Birdman (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) 9.5/10

Every once in a while, a movie would come along and blow your mind away. In 2014, it was Boyhood that came first with a story concept that lasted more than 12 years.

Then, by the end of 2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu released Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance), and I was so lucky enough that the Golden Screen Cinemas in Kota Kinabalu was still showing it while I visited. And I even came across it by chance and changed my schedule to fit this movie in.

This was a masterpiece by Inarritu. In fact, the whole movie looked and felt like one continuous non-stop filming sequence because of how it was architectured and choreographed. It began with that first opening sequence where we had Michael Keaton battling with his inner voice of Birdman  in his dressing room, to walking out onto the stage for a table read. I was so fascinated by how the camera followed the actor that throughout the entire of the film, I kept looking for the breaks.

The amazing thing was that (it looked like) only one camera was used for the entire movie. You don't see any cut-away or editing cuts. It's just one camera going in and out. And when it's trained on an actor giving his or her performance, it looked like you are right there in the scene, feeling all that emotion and intensity. And that's the vision of Inarritu for his movie.

The actors themselves, from Keaton to Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan and Lindsay Duncan were phenomenal. And that's because of Inarritu's vision for his actors, to give the kind of performance that fit into the vision of his movie.

Other than Keaton, one of my favourites was Norton who gave another performance of his lifetime. He's not the Edward Norton that I usually see.

The only thing that I wasn't completely satisfied with was the ending. I saw many points towards the end of the movie where Inarritu could have ended his film. And I didn't quite like how it actually ended. It was so perfect until that very last shot of Stone looking up in the sky and smiling. That made no sense to me in relation to the entirety of the movie.

However, I believe Inarritu wanted it to end that way for reasons that may not be clear to me. Granting him that from the beginning up until that point was perfect, I trust that he knows what he wanted and, from an artistic point of view, I won't argue with him.

Except for, and this will be a SPOILER so please DO NOT READ ON, but that nose; how did the nose survive a bullet and was still attached is beyond me.

I loved this movie, I loved how it was filmed; and it really gave such a different movie-going experience. It was ingenious.