film — a superhero identity that haunts him.
The reference to Keaton's "Batman" days is unmistakable, but "Birdman" — shot in long, flowing takes that capture the chaotic swirl of backstage life and a theater full of people striving for their own sense of self-importance — only plays a little with Keaton's own persona. It's a gonzo portrait of an actor's out-of-control psychoses that appears certain to land the 63-year-old's first Oscar nomination.
Keaton's comeback is the result, he says, of sharping his focus.
"I turned the dial up," says Keaton. "I don't know if I got re-interested or I settled a lot of other things in my life. I really don't know. I just thought: 'I'm going to dial the scope in a little more,' like on a rifle. ... It's amazing when you focus on the things you want and keep your eye on the ball. You start to create it or something."
His hair trim and gray, Keaton is intense in person and initially standoffish. He doesn't look up from his phone entering a Manhattan hotel room. At the mention that many have overdone comparisons of him to his "Birdman" character, he grows tense: "If I were you, I'd take a higher road," he says.
Keaton has in many ways spent his career avoiding the typecast fate of Riggan. The Pittsburgh-native, Catholic-raised, youngest of seven began as stand-up. After his breakthrough in 1982's "Night Shift," he deliberately sought to avoid what he calls "glib young man" roles. When development on a third "Batman" film sought to lighten Tim Burton's universe, he bailed.
"He's a very self-assured guy. He doesn't need to be validated," says Inarritu ("Amores Perros," ''Babel"). "In order to play a role like this and be naked — spiritually, intellectually, physically — you have to have a lot of self-assurance."
Keaton, who has a 31-year-old son from his marriage to Caroline McWilliams, spends much of his time on his ranch in Montana, fishing and hunting.
"People can say 'Oh, he hasn't been around because nobody's called,'" says Inarritu. "No, it's because he has a life. He has a ranch, he has a family."
Keaton gave Inarritu (whom Keaton calls "the mad Mexican") the kind of "Beetlejuice"-level commitment he's known for. Keaton didn't even question shooting a scene in which Riggan gets locked out of the theater during opening night, forcing him to stomp through Times Square in his tighty-whities. The actor says his only thought was "'I wonder what type of underwear I'll wear.'"
Keaton pegs Adam McKay's white-collar crime comedy "The Other Guys" (2010) as the start to his return, calling it "the first jab" that proved he "could still hit." He's also played a Steve Jobs-like CEO in "RoboCop" and appeared in the HBO comedy "Clear History." Next, he'll star in Tom McCarthy's Catholic scandal drama "Spotlight."
Will he keep up the pace?
"I honestly don't know," says Keaton. "I'm sure I'll do something that won't work, that will be stupid and people will point their fingers and say I'm a dope. And I'll go to the next one and maybe they won't."
Last edited by mojofilter; 10-13-14 at 09:37 PM.
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Keaton is on promoting Birdman with Letterman, tonight. Dave and Michael go waaaaay back, to before either one of them were famous. They were both in the cast of "Mary!", Mary Tyler Moore's short-lived variety series that only lasted three episodes on CBS' line up in 1978.
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Keaton is on promoting Birdman with Letterman, tonight. Dave and Michael go waaaaay back, to before either one of them were famous. They were both in the cast of "Mary!", Mary Tyler Moore's short-lived variety series that only lasted three episodes on CBS' line up in 1978.
Cool! The Foo Fighters and Michael Keaton on Letterman tonight. I'm DVR'ing that!
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You all are making me want to see this one. 
Loved Michael Keaton back in the day. Glad he's coming back in the spotlight. Wish he would've stuck around for Batman Forever... and Tim Burton for that matter. Who knows where the comic book movie genre would've gone from there....
Loved Michael Keaton back in the day. Glad he's coming back in the spotlight. Wish he would've stuck around for Batman Forever... and Tim Burton for that matter. Who knows where the comic book movie genre would've gone from there....
Good interview with Keaton, Edward Norton, and Alejandro González Iñárritu with Charlie Rose.
http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2...lie-rose-10-14
http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2...lie-rose-10-14
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This movie is for Michael Keaton what Pulp Fiction was for John Travolta.
It also seems that Birdman will have the same massive appeal that Pulp Fiction had on audiences 20 years ago.
It also seems that Birdman will have the same massive appeal that Pulp Fiction had on audiences 20 years ago.
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Funny Beetlejuice story while on the set of Birdman Keaton shared with Letterman the other night
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Critics Consensus: A thrilling leap forward for director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman is an ambitious technical showcase powered by a layered story and outstanding performances from Michael Keaton and Edward Norton.
92% on Rotten Tomatoes cannot wait !
92% on Rotten Tomatoes cannot wait !
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