Hacker Cinema
The Birdman
Omul Pasăre
2014 · Film · documentary · 76 min
Directed by Alexandru Mavrodineanu
An old aviator fights to stay in the air. Whether he wins or not, his participation will mark a new record for aviation and will allow one more armistice in his battle with time.
11 positive2 negative13 neutralfrom 26 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
Birdman's ending is atrocious, but the main problem ain't even there. The movie is just a giant pile of pretentious nothingness, I can't even remember what was the point of it. Hollywood movies from the last 2 decades or so are just disposable.
Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.
I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.
Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
Copyright covers the specific work of art you created, not anything that looks like it. Birdman didn't violate Batman's copyright even being an international callback. Nor did every superhero movie that tried really hard to copy Nolan's style after his trilogy.
It was perfectly fine in 2023 to create a cartoon about a prankster mouse called Nicholas sailing a steamboat. What became legal in 2024, with the copyright expiration, was to give him those exact pants and ears and call him Mickey.
I'm not familiar with Pokémon, so I'm not sure if the PW cartoon monsters are literal copies of the originals or just drawn in the same style.
Totally, you do you.
I love the movie birdman, on the topic.
I do like superhero movies—i.e. films about characters with supernatural powers—just not the MCU flavor of them.
I enjoyed Unbreakable, Chronicle, Birdman, Fast Color, Freaks, etc.
Excellent example. Redmayne is a very talented actor, but that role was awarded for for its acting stunts rather than his understanding of who Hawking really was.
Birdman was very much an actor's movie. I went to see it with my actor friends, and had a wonderful time. Even setting aside the wonderfully long (and tricky) takes, it was an incredible exercise in performing the same scene several times in different ways. It was full of great performances, and Keaton surprised the heck out of everyone.
I notice that Iñárritu has a new film coming out on Netflix soon, Bardo, and I'm really looking forward to it.
I do find the thesis in the ending quite weak:
> For a longer time before the gritty period, we all dedicated ourselves to the idea that anything we’d acknowledge as very good had to be both serious and artsy. People really liked Good Will Hunting (see: very serious); it was also a good movie, so it won an Oscar. Zillions of people love movies like The Princess Bride and Happy Gilmore; it’s incredibly likely both dwarf Good Will Hunting in terms of total views, but you can’t even imagine a world where either could have possibly won an Oscar.
[...]
> This is a short article by my standards, but it does have me thinking: What kind of world could we actually live in, if we were willing to treat works of art made with the goal of making us happy as if they were important? What if we were willing to make them? We’ve seen what happens in a world where all the Oscars go to movies that make you cry, or that we pretend make us think even though they generally don't
There are plenty of widely acclaimed movies that can not be considered "very serious", picking some recent Oscar winners as examples with categorizations from wikipedia:
* Parasite ("black comedy thriller")
* Green Book ("comedy-drama")
* The Shape of Water ("romantic fantasy")
* Birdman ("black comedy drama")
* CODA ("comedy-drama")
* La La Land ("comedy-drama")
* Life Of Pie ("adventure-drama")
Are all those completely feel-good movies intended to make you happy? Maybe not, but still its not like happy/humorous/feel-good is completely disregarded category even among grumpy art critics.
I would go as far as to say movies teaching morality are just bad and tiresome when the moral concept is obvious. Art is most interesting, imo, when it takes a position on something that matters or isn't obvious to those not thinking about it.
Birdman still stands out to me as an amazing film. It's messages are so specific and consumable, and it had something to say that felt somewhat novel.
> Independent films still exist.
Barely. There's no money left in the industry. Everyone is trying to make the next universe, and failing.
5 years ago Birdman was very close to not being a thing because they couldn't find money. How many Birdmans of today can't?
Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
I don't think digital itself is the problem. Rather, much like the music industry, the knowledge of how to monetize most efficiently has killed creativity to a great extent in mainstream culture. You can make a hundred Eyes Wide Shuts and you wouldn't get the profit of The Avengers.
I'd also note that a passion for film has been culled out of the Hollywood management class almost entirely. They are running corporations, not film studios, unlike some older generations. Not to say that profit wasn't an important motivator ever since film began, but it was never the sole reason for funding movies across the industry like it is today.
It's also very sad that taste in movies will be fundamentally altered by this period. Taste for complex movies needs to be formed - in a world of Marvel movies, it's very hard to even understand what is good about a film like A Clockwork Orange or Birdman.
I made a flippant comment during book club about how short stories are nothing compared to novels. A friend suggested I check out Raymond Carver which blew my mind.
His prose is one of a kind and his stories usually leave me floored.
I recommend the collection, "What we talk about when we talk about love" (the title of one story) -- which, by the way, is the play central to the (excellent) movie Birdman.
Man, typing this got me excited. Think I'm gonna pour a glass of Teacher's and see if anyone wants to dance.
I think this is an exaggeration. Short/Long takes are an artistic decision. We have recent movies that are a few long takes (sometime pretending to be a single take) 1917, Birdman, Russian Ark (true single take) all shot in recent years. Same with TV: True Detective has a famous long take scene, Mr. Robot, BCS.
Used it once, cost me €840.
With torrents you can get a film in minutes. With popcorn you are exposed the entire time you watch the film.
In Germany they monitor peer connections and send a payment demanding an out of court settlement. After two years they escalate to a court appearance in a remote town. If you don't show, you lose and they turn it over to debt collection.
But I have to say Birdman was a great film.
Movies like 1917 and Birdman (and perhaps even Rope, if I'm being pedantic) only have the illusion of a single shot.
The best true single shot movie I've seen is the German movie Victoria (2015), which really wouldn't have worked half as well if it was shot in a more traditional way.
This doesn't work well in apps but games do incredible things to hide that state; and it's partially a consequence of avoiding a patent on minigames inside loading screens.
e.g. back in the 90s with Resi 1, the loading screen was hidden by a slow and tense animation of a door opening. It totally fit the atmosphere.
Plenty of games add an elevator or a scripted vehicle ride, or some ridiculous door locking mechanism that serves the same purpose without breaking immersion, especially as those faux-loading screens can be dynamic.
It's pretty much the exact same technique used in cinema when a director wants to stitch multiple takes into a single shot (e.g. that episode in True Detective; that other one in Mr Robot; all of Birdman).
>A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/
Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices.
I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive".
I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.
The reasons you consider it to be such a good film probably have more to do with cinematography than writing, acting or directing. The beautiful shots are a direct result of Emmanuel Lubezki being the DP - the same style can be seen in Birdman, Gravity, The Revenant, and some of Terrence Malick’s films.
;)
It's an emotion vs intellect thing. Birdman is like cocaine to people who like the emotional side, and like hydrochloric acid for people who want a movie to be rational.
I'm just surprise the numbers even bear that out like that.
Interesting question, just ran a quick analysis for all movies rated 4.5+ star
Highest Consensus:
1. Whiplash
2. 12 Angry Men
3. Se7en
Most Controversial:
1. Birdman
2. Citizen Kane
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Just real quick here. Box Office Mojo has data on 702 movies released in 2014 (I only wanted to do one year because there's no API I know of for this and I was doing it quickly, I chose 2014 instead of 2015 because there's still many 2015 releases that are still earning money and so I wanted the most recent "complete" year). The correlation between total box office gross and theaters shown in is very robust, at .79. So if you look at the top Metacritic movie from 2014, Boyhood, you can see it has a low gross, ranked 100th on Box Office Mojo's data. But if you look at the theaters shown in, it was only in 775 theaters. Mr. Turner, the second movie on Metacritic's rankings for 2014, was only shown in 120 theaters. Birdman, the Best Picture winner and the 16th ranked movie on Metacritic's list, was in 1213 theaters. Meanwhile, you have to go to the 21st movie on the top grossing list to find a film that was in fewer than 3,000 theaters. It's a classic example of Simpson's paradox[1]. You have two populations, wide-release movies and small-release pictures, and within each population, there's a positive correlation between critical approval (as measured by Metacritic) and box office gross, which is picked up by the contour maps. But because the highest Metacritic scores go to the movies released in 2000 theaters or less, without controlling for the number of theaters a movie shows in, it looks like there's a negative relationship between critical acclaim and box office totals.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
I don't want to weigh in on the discussion about The Phantom Menace, but I do want to address the sentiment that in order to have a valid opinion about some craft, you have to be proficient at that craft.
When you practice something, you usually don't practice it in order to impress others who practice the same thing. Unfortunately, this ends up happening in many cases (usually with abstract things such as pure mathematics or classical music, where appreciation is difficult without context). But in most cases, you produce things that can be appreciated by others, regardless of their interest in the process. If you knit your friend or loved one a cool scarf, they don't necessarily need to be interested in knitting to enjoy wearing it. And if you're a great baker, someone doesn't need to know anything about baking to enjoy your creations.
All the same, ordinary people can have valid negative opinions of things that they aren't proficient in. When a scarf has numerous dropped stitches or a pie doesn't taste quite right, many people can make observations and express their distaste. Just because they aren't knitters or bakers doesn't mean that their critique doesn't "count for anything." They might not be able to pinpoint the part of the process where something went wrong, but that still doesn't invalidate their opinion.
In this case, the intended audience of The Phantom Menace was not film makers, it was ordinary people (in contrast to say Birdman, which may be easier to appreciate if you have some insight into the dramatic world). Maybe it was meant to appeal to a younger crowd (I enjoyed it when I first saw it). Maybe it was meant to appeal to fans of the original trilogy. But the fact remains that aaronbrethorst is entitled to his opinion and his opinion is perfectly valid.
P.S. I also don't like The Phantom Menace, but that doesn't really matter.
Most of the critic (and user) reviews are what I think of as "easy mode" ones. They don't really teach you anything about the film, just say whether they liked it or not, using the most colorful language they can possibly muster. The FF quote seems like a typical example.
Alternatively there are some that really dig deep into the meaning and execution of the film and analyze it in ways I would never think of, not having a PhD in literature or having been to film school or anything. An example I like a bit is Film Crit Hulk[1], which range from simply explaining why the film's execution didn't match its themes (Jurassic World) to borderline philosophical treatises on the meaning of film (Birdman). (Imo, obviously.)
For getting a quick rating to see what soared/bombed, stuff like RT and IMDB serves its purpose, but I wish published reviews would do more of the deep dives into film analysis, rather than just letting some random journalist vent their opinion for pageviews.
[1] http://birthmoviesdeath.com/author/film.crit.hulk
He explains why himself: Birdman opened in the United States on October 17. It is not, financially, a consequential movie; it was released by Fox Searchlight, the prestige, indie-ish subdivision of 20th Century Fox; it has made decent money (nearly $21 million domestic) for the kind of film it is; it will win a bunch of awards over the next three months and lose a bunch of others. It is a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about.
Typically a film like this loses some money at the box office once all the costs are taken into account (even though Birdman got a lot of great advance PR on the late night TV circuit and so on); the theatrical release is essentially a giant advertisement for the DVD/rental/streaming/broadcast windows.
What can you do? The market for franchises or blockbuster films (most of which either have franchise potential or big ancillary tie-in potential, like Titanic) is huge because that's what most people like - an amazing, larger-than-life spectacle. Same reason Shakespeare built so many stories around exotic locations and courtly intrigue, same reason Dickens leveraged class distinctions to ratchet up the drama between his characters. I find these complaints a bit odd considering that many of the big franchises originate in the comics world, which was the dungeon of literary publishing for decades. these franchises are successful not just because of spectacular elements but because of the highly refined storytelling skills of the creative teams. To a large extent they're building meta-narratives of multiple interconnected stories that draw on a common fictional world and are designed to reinforce each other, for both economic and aesthetic reasons - a modern panthetistic mythos that lays out a different worldview from the singular ideological perspective that was a cultural staple of the past (while also containing its own ideology, of course).
Incidentally, it's off that the piece doesn't address how Josh Whedon went from directing The Avengers in 2011 to shooting a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing in his own house/backyard, featuring several of the same actors (eg Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Colson in the Marvel superhero 'world').
Today we have a different model: The modern studio chief loves business, success, replication, and reliability, and nobody expects him to offer even the most cursory nod to anything that smacks of ideals that relate to content;
That's because the modern 'studio' is just the crown jewel in a business conglomerate, and development now happens within production companies. It's been going this way ever since Uncle Sam busted the studios' vertical market and forbade them from owning theaters or signing stars to highly restrictive contracts. There's a good albeit somewhat tendentious history of the motion picture business here: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pdf
fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form
Megan wants to make money as much as any other producer and just has a different strategy for doing so (and I don't mean that as a criticism). Look, the film industry is a bit like the restaurant industry: you have a few megacorporations at the top, like McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks - everyone knows their food is of low overall quality but it remains popular. Then you have other fast food providers that do the same sort of thing but slightly better in some ways and worse in others, for a slightly smaller audience. Then you have some specialty fast food outlets like Chipotle that make pretty nice food for more money and are very successful but an order of magnitude smaller than megacorporations. Then you have smaller chains (often family owned or closely held), then a wide variety of regular restaurants, and scrappy disruptive food trucks on the outside. It's your typical power-law distribution.
If you're running some sort of artisinal restaurant, you're in competition with McDonalds insofar as they also sell food and dollars spent there are not winding up in your register. But in another sense you're not, because you don't want to make your living selling $5 meals off plastic trays, you want a more intimate relationship with your customers, you like having little boozy gourmet parties with the wait staff after the customers have left, and you like starting work at 11am instead of 5am.
MARK HARRIS is the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.
Gee, sounds like Mr Harris is trying to put together a little franchise of his own. If you're planning to write pop film criticism you'd probably do well to pick some other number of films to analyze besides five.
For what it's worth, Birdman is doing quite well. It's not following the Be Everywhere All At Once release model that's become the norm for franchise blockbusters, but then again it's not a franchise blockbuster. Rather, it's taking the incremental release path that used to be quite common before the Giganto Kablooy Superhero Invasion overtook everything.
http://variety.com/2014/film/news/birdman-expansion-box-office-michael-keaton-1201345523/
The fault for Hollywood's endless sequels, remakes, and remakes of the remake should probably be laid primarily at the feet of the American viewing public. We won't make the hike to the movies for artsy stuff like Birdman, but Spider-man I (Remake III)? Already got my ticket!