Yours is an interesting take though, Stooge.
I didn't really get most of it either, but I tend to blame myself and try to look harder when that happens, but perhaps this film isn't necessarily deserving. Mostly I took it to be about getting old, which I've always liked as a theme. And I thought Norton did pretty good. But yeah, it's definitely not going to stick with me like Nightcrawler did.
I mean, the acting in Birdman was fine. No one was downright awful, but it was all over the top stage acting. Plenty of yelling and throwing things. Very little room for nuance. Which, yes I understand part of the "point" was that you are watching a movie about a play about a book and everything in the entire movie is cute little "hey, hey you get it, you get it.. everything is symbolism".
I tend to not thing I just "didn't get" movies and blame myself. Not least of which is I'm a reasonably smart person, so it's a bit on you to make sure that your movie isn't too obtuse. In this case, the movie isn't obtuse at all. It wears it's message on it's sleeve while a character screams it at you. It's just so all over the place that it's hard to know what it wound up saying at the end. Does nothing matter? Does ego matter? Does theater matter? Story? Art? Life? I walked out not knowing anything about the message it was trying to convey other than that everyone involved thinks they are very clever.
I was an undergrad Philosophy major and I've seen plenty of theater that touches on the same subject matter (it's effectively a been there done that play within a play that most theater of the absurd derivative stuff has been doing since the 80s off Broadway). This is to say I've been exposed to a lot of things that have managed to go where this movie tried to. It's so on the nose with it's symbolism and repetitive beats that any attempt to be clever comes off as sophomoric.
It just did nothing interesting to me at all, and it's entire message was a giant convoluted mess of "nothing matters". Except perhaps personal performance as long as it's an artistic endeavor and not schlock for the masses.
If you want to see a movie about a persons descent into madness over their inner drive to prove themselves than Black Swan is a substantially better movie. If you want to see a movie about growing old and losing touch with your youth then see Lost in Translation. If you want something that questions the fabric of reality and living in bad faith than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is better. Or any good theater of the absurd from the last 70 years. Exit the King, No Exit (not properly theater of the absurd), Waiting for Godot, really anything by Becket. Or you could just cut straight to the source and read the Stranger or Being and Nothingness.
This is the sort of distilled down retread of much more interesting works.
The cinematography and the Sound-track are top notch, but it's not the first movie that made you feel as though you were in the lead characters head as they spiraled. It's a pretty clever parlor trick, but still just that.
Or you can watch Birdman which is basically every off broadway play that high school kids have been turning into Dramatic Interp performances for the last 15 years.
It's a movie that is convinced of it's own importance, but I've yet to find someone who can tell me what it was about the movie that was actually important.
