Fr Stephen Wang reviews Birdman
Every now and then a film comes along that changes your understanding of what a film can be - Fr Stephen Wang writes in his blog the Jericho Tree. This was my experience in the Odeon Covent Garden last night. I spent most of the two hours of Birdman giggling with sheer delight at the technical and artistic audacity of the long-shots. Most of the film is presented as one unbroken shot, in some of the most complicated situations imaginable.
Of course there are hidden cuts; but even admitting that the hyper-long shot was an artifice, the real-long-shots that lay within the uber-shot of the whole film were dazzling. It's embarrassing enough when someone in the audience claps at the end of a film; I had to stop myself from clapping two or three times along the way because I couldn't quite believe they had pulled it off.
Read on here: http://jerichotree.com/2015/01/20/birdman/