journal features

movie review - Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2018.03.27

This is the story of an aging actor who decides on one final big splash. He writes, directs, and stars in his own musical. Stirring up quite a commotion on Broadway with the audacity and the insanity of the project, this show's making is the setting and story for this movie. All manner of characters from the lead's past surface to play some part in the production, from other actors keen to work with the man to bitter critics who feel they've been slighted or that the genre is being debased.

I don't know what part Michael Keaton played in the creation of this movie, but having the man who made "Batman" huge decades ago play this part was ingenious. This movie is a rarity in being complex, smart, fast-paced and free of any pretense or obnoxious presences.

Strongly recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)