movie night: birdman, or 'well that was a movie we have seen'

Most Saturday nights, after we put L to bed, The Boy and I watch a movie. They range pretty broadly -- on recent weekends we've seen Raya and the Last Dragon (loved it), Clue (very fun, although I kept weirdly expecting it to break into musical numbers), Knives Out (absolutely fabulous) and Twelve Monkeys (didn't really know wtf to make of it apart from feeling like I've now seen way too much of Bruce Willis' butt). Last Friday, The Boy suggested we watch The Lobster, which we've had an ongoing battle about pretty much ever since it came out. He wants to see it, I don't. In a last-ditch effort to avoid this movie, I brought up Birdman, which we'd discussed seeing before but never got around to. As I predicted, the promise of Michael Keaton playing a washed-up superhero actor trying to restart his career with a serious Broadway play was an effective distraction from a movie about a world where people decide what animal they're going to turn into when they... die? Something like that? I've never been totally clear.

To be clear, I have no good reason to avoid The Lobster as avidly as I have done, it's just that it sounds exactly like what happens whenever a literary fiction author takes into their head to write speculative fiction and then gets treated by every critic in the world as if they've just invented absolutely everything about science fiction, while anyone who's been reading the genre in the last decade or two (or three...) is like "...uh, yeah, that's been done a million times and also this book is super, deathly slow and has basically no plot."

Well, friends, let me tell you that I have reaped what I spent the last few years sowing, because it turns out, that's also basically what Birdman is. And it's not very fun.

( Rather pissy spoilers for a movie from 2014. )