Awesome / Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

• Riggan punching Mike in the face.
  • And right before that, he approaches Mike and demonstrates some genuine respectable acting skills by feeding him a story about how his father used to beat him as a child before revealing that he made the whole thing up just to see if Mike would buy it.
  • Mike doesn't take well to either and promptly puts Riggan in a choke hold, leading the latter to squirm out and march off in a huff while Mike goads him with a shoe.
• The Birdman hallucinations that Riggan experiences right before he regains his confidence, resulting in him jumping off a building and going on a beautifully operative and poetic flight through New York. Whether or not it actually happened, it was still awesome.
  • One particularly awesome hallucination has Birdman trying to convince Riggan to come back to mindless blockbusters to attract money and fame again. Riggan snaps his fingers and a war scene suddenly erupts in the streets with explosions, soldiers getting shot, military helicopters and a giant mechanical bird causing mayhem, with Birdman casually sending it a laser beam with his watch.
• Riggan manages to break his critic's promise of a scathing review by giving the most shocking conclusion to his play.
• Riggan's particularly epic and deserved "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards Tabitha. Not only is it highly rewarding to see that witch get what she deserve, especially after she flat out said she's gonna trash his play for no other reason than bias, it's also a very awesome Take That! towards Critics who come in to a product and trash it for anything but the fact that it actually isn't good.
  • It also contains a nice jab at those who use Purple Prose and labels in their reviews to disguise the fact that they're not really critiquing anything that's important like structure, technicality, skills, etc.
    Riggan: Wow. You know... What has to happen in a person's life to become a critic anyway? What are you writing, another review? Huh? Is that any good? Is it? Is it bad? Did you even see this? Let me read it... "Callow." Callow is a label. It's just... "Lackluster." That's just a labels. "Margin"... "marginalia". Are you kidding me? Sounds like you need penicillin to clear that up. That's a label too. These are all just labels. You just label everything. That's so fuckin' lazy... You just... You're a lazy fucker. You're a lazy...(grabs a flower) You know what this is? You even know what that is? You don't, You know why? Because you can't see this thing if you don't have to label it. You mistake all those little noises in your head for true knowledge.
    Tabitha: Are you finished?
    Riggan: No, I'm not finished! There's nothing here about technique! There's nothing in here about structure! There's nothing in here about intentions! It's just a bunch of crappy opinions, backed up by even crappier comparisons. You write a couple of paragraphs and you know what? None of this cost you fuckin' anything! The Fuck! You risk nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! I'm a fucking actor! (Beat) This play cost me everything... So I tell you what, you take this fucking malicious, cowardly, shittily-written review and you shove that right the fuck up your wrinkly tight ass.
  • One could also take that as a jab to internet critics who trash films just for the sake of nitpicking rather than putting any thought behind why they dislike a film.
• Tabitha's own "The Reason You Suck" Speech at Riggan works just the same.

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