What's not to like?

Rating: 10/10 (21 April 2015)

Everything about Birdman just fell neatly into place. The extended takes and camera choreography was just one small piece to the crazy puzzle that makes this movie an astounding achievement.
The whole film was scripted to be detailed on a "meta" level. Actors cast as caricatures of themselves, playing to each other across a single long story thread just like the play that they are performing in the story of the film.
Every cast member essentially playing a blown out caricature of their actual selves.
Michael Keaton's performance as Riggan, in particular, was quite inspired, and clearly drawn from some amount of personal experience, with his fellow cast members attempting to support him and his Broadway stage comeback while simultaneously undermining everything he's doing by doing things their own way.
It made for entertaining viewing, which, having spent a lot of time around drama types, I found to be genuinely funny in a number of places. The way that Riggan interacts with the character that made him famous and his ability to suspend reality in order to lead the life of a character he played for the majority of his career, while funny, also ponders similarly to "The Men Who Stare at Goats" on the topic of the suspension of reality and how the human mind can create abstract visions of what could be done if we harness the power of our minds...
In reality though the film makers have made both a technically accomplished film, and one that is enjoyable from start to finish, thanks to good humour and great casting. It's the freshest telling of a story in film that I've seen in a long time.