Film Shapes

A character in Birdman suggests to the titular figure that he 'confuses love for admiration' and this neatly sums up the film for me. Easy to admire, very hard to love. The admirable part mostly shows itself through the celebrated cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. His hand-held, 'one take' style, though hardly ground-breaking, is technically brilliant. Lubezki has tried his hand at this kind of technique (gimmick?) before with that great scene in Children of Men . Take this away though, and I'm afraid the film appears as something of an actors wankfest. Some of the acting is pretty good and I'm thinking of Emma Stone and Ed Norton mainly here. The others seem to be pushing things a little too hard (Galifianakis is shite). It may be that acting as earnest theatre types, so in love with their profession, rubbed off a little because some of the ham was actually sniffable. The biggest problem was that I didn't give a rat's arse about any of the ...