Popularity is a slutty little cousin of prestige

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) - Iñárritu

A movie as a spectacle, Birdman is a virtuosic experience - technically brilliant and much more sophisticated than action hero franchises it makes fun of. But at the same time, the whole premise is as light as a feather, its comments on Hollywood and its narcissistic actors are emotionally and intellectually hollow. As much as I love Michael Keaton, who commands most of the screen time, his Keatonness is buried deep in meta-ness of the film premise and so never gets to shine. It's as if he is going through the routine of a hamster in a cage, just like the film's universe - one block radius möbius strip trip from and to an unnamed Manhattan theater in the Theater District near Times Square.

Ed Norton gets to play the more interesting part as Mike, a Brando-esque nihilistic actor who comes in to the troupe the day before the theater opens for the preview. Yet he is not written as a one dimensional character, so as other characters. There is much humanity to be found in characters and everyone's terrific acting-wise, from Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Amy Ryan, Andrea Riseborough, Lindsay Duncan to even Zach Galifianakis. But there is not enough time to explore them all. Birdman wants to be many things- it wants to be a Robert Altman film (Raymond Carver connection too obvious?), but only half-heartedly. It never succeeds as those it aims for. It's a fun film that never stops. But it's not a great film.

Back from the Dead

The Revenant (2015) - Iñárritu

In the tradition of ambitious, bravura, excessive filmmaking, Alejandro G. Iñárritu goes there with The Revenant and achieves Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo worthy greatness. It's an unsentimental, relentlessly brutal, macho filmmaking that will undoubtedly turn a lot of viewers off. But I loved it. It concerns fur trapper/guide Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) leading a cavalry of men in felt business to safety through the snowy and hostile western territory in 1800s. Because Glass has a half-breed, teenage Pawnee Indian son named Hawk and the group reeling after a vicious large scale Indian attack, the tension rises among the crew, especially from Fitzerald (Tom Hardy) an unsavory character who'd fuck over anyone standing in his way and his share of the profit. After the horrendous bear attack that leaves Glass almost dead, the captain of the cavalry (Domhnal Gleeson) orders (with the promise of large rewards) Fitzerald and young Bridger (Will Poulter) to care for Glass and Hawk and give Glass a proper Christian burial when the time comes, and leaves them behind to catch up later.

For the next two hours, The Revenant becomes a harrowing tale of survival and a revenge story. It's an amazing feat for DiCaprio, finally shedding all remnants of youth for the first time in my eyes, crawls the snowy earth, then dove right into the freezing roiling water, eats raw meat and fish, trek and climb the snowy Rockies with his bare hands. He is a live-action Wiley Coyote - he gets mauled, buried alive, almost drowned, thrown off the cliff, and so on and so on. He even uses a dead horse as a shelter, Empire Strikes Back style. Tom Hardy is perfect as a villain with his shifty gaze and mumbling.

Emmanuel Lubezki's only natural lit cinematography doesn't really chart anything new here, but the look and feel of The Revenant is polar opposite from Malick's The New World. And I am very glad that I decided to see the film in theaters. There are some blissfully beautiful shots in Glass's flashbacks/dreams of his dead Indian wife floating over him, but most of the time, the film is all dirt, mud, snot, wet felt and blood. And in its own way, it's spectacularly beautiful.