Birder Movie Review!

I don't need to inform any possible reader of my bias toward this movie. That said, this is my happy place film. Make a movie about birding. Add Steve Martin and Jack Black to the two sides of a bromance over birding, and I'm in. Then include the tiny cowboy, Owen Wilson, whose personal past of depression and attempted suicide gives me a sense that his performance was part acting, part catharsis; and I'm experiencing this film like an afternoon at Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary in the Cleveland National Forest with a sandwich in one hand and a box of tissues in my lap.

Outside of the overt themes of the importance of friendship (however new), social integrity, family, and nature this movie bestows upon the winged of our earthen family the homage they deserve. 

Although this movie barely brushes against the cheek of migratory realities, majestic bird mating, and intricacies of speciation (those that inspired scientists such as Charles Darwin to change accepted explications about human origin), it provides an admirable springboard into reconnecting (or connecting) with nature for the tentative naturalist to the ADHD "bird watchers" among us, to cultivate their inner nature nerd/superhero.

As far as I was able to observe, the main element left out of this nature movie was that all too familiar ecologists viewpoint about the plight of our avian (and other non-human animal) pals - loss of habitat. As a native Californian the plight of the California Gnatcatcher comes to mind. Its classification as a threatened species is an illustration of human monocular vision. It's tiny frame and specialized existence is virtually unknown to most Californians. To use an art reference as metaphor, humans so interested in functionality zoom in on a small clump of colored dots in a Georges Seurat painting in an attempt to unravel the mystery of how impressionism works. In which case we overlook, who am I kidding, remain unmoved by the overall story. Never mind the necessity of a complex system of dots to form the "Luncheon on the Grass," rather we ponder how we can reproduce an art form that looks ripe for the mass production picking. To translate my weirdness, many of us go about our lives being big in our existence, looking only in detail at that which is in our lines of sight, at that which validates our personal existence without wondering how the rest of the world is doing. Maybe my single critique is to weird, but this is my response. 

So if you want to formulate your own opinion, watch the movie and tell me (or someone) what you think.

That is all.