Birdman

Had a very good time watching the movie Birdman today starring Michael Keaton. Directed by a Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu who made a vaguely remembered movie a few years ago with Xavier Bardem called Biutiful. But this movie which I only had half an idea about seeing it some time but went past the cinema just ten minutes before it started and bought a ticket.

It appeared to be a washed up movie actor producing and acting in a play and all the troubles within and around it and how it effected him with his experiences of being a screen super hero, was actually very fascinating. It seemed to be the sort of film that might have been inspired by the Coen Brothers and Woody Allen, steering off perhaps in the direction of the oddity of when Terry Gilliam is making a movie based on someone else's script. 

There was wonderful slightly confusing deliriousness of overlapping realities where one start to ask what is real and what isn't and never have a final answer, in that way it might be said to have a touch of the recent Walter Mitty movie about it. But it showed that Michael Keaton despite not having much of a career over the last decade and so on, still has some go in him as a leading actor. This film is not likely to interest fans of superhero movies very much.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

Managed to see Exodus, a strange interpretation of the Moses story almost, quite bleak, and also enjoyed the performances enough and the film in general. Many scenes may well have bored a typical mainstream cinema goer Perhaps the exploration of what kind of world they were really historically dealing was a generalisation that they couldn't really afford to get too bogged down exploring but what they put on the screen was elaborate enough. So they had the plagues, ditched anything that seemed too visually supernatural unless it could be explained away as an internal mental vision and they ditched the golden ark as well. Not a movie for Indiana Jones fans to get obsessed by certainly. Perhaps in its own way was an essay about what sort of person Moses was and how he was being mentally led by something that at the same time in itself was acting as a catalyst for odd events. May need to see it again because a bunch of wide skilled irish gypsies with young triplets and a wailing baby couldn't keep their mouths shut in the back corner. Joel Edgerton had an interesting makeup job to play Ramesses, fifty years ago they probably would have been after Yul Brynner. It would good to see an extended cut of this.