Stream it now The Birds Reset Status Want to Watch Already Watched Don't Want to Watch

Terrific original film by Hitchcock. I love the scene at the schoolhouse as the birds congregate behind Tippi Hedren while the children sing that creepy song.

Make a caption for this pic. and win a prize!

Apparently I'm single because I'm completely oblivious to people hitting on me. My friend slapped me around for my stupidity while she pounded some jager, and I had a mountaineer on acid. (By "a" I of course mean several.)

Bar owner? Would have been a major score.
Really hot guy? Would have been a major score.

Dammit.

Pillow Talk (Gordon, 1959): B
"I've been married three times, and I still don't understand women." Or something like that.

The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963): B-
The several outstanding vignettes of thrillery and mood don't stitch together into the typical Hitchcockian thrust of inevitability that is usually so satisfying. Compounded by distasteful protagonists whose actions go beyond hysteria to sheer stupidity, the movie has a wee bit o' suckiness swimming around in it.

Dammit.

Probably the worst Hitchcock film I have seen yet. Special effects really look dated and I hated the ending. However, even with all of these criticisms I still enjoyed it in a B-movie way.

***/****

after taking this hitchcock class and seeing some of the films i hadn't seen, i would now venture to say that his three masterpieces are in fact Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds.



THE BIRDS (1963)

so much in this film below the surface level. it isn't merely about birds flccking together to destroy our world, rather the birds represent us and our destruction of ourselves. there is so much hidden meaning, it's fun to watch over and over and see what you can pick out.

Yesterday was a very long day. I went to class as normal and then I volunteered at PBS. It was so interesting. I did the usual boring stuff when you volunteer. Like stuff evelopes with flyers, but it was a good experience. I met this volunteer from a local Smooth Jazz station, she told me about how they are always looking for college interns and I should sign up. I thanked her kindly and will definetely proceed to do that. I mean why not!? I got nothing to lose.


Then early in the evening my grandmother and I spent 5 hrs, yeah thats right 5 hrs editing my article for Orlando Sentinels New Voice. We didn't spend that long because I am a horrible writer and my paper didn't have content, we spent that long because we wanted it to be perfect. It definetely is a good article. I will send it in soon. Afterwords , I just cried with pure exaustian. I litterally had an emotional breakdown. Just exausted and out of energy. I looked like a zombie.

Well Sunday night Laila and I chilled together. It was nice to just sit there and do nothing. lol. She belongs to the organization that I want to join and a year or two ago she went to a conference in Baltimore that was hosted by the organization. I saw some footage from it and it was really histerical. It got me more excited to join.

I rated my top 5 favorite emotional breakdown films. Lets put the strain on my top 5 favs. I am sure many of you have your own. Carrie because she lived with an abusive mother and had a physco outlook on life, The Birds because the people were being taunted by man eating birds who completely took over the town, Something' Gotta Give because Diane Keaton had a breakdown in her middle age of the 50s, Office Space because it was a humorous breakdown of a bunch of guys who disliked their job and finally Fahrenheit 9/11 because it was an emotional breakdown of the country. I don't care if the films had bad camera angels or there wasen't enough lighting on their damn faces. I went into those movies with an open mind and came out apprecaiting them even more.

The effects are fairly good for it's age. The film isn't really about the birds as much as it is about Mitch and the people in his life.

Not as good as Psycho.

Comments pending.

Mallrats: Con---It's Clerks in a different setting. Pro---It's Clerks in a different setting.

Ugh.

I love Hithcock and I'm ashamed I hadn't put as much effort as I should have in seeing one of his best known films, The Birds. For some reason it just never seemed like something I'd totally love, much like I felt about Psycho. I was wrong about both films, but the similarities continue. They lack the adventurous and fashionable plots of his classic peroid, but more than make up for it in pure thrills and frights. Taking simplistic plots that many would have made laughable, Hitchcock shapes thrillers of arguable depth and meaning. What do they mean, if anything? Just how do we get sucked into these movies? The bird attacks are horrific, but we can't look away. This is technical mastery of an artform at it's peak.

Once Melanie Daniels arrives in Bodega Bay a strange, unnatural string of bird attacks of increasing scale strike the town's residents. It's funny the damage one "bird" can do, the one played by Tippi Hendren. That is at least one way to look at the film, the birds being cold woman all pecking at one Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). His mother complex is a Hitch favorite, but it only serves to represent the depressed, distant nature of his widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) that is also evident in his ex-gal Annie Hayworth. They're all drawn to Mitch and no matter how much of his own life he wants to live he seems to keep makin himself available to all these women. In fact, Melanie drives up his sleepy bay town simply to play a practical joke on a man she hardly knows, but she too can't seem to leave his side. "Forces of Nature" you could say keep all these peole clashing back into one another, just as maybe the birds represent nature lashing back at a humanity who has taken it for granted. People hide in their boarded up homes, caged by birds instead of the other way around.

One could argue that with the decreasing star power of this film versus Hitch's other works would lead it to suffer. From everything I can see it matters little. The characters are meant to be bottled up and distant to play second fiddle to the technical brilliance of their feathered foes. The the visuals have not last an ounce of their effectiveness over 4 decades. The direction, editing, art/prodcution design and sound. Bernard Herrmann doesn't provide a traditional score, but instead an incredible, chilling sound collage of bird noises