The Most Overrated Film in the History of Cinema

Rating: 1/10 (14 February 2015)

With the Oscars just around the corner, this week I made an attempt to watch a few of the Best Picture nominees. I started with "Birdman", the supposedly whimsical story of Michael Keaton's attempt to overcome his past celebrity status by rising to the occasion of a serious actor in a Broadway play. As a longtime comic book fan who grew up in the 80's, I have a special place in my heart for Keaton's portrayal of "Batman", and I imagined that surely this "Birdman" must be a neat satirical play on the advent of comic book movies playing more of a role in popular film culture than they were at the time of the Nicholson/Keaton Batman film some 20+ years ago. One would especially think that this movie was at the very least watchable and endearing, considering the fact that it's leading the Oscar nominations this year (tied with "The Grand Budapest Hotel" for nominations in the most categories).
Sadly, one would be mistaken to expect much from this film. What you have here is a sad (i.e. beneath mediocre) play on "Six Characters in Search of an Author", the "metatheatrical" 20th Century play that attempts to show the personas behind characters in play before they really take form. "Birdman" does something akin to this, showing the character flaws of its actual actors as they attempt to engage in the real world.
The overall gist of the film is to highlight the neurosis of Riggan Thomson (Keaton), who some twenty years ago starred in a series of "Birdman" films. We quickly learn that the "Birdman" persona has infiltrated Keaton's psyche, leading him to imagine himself doing things that he isn't really able to do in real life (it's some time before the film makes this more overt, but that certainly was my takeaway from the opening scene of the film). Along the way we discover that Thomson is at one and the same time suffering from an ongoing inner struggle with his former alter-ego while concurrently fighting against the entire premise of being the celebrity star that is associated with the "Birdman" persona.
While the entire gist of that scenario sounds like a reasonably intriguing plot for a film, the grandiose way in which this film goes about making itself abstract and removed from conventional movie storytelling makes it extremely hard to watch, and ultimately leaves the viewer with a complete sense of remorse for why you paid good money and wasted two hours of your life watching this asinine piece of crap "film". I probably said that more kindly than I ought to have, but I digress.
The big thing that one needs to understand about this movie, though, is that it's being lauded for its cynicism about contemporary movies and its artsy-fartsy behind the scenes, insider lampooning of the film industry. It's abstract in a way that it is completely divorced from traditional movie script writing, and I suppose that it's right to say that it's "original" in that regard. The problem is that those who are praising this film for its originality are nitwits who lack the prudence to know when an original idea is at one and the same time a horrible idea. It's like saying that someone has invented a new method of defecating. The convention may be new and novel, but at the end of the day the result is still a pile of $#*%, plain and simple. It's clear to me that the only reason that this film is scoring as high as it is is due to its obscurity and the pretentiousness of its marketed audience, and that once the masses watch this movie on DVD and Netflix its popularity will plummet accordingly.
All that said, I've given this film 1/10 stars purely because 0 was not an option. The lone redeeming aspect of this movie is Emma Stone's strong performance, for which she deserves praise, but probably not a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Aside from her role, the film is one of the worst I have ever seen, on par with "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation" andwell, aside from that jewel of a Matthew McConaughey movie, I really can't think of a movie that I disliked more than this "Best Picture" nominee. Michael Bay could make a "Transformers 9" and it would tower over this grotesque attempt at filmmaking.