The Big Year – 3

As a birder, I felt compelled to watch this film, to see what the rest of the world was learning about birding (although only two other people were in the theater with me). The good news is that “competitive birding” takes a big hit: it comes across as obsessive, unseemly and not a whole lot of fun. The bad news is that this is a terrible film, a waste of time were it not for the incidental pleasure one gets from movie-star-watching, in this case Jack Black, Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Rosamund Pike, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest. The actual scenes of birdwatching are, not surprisingly, given the cast, totally absurd. In fact, the only moment with which I identified found Steve Martin leaning nauseously on his backpack during a pelagic outing. When I first heard someone thought he could make a movie out of a competition to see birds I was dumbfounded. I still am.