“People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit” sneers Birdman, mocking his pathetic actor alias Riggan Thomson. This taunt, along with the dual title, delivers the integral tension of the movie; the age old battle of popularity vs. prestige, high culture vs. low culture, celebrity vs. artist. In the era of reality television and the Transformers franchise, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is the perfect meta-critical response, and, after all, Oxford students love ‘meta’. It poses behind its trailer as a popular action movie of the people, but in reality it is much more akin to the ‘talky philosophical bullshit’ that the subtitle suggests – offering its audience a taster of both movies, but surrendering its integrity to neither.

Riggan Thomson is a washed up actor, famed for his role as ‘Birdman’, trying to kick-start the twilight years of his career with a shot of artistic integrity, and so turns to Broadway. He attempts to adapt, star in, and direct Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. Whether this is brave or merely self-indulgent is something each character questions. The casting of the movie offers another layer of wry self-awareness. Riggan is played by 90’s Batman star Michael Keaton, a former superhero actor in his twilight years. His difficult but highly praised co-star Mike Shiner is played by difficult and highly praised Edward Norton, coincidentally (or not) also former superhero The Hulk. Riggan’s daughter, Sam, is portrayed by Emma Stone, of The Amazing Spiderman franchise– famed for coming out almost immediately after the Spiderman trilogy. Its miraculous success was due to capitalising on social media, updating its image and generally becoming more relevant. These are the very same qualities that Stone’s character attacks her father for lacking in her biting monologue, which criticises his egotistical attempt to shed Birdman and regain the respect of the people.

 Even the aesthetics of the film encapsulate the superhero-cum-super-arty vibe. There are no cuts between shots, and the film is made to look like one continuous take (done by Gravity’s Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki), a trajectory mirroring the vertigo-inspiring flight sequence of Birdman himself. There is a vibrant percussion score throughout, with occasional appearances from the drummer (Antonio Sanchez), who crops up often and just out of focus, slipping from extra-diagetic to diagetic (a la Mel Brooks’ Western parody Blazing Saddles). Whenever Birdman is reintroduced, it is marked with a dramatic, swooping Hollywood blockbuster number, interrupting the subtle drumming with, of course, an unsubtle superhero theme tune. Birdman is to the theatre what Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is to writing: so self-conscious of its own self-consciousness, both on and off stage, and both in front of and behind the camera. But this is also its charm.

The supporting cast are amazing. Ed Norton is a real scene-stealer despite his character being, at times, so blinded by his own arrogance and misogyny that it makes for uncomfortable viewing. Andrea Riseborough’s original and refreshing turn as Riggan’s younger girlfriend and co-star doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, nor does Amy Ryan playing the deeply poignant supportive ex-wife, or Lindsay Duncan’s dragon-like critic, who is seldom seen, but a resonant force. Russell Crowe’s recent comments show the damage done by failing to recognise and support parts for older women, whose careers struggle for longevity as it is, so it bothers me that Emma Stone has been receiving the most praise and nominations, even though I think her performance was the most lacking in nuance. She plays the troubled and stubborn teenager, which a stereotype both written and performed many times before, and often done better.  A couple of scenes in the film sit uneasily as well – such as Laura (Riseborough) and Lesley’s (Watts) moment of vulnerable solidarity in the dressing room, which leads into an arbitrary lesbian kiss. It is never explained or explored, which is a shame, as it becomes reduced to mere voyeurism, rather than an honest interaction.

The titan of the film is naturally Keaton. He stated in an interview, “I probably relate less to this character than anyone I’ve ever done… that’s the irony”, but one cannot help feel deeply invested in his comeback, as well as Riggan’s. The line between Keaton and Riggan, as well as Riggan’s imagination and his reality, becomes increasingly blurred. Riggan smashes up his dressing room with superhuman rage, but when his lawyer Jake (Zach Galifanikis) walks in, and intrudes on his fantasy, we are shown a pathetic, aging man throwing a tantrum. He oscillates between headstrong and passionate, to crumbling and fragile. When he walks down a street in New York, with Macbeth’s soliloquy being shouted in the background by a gravelly-voiced homeless man, one wonders whether his stunt will pay off, or if he too is on a tragic downward spiral of ego and ambition. But the film never answers this. On every matter – Riggan’s sanity, the morality of each character, the ideals of fame – the film is ambiguous, and offers us no answers. Having been made painstakingly aware of our role as the critic, we are forced to conceive our own.

★★★☆☆
Three stars

On the surface, The Theory of Everything ticks a lot of boxes for forthcoming success in the movie awards season: an able-bodied actor playing a disabled character, a plot about an underdog who succeeds in the face of all the odds, a personal drama flecked with existential questions about creation and the nature of the universe. It’s a truly exotic mixture of domestic turmoil, the acute reality of disability and supernovas.

The film charts the remarkable life of Professor Stephen Hawking, the physicist known for his pioneering theories about the universe’s origins and his lifelong battle against motor neurone disease. Constructed as a chronological tale that follows Hawking from his days as an awkward Cambridge graduate through to international scientific superstar, the plot covers in equal measure his personal battles. It not only covers Hawking’s attempts to prove a diagnosis of a two year life expectancy wrong, but also the struggles his wife confronts in the face of a husband who is physically degenerating.

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The film is foremost a performance-driven piece, and these struggles between husband and wife are brought to life by the captivating central performances of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Jones brings tremendous emotional credibility to the character of Jane Hawking, who is burdened with the realities of her husband’s burgeoning success. Whilst Stephen enjoys worldwide academic acclaim, Jane is confronted with the mundane exigencies of everyday life: clothing, washing, feeding and caring for a husband in a worsening physical state. Caught between an inescapable sense of hopelessness and the perpetual drive to see Stephen carry on, Jones brilliantly and subtly captures the role of a woman whose life becomes dominated by her spouse.

Of course, Redmayne’s towering portrayal is the film’s central talking point, and it is joyous, in parts, to watch. Throughout, the uncanniness of Redmayne’s performance is striking, from the physical twitches, to the facial contortions, down to eye movements and blinks. It is a performance driven by nuance, which never strays into parody, gratuity or distaste. Yet, it is the earlier scenes, of Stephen as a still able-bodied graduate in Cambridge that were the most entrancing. There was something particularly magical about viewing a side of Stephen Hawking none of us would ever have seen or even imagined him as – a socially clumsy, fantastically intelligent and charming university student. Factual accuracy aside, Redmayne perfectly captures an imagined version of Hawking in his youth, and those scenes in Cambridge towards the beginning of the film were by far the most enthralling.

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Yet, there was something deeply incongruous about these brilliant central performances and the film’s numerous flaws. For one, though the performances bring tremendous emotional clout to the personal side of Hawking’s life, the script dumbs down his scientific achievements to a gallingly infantile degree. If there were more than four sentences describing what major breakthroughs in physics Hawking pioneered, I would be surprised. I understand his work to be immensely complex, but I entirely doubt his leading theoretical work about radiation emitted by a black hole is best explained by drawing a spiral in beer foam on a pub table.

Equally, for a film that attempts to chart an enormous, perhaps too large, chunk of Hawking’s life, scenes meant to symbolise the passing of time were done remarkably ineffectually. The montages disguised as vintage home-movie clips, shot in an almost Instragram-filter-esque homage to 1980’s handheld camcorder footage, were particularly naff and felt deeply out of place with the rest of the film’s beautiful, and measured, cinematography. The all-too-frequent use of these scarcely disguised sequences only served to highlight that the script couldn’t tackle so much of a very eventful life.

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Moreover, the script quickly became formulaic, with these passing-of-time moments often used to break up the repeated sequence of academic advance tarnished by a personal setback. Whether that was Stephen gaining a PhD, yet simultaneously resigning himself to life in a wheelchair, or the publishing of A Brief History of Time, set against him contracting pneumonia and subsequently losing the ability to speak, the script was cyclical to the point of tedium.

And although these personal dramas were effectively realised, it was hard to feel compassion for Jane in these moments. Though acted well by Jones, Jane as a character came across as perpetually frigid and dislikeable; hardly the sympathy-inducing persona the film was trying to fit her into. Equally, her falling in love with family-friend-turned-assistant-carer Jonathan was rendered so blandly that it was hard to feel anything at all for either of them, besides a sense of curiosity as to why the film had dedicated so much time to that side story.

When compared to that other cinematic depiction of genius out at the moment, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything is the better film. It is more nuanced in its central depiction, more emotionally evocative without straying into crass sentimentality and far more carefully constructed. Yet, both films suffer from the exact same flaw; inadequate scripts that only serve to impair truly remarkable acting performances.

★★★★★

Five stars

Artists, who were once revolutionary and subversive in their time, seem to lose their edge upon acceptance into the canon. Not so with Egon Schiele. As far as this country is concerned, perhaps Schiele hasn’t even made it into the canon. Indeed, the recent retrospective at the Courtauld gallery in London elicited such a mix of reactions that it seems the artist’s radical, shocking and uncompromising work remains as disputed as ever. Time Out’s Martin Coomer stated bluntly, “With Schiele there is no poetry,” whereas the Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschlager not only dubbed the show the work of an arrested genius but also one of London’s best exhibitions in 2014. 

Either side of this divide, the issue of how to approach Schiele’s sometimes aggressive and disturbing exposition of sexuality features prominently. The conservatives see his work as yet another expiation of obscenity and perversion, foisted upon us by the regrettable tendencies of so-called modern ‘art’. Another approach simply dismisses Schiele as a morbid, promiscuous exhibitionist whose theatrical voyeurism is little more than an adolescent vanity project. But the believers among us see Schiele as a groundbreaking visionary whose works, unnerving as they can be, represent a revolution in the understanding and depiction of sexuality. Whichever side of the debate you fall, this exhibition has to be praised for giving fair representation of everything, from the most “acceptable” to the most provocative. 

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For me some of Schiele’s most affecting works, are the most difficult to process. In haunting self-portraits, such as ‘Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth,’ Schiele depicts himself naked in arresting contortions, coloured in sickly pallid tones. These paintings do not merely show angst, they portray an angst that reaches out a sickly hand and drags you into its horror. Then there are the unnervingly sensual nudes – ‘Mother and Child,’ for example, is pictured in full oedipal transgression and the undeniable eroticism of the figure sits uncomfortably with the incestuous setting in which it appears. Perhaps it’s becoming clear why ‘Schiele, the radical nude’ is the first ever-major Schiele exhibition in Britain.

The acuity of the effect also owes much to the thinking behind the arrangement. Following a broadly chronological pattern, we trace some of the early works before the war in preparation for a large, second room in which we see the artist in full maturity. What makes the arrangement so compelling is how curator Barnaby Wright shows a dissonance between the form and content in Schiele’s work. For example, the first series of paintings were primarily solitary female nudes. Yet stylistically they felt very different; some of them highlighted Schiele’s very particular reverence for the female form, fetishizing curves in sensuous poses. Others depicted the same subject with a radically different effect – not erotic but graphic, even grotesque. Yet they were in many ways identical to the previous portraits. This careful design of the exhibition very cleverly used Schiele’s dynamism, to make the viewing experience consistently intriguing and surprising.

In addition to Schiele’s expressive range, the exhibition highlights his immense technical ability. Peer closely and you find a calculated method in the madness. For example, look at the precision of Schiele’s brushwork. His lines are at once strikingly bold and incisive, yet always conveying a hazy dreamlike effect that makes his pictures feel like part of a hallucination. There is also a subtle beauty in his composition with colour. His palette is for the most part confined to shades of red and orange, yet paradoxically, this restriction is what makes his work so expressive and lyrical. Indeed, the subtle mixtures and layering of tones create some truly beautiful combinations. It is also undeniable that Schiele is a virtuoso of figurative painting. As unpleasant as his deformed specimens are, they show an exceptional ability in execution and conception.

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In short, if not for pure curiosity, or even the opportunity to have a good grumble, I would seriously recommend you take a look at this exhibition. See on which side of the divide it will cast you, unlike much contemporary art, it will cast you on one side or the other. Schiele’s liminal status in the canon, reminds us that before the platitudes of later critics, the work of the great painters was never as easy to deal with as the art books now suggest. In this regard, this exhibtion gives us a sense of history as it was in its moment. Even now the startling nature of Schiele’s work conveys the radicalism and vitality with which his generation changed the art world.  

“Schiele: The Radical Nude” is showing at the Courtauld in Somerset House until the 18th of January 2015. 

After threats by the North Korean affiliated organisation the Guardians of Peace and the cancelling of the New York première, followed by the decisions of major cinema chains in the US not to screen the movie, it was looking unlikely that The Interview would ever be released. The international situation has been discussed by people as varied as President Obama, who criticised the decision by Sony Pictures to cancel the release of the film (In typical fashion, Fox News incorrectly reported that Obama had banned the movie in the US), to Dr Evil, who made a welcome return on SNL. Finally, on midnight of Christmas Eve, the movie was finally released online in the United States, and it was rolled out to cinemas later that day.

Written by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Dan Sterling, The Interview follows Dave Skylark (James Franco), host of the talk show Skylark Tonight, and Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen), the producer of the show. The talk show is vapid and focuses on celebrity gossip, much like if the gossip column of the Daily Mail took the form of a show. The movie begins with Dave interviewing Eminem, who is defending his controversial new lyrics about hating old people. It’s all strong satire and really funny, because this is what Rogen and Franco do best – This Is The End was just an entire movie of celebrities portraying themselves and lampooning American pop culture (but mostly themselves). Despite the popularity of the show, Aaron has high ambitions to do “real journalism” and make the show more serious, which can’t be achieved by reporting that Matthew McConaughey has just had sex with a goat or featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt stroking a group of cats (I must protest that an hour of watching him stroke cats is an excellent idea for a programme).

It is here that we find out that Kim Jong-un is a big fan of American TV, specifically the Big Bang Theory and Skylark Tonight. Well, there’s no accounting for taste. However this fortunate piece of news about Kim’s poor viewing habits leads Aaron to an idea – perhaps they can make the programme more reputable by conducing a serious interview with the elusive supreme leader of North Korea. Dave is interested: maybe Ron Howard will make a movie about them in the future, a reference to Frost/Nixon, an excellent film on the landmark interviews of 1977. The initial premise of The Interview can certainly be compared to Frost/Nixon: lightweight talk show host plans to conduct a serious political interview with an elusive leader (or ex-leader). However, this is not a Ron Howard movie. After some obligatory slow-mo frat party dancing to celebrate, a scene which is in every single Rogen and Franco film, they are contacted by the CIA. Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) asks them to use this interview opportunity to “take out” Kim Jong-un. Cue extended scene of Aaron and Dave misunderstanding “take out”. Oh, to a party? Nearly every joke in this movie, no matter how funny, overstays its welcome. This is one of them.

Aaron and Dave fly to North Korea to meet Kim Jong-un (Randall Park). Dave and Kim get on famously, bonding over their love of margaritas and Katy Perry. Randall Park is great and a highlight of the movie. Whereas the rest of the film was filled with the usual hit-and-miss innuendos, dick jokes, and bad accents common to Rogen/Franco films (after their collaborations on Pineapple Express, This Is The End and the homoerotic Bound 2 parody I feel compelled to refer to them as a single entity), the depiction of the pop-loving crazy Kim Jong-un is actually pretty funny.

It’s a shame that there has been so much media attention on what is essentially a mediocre comedy. It never reaches the comedic heights of the Rogen and Goldberg scripted Superbad. There are some great characters, such as Sook (Diana Bang), a North Korean head of propaganda, and Kim Jong-un himself, but unfortunately the main characters, especially Franco’s smug Dave Skylark, are generally unlikable. There is also reliance on repeating the same juvenile jokes throughout the film, most of which fall flat. Let’s not pretend that this film was making a political statement. It’s not. It chose Kim Jong-un to lampoon, but none of the parody or comedy is political in nature. There is a very naive assessment of the political situation, just used as a foundation for Rogen/Franco to lay all their Lord of the Rings references and penis jokes on. Perhaps the best aspect of the film was the fascinating and embarrassing emails leaked from studio executives at Sony Pictures, as a result of cyberhacking in response to the film. However, putting all the degradation of international relations and the emails about Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio aside, and reviewing it as just an ordinary film, it is simply a mediocre comedy. It is what I’ve come to expect from Rogen and Franco in recent years, which is a shame, since they’ve done some great things in the past. I expected casual misogyny, extensive innuendos, jokes that go on for too long, bad accents and celebrity cameos. Sadly, I got exactly what I expected.