Forgettable

Rating: 4/10 (1 February 2015)

This film will be forgotten in a year. It may con the voters in 2015 and win a handful of Oscars, but still it will be forgotten in a year.
Alejandro González Iñárritu's ironic comedy "Birdman" is an outsider's take on the supposed battle between Hollywood (i.e., popular entertainment) and Broadway (i.e., theater art), in which the director dumps on both before siding with -- well, no spoilers here, but the ending is bound to appeal to sixty-something white males who happen to be members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The script is far from realistic, unnecessarily profane, only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and sadly centered on the insecurities and ruminations of a barely likable cast of actor-addicts intent on bringing Raymond Carver to the stage. Maybe the script read better in Spanish.
Buy the premise and you'll buy the bit; I didn't buy the premise. The acting is fine, but the cinematography, with its hand-held cameras mostly following Michael Keaton as he walks through the set, cloyingly emulates cinéma vérité even as it blows kisses to Broadway. Most disappointingly, there is no hook, nothing to get into in this film, nothing to justify its two-and-one-half-hour run.
By the end I was checking my watch. This was one film I didn't stay for the credits.