Birdy (1984)

Absolutely amazing

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This is a wonderful character study of two friends throughout life.Al (Nicolas Cage) and Birdy (Matthew Modine) put in some great performances, to be expected by this point from Cage. Birdy wants to transcend his human experience and learn to fly. Cage humors his aspirations and wants to help his friend.Later on, the friends go through something neither can fully comprehend. (Vietnam War) The ramifications of the war weigh heavy on their heads.It's a tale about friendship, and what it means to be there for someone. Highly recommend.

I had great expectations for this Alan Parker movie that I have been meaning to watch for years. In my opinion, it is a classic that everybody should watch once but I also have mixed feelings about it. The plot is fairly simple. When 2 childhood friends come back from Vietnam among the casualties, one has lost it, the other is disfigured and will try to connect to his friend and bring him back from the crazies. In terms of harsh topics, Birdy is no testing ground for Parker. With this movie, the director deals with post-war mental and physical trauma as well as the struggle to fit in as a high schooler. On one hand, the combination of the Peter Gabriel-made soundtrack and the flying camera shots really convinced me. On the other, I thought it beats around the bush for quite a while. Nicolas Cage's monologues are a bit sketchy even though his overall performance is good. Matthew Modine makes a convincing quiet and deranged bird-lover. As I'm no war-movie enthusiast, I appreciate the fact that Birdy only shows a few war scenes. The plot is largely based on childhood flashbacks. Birdy is a good movie and I get satisfaction and personal pride to have watched it. 1 reason to watch: very few war scenesRead it here: http://squeerelist.blogspot.com/2013/06/birdy-1984.html

Imagine a movie where one of the main characters is highly annoying and inscrutable, and the other main character is average, boring and yet also inscrutable. Now imagine they're best friends even though the annoying one doesn't really seem to give a damn and the average one has no understandable reason for his apparent deep love for the annoying one. Throw in some facial bandages on Nic Cage (I guess they want to take his face off) and random scenes of animal abuse, you and you have Birdy. This movie is mostly charmless and pointless. Even the score, which was composed by Peter Gabriel, sounds like some rinker dink low talent crap. This score suits the movie, it's lame and unmemorable. I guess the music did sometimes bring a heightened tension to things; even though nothing would actually happened in a scene, the thudding drum beats still quickened my heart rate a little.I don't have many good things to say about Birdy. It was slightly interesting at points. Nic Cage did a fairly good job of delivering a relatively normal character, but the story gave the character so little motive or meaning. The ending could have been worse /Spoilers/ I actually liked that Birdy didn't "fly" to his death, even though that would have been a rather fitting way to end the character, it would have been depressing and just made the movie seem like an even bigger waste of time. /End Spoilers/Mainly this movie annoyed and bored me. I was unable to relate to much of anything. Certain animal scenes disturbed and troubled me. I don't feel there is much point to this movie. So unless you just like watching an obsessed birder get freaky or you just really want to see Nicolas Cage play what may be his most restrained role, I recommend you skip Birdy.

A special trip beyond masks and illusions, innocent lies and slippery politeness.A film about truth and its orations, about the honest manner to live and to trust, about the cruel relation with the past and about refuges.Fight against the Angel and image of world.The passages of memory and recreation of golden age.Exploration, with depressing flavor, of a fragile way, touching corpses of dreams, waiting and deconstructing old facts in a personal puzzle.It is not a film about pain, desire, war, mental illness or friendship. It is not a Vietnamese drama or film about birds."Birdy" is pledge for discover the sense of yourself. A beautiful trip in the nooks of innocence and appearances, a form of spell without magic lights.Birdy is Don Quixote ,prince Myshkin or Oblomov. The passion for birds is not a hobby or mask of frustrations but only manner to escape beyond an unintelligible universe.The interpretation of Modine is brilliant. And Nicholas Cage- great actor in the skin of a delicate character.Splendid film and object of profound reflection.In fact, instrument of catharsis.