Birdman review: Keaton misses out the best actor award for his superb act but this is Oscars 2015's best film

Editor’s note: Since Birdman won the Best Film Award at Oscars 2015, we have republished the review of the film for those of you who are yet to watch it.

Growl.

It’s me. Birdman.

How did you end up here.

This place is horrible. Smells like malls.

The cheap, pseudo sanitized, plasticky nature of the thrills. The crummy, emotionless texture of the narrative. The dead eyed one-note characters. The over the top acting and visuals.

This is not entertainment. This is robbery. And snuff. And you pay for it every single week, week after week. You champion commercial blockbuster cinema. You’re the problem.

Fuelling a kind of cinema that caters to the lowest common denominator. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Lying on your sofa-facing TV, with a tub of poisonous snacks, feeding your ugly, shapeless, potbellied body more calories than the budget of these films. Feeding your vacant mind with flashy images of robots fighting each other or Adam Sandler cracking dick jokes with his friends.

You’re pathetic.

Every two months a great indie or an arthouse movie shows up, and you get a chance to redeem yourself. But you never do.

Birdman is in theatres. It stars Michael Keaton, best known for playing Batman, in one of the most memorable cinematic performances of all time. There’s also Edward Norton, who once tried his hand at superheroism with The Hulk, playing himself. Following the pace of the narrative the background score: a drummer, keeping time in both the real world and the hallucinated. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s signature balance of powerhouse performances and a tremendous narrative is on display as is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s mind-boggling visuals. And the whole film looks like one, long and spectacular take.

Birdman appears to be a movie about an actor trying to redeem himself, but really, Inarritu’s award-winning movie is about you and me. It’s a movie about how we disappointed each other, how we’ve failed cinema and cinema has failed us. It’s also about choosing between the easy allure of expensive comfort and mediocrity versus stepping away from one’s comfort zone and salvaging some self respect. And all this is done through cruel, crackerjack, black comedy.

Keaton plays Riggan, a washed-up actor who is trying to gain some credibility by doing a play on Broadway. Nothing is going right — the set is falling apart, his cast is in tatters, the theatre critic he wants to impress is determined to give him a bad review, the debts are mounting, his daughter looks like she wants to kill him. Everyone seems to be convinced Riggan and this play is a joke, including Riggan himself. Everyone except the voice in Riggan’s head that believes he can do amazing things: the voice of Birdman. And even though you know it’s insanity to hear that voice, you can’t help but wish it would growl in your ear too and pull you out of mediocrity the way Birdman does Riggan.

Face it. You don’t watch challenging films because you’re afraid. You’re scared to death that your tiny little brain, already fried by the years of blockbuster meals, won’t process anything that’s not made for toddlers. You’re as stupid as the movies you watch. The movies are as stupid as you.

You know I’m right.

Listen to me. You were once not stupid.

You did watch that Kieslowski movie on TV once and you kind of liked it. But when was the last time you saw a movie for the characters? You only watch movies because they’re just extended versions of trailers on YouTube. The three minute trailers that give away every damn thing in the movie except for the end credits.

You’ve got a chance to do something right. You’ve got to take it. You can go back one more time and show me what you’re capable of.

So get your lazy buttocks off your couch. Shave off that pathetic goatee. Get some vitamins. Drive to the cinema. If you find a movie better than Birdman, I’ll clip off my wings, bathe in batter and offer myself on the platter at the nearest KFC.