Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread III

[kihei]

The Forbidden Room (2015) Directed by Guy Madden

After an opening sequence in which we learn how to take a bath, we are introduced to a submarine crew of four who are desperate. They can’t resurface without the ship exploding because of some strange jelly they are carrying on board and they have somehow lost their captain who is nowhere to be found. They eat pancakes because they think they contain air bubbles that will help them double their waning oxygen supply. As if this isn’t perplexing enough, a woodsman dressed as a lumberjack appears--who no one has ever seen before. Where did he come from and how did he get there? No one knows, least of all the lumberjack. He was on a mission to save Margot, a damsel in distress, from the Red Wolf gang, a forest-dwelling collection of bad hombres that live in a cave with a pink centre. He begins to tell the sailors about his story and that leads to another story and another story within that story and on and on, all of them weirder and more surreal than the last. We are introduced to a jungle vampire, a brain extraction, avenging skeletons, a devil on a train to Bogota, strange bone crunching operations, windmills, farms, volcano (spelled “valcano”) justice, squid thieves, a man with stones on his feet, a missing boar’s head, a statue of Janus, a strange creature called Lug Lug, a birthday penthouse, and to top it off, an index of all kinds of different possible climaxes, pick the one that suits you. None of any this makes sense and it is all photographed in a manner that recall silent film serials gone berserk. The images seem liquid; they melt and swirl and distort and disintegrate and reconfigure. Everything about the movie is strange beyond belief, but The Forbidden Room keeps going on in this fanciful vein from start to finish. The movie has the look and feel of a silent film directed by a mad man with help from Salvador Dali, Dr. Caligari, and Bela Lugosi, an incomprehensible dream gone majestically haywire. There are also some nice erotic bits and the overall effect is quite playful. There is nothing quite like this movie because there is no director quite like Guy Madden.

Guy Madden is a director from Winnipeg and maybe the most successful experimental film maker in the world. He has received the Order of Canada for his work, our highest civilian honour, our equivalent to a knighthood. His career includes a host of highly imaginative, beautifully photographed and constructed, unabashedly strange and mysterious works that show an imagination and sensibility like no other in cinema. His brand of avant garde strangeness covers a lot of different territory; Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is based upon a ballet; My Winnipeg is a decidedly oddball documentary about Madden’s hometown; Brand upon the Brain is something of an odd reminiscence and an homage to German Expressionism; and so on. Though the style is always “out there,” he never repeats himself in terms of subject matter or genre predictability.

For sure, Madden is an acquired taste. Not everybody is going to find his work appealing. I’m a fan, though, and I am really glad that he is out there. He constantly surprises me and although I never have a clue what rabbit he will pull out of his hat next, I am never less than engaged and entertained by what he comes up with. I suppose one could call his work an example of art for art’s sake, but I fail to see why that is not a very good thing

 

[kihei]

My next pick will Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela. Available on the Criterion Channel.

 

[nameless1]

The Forbidden Room is an experience. I nodded off a few times, but I feel like I went on an odyssey when I watched it. The narrative is messy, as expected from an experimental type of work, but somehow, it comes full circle in the end. My favourite part of the work is the eclectic group of performers. There were some blast from the past, but it was great to see them on film again, even if it was a brief second or two.

 

[nameless1]

Also, it is great that you guys decided to watch An Elephant Sitting Still. It is long, but I am so absorbed by the story, that I am not bothered by it. Also, every part is important, so there really is nothing that can be cut.

 

[Jevo]

The Forbidden Room (2015) dir. Guy Maddin

A submarine crew is trapped under water with a volatile cargo that will explode if they resurface, and their own oxygen is running out. A mysterious woodsman appears in the submarine, and they interpret him as a possible saviour. Like a series of russian nesting dolls the film jumps from interconnected story to interconnected story, going deeper and deeper into the web of stories, sometimes resurfacing again in stories in higher layers, only to dive into a new set of stories again.

The Forbidden Room is an interesting film if you are looking for an exercise in writing and editing. It is no doubt an innovative piece in terms of story structure, and it is very well put together. The movie is generally inspired by lost films, and the visuals of the film show that, since the film has made to look like old damaged film stock.

Guy Maddin fans will no doubt love The Forbidden Room. People who are not fans of Guy Maddin perhaps not so much. You have to be ready for this weird web of stories that don't quite makes sense at first, and perhaps don't really make much sense at the end either. But this is the type of film where the journey is more important than the destination.

Films like The Forbidden Room can be really hit and miss, for me this was a miss. Maybe because I wasn't really in the mood for this type of film a thursday evening. Either way I just couldn't get into it and the get interested in the story structure to keep up with it, and then it's just a long slog to get through. But visually it looks good, and I appreciate it as an exercise in writing and editing. It was no doubt a lot of work to put this thing together in a coherent manner, both on paper and in the editing room.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

The Forbidden Room
Maddin (2015)
“Why all these flapjacks?”

A Matryoshka doll of a movie. Dreams within dreams. Or maybe nightmares within nightmares. Or dreams within nightmares. Or vice-versa. A man tells a story. Within that story a charcter has a dream, etc. Repeat. Reframe. Submarines. Cavemen. Skeletal insurance defrauders. Squid theft. Udo Kier. A montage of climaxes that itself literally includes an exploding brain. Then everything circles back to the beginning. I need a bath. Not because I feel unclean, but because the advice about bathing was so effective. Like when you watch a Thin Man movie and instinctively want a drink. The power of movies!

The backstory I read was that Maddin and his co-writer took synopsises of lost early movies and set out to recreate them and join them together in this weird, rollicking venture. It’s an experiment. What I didn’t expect was how entertaining it was. It’s the filmic equivalent to the Exquisite Corpse game or maybe an improv bit asking “Yes, and …” and spinning into a new direction.

This is Tim & Eric and David Lynch teaming up to make a movie for MOMA members. Widly absurd. A mixing of ridculous (and often very funny) dialogue with images that sometime veer into creepy and disturbing. This might actually play as horror for long parts were it silent. There is nightmare logic and energy at play.

It’s a technical feat for Maddin who films, edits and crafts the demented vignettes with a clear understanding and affinity for the old ways and styles. I particularly liked the damaged film stock look to the whole thing. It’s too ridiculous to present itself as anything other than modern, but I loved that old veneer from the FX to the broad acting to the pips and pops and visual grain. This is the type of project that feels both like a labor of love and a fun shoot and that comes through in the finished project. Hard not to believe every actor in this didn’t have a grand time mugging in the old ways.

All of this said, for as much as I broadly enjoyed this trip, the two-hour run time began to drag on me a little. I suppose that factors into its dream/nightmare nature. You can’t really escape it. But I can’t help but wonder if the this would have been even more effective at a more efficent 90-100 minutes? How ungrateful do I sound?

 

[Pink Mist]

The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, 2015)

A little bit off the top

An absurd film that is almost impossible to provide a plot description for without sounding like a fever dream. And that’s partly because the film feels like a complete fever dream. The basic premise of the film is that we learn how to take a bath from a man in a bathrobe – err nope – that there’s a submarine transporting explosive jelly whose crew is asphyxiating and they can only survive off the air bubbles in pancakes – sorry I’ll try again – that a lumberjack (or rather, “sapling-jack” because he’s a novice) must save a damsel in distress from a gang of wolfmen through a series of trials like offal piling. Well that’s just the first 15 minutes or so as before the film continues to drift characters into other equally absurd vignettes and short stories that involve female skeletons, a two faced Janus statue, and a devil on a train somewhere between Bogota and Berlin.

Does the story make sense? Absolutely not. But it is not meant to. Maddin and Johnson’s story was inspired by reading the plot summaries and reviews for lost or abandoned films up until the early 1930s. They then took those summaries and conceptualized how they could make those lost stories as absurd as possible. The entire film is shot in the style of late 1920s and early 1930s films around the transition from silent films to talkies and is edited to look like the film was misplaced or previously lost with added grain and intentionally poor transfers and markings on the film.

The first time I watched this film it was around when it came out and I wasn’t huge on it, but since then I have watched a lot more films from the era that they are trying to replicate and it really helped my appreciation. The film definitely does test your patience as it is an experimental and absurd work and is really one of those films that you just need to strap in for the ride with rather than search for immediate meaning and understanding, but patient viewers will be rewarded with a unique and engaging film experience and a great mix of fantasy and comedy. The short stories don’t always work for me and the film runs a little too long and it becomes a little exhausting by the end of the film, but overall it is a captivating work.

The film has a large ensemble cast is a bit of a who’s who of Canadian, cult/b-movies, and international cinema with actors such as Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlotte Rampling, and Udo Kier who all make brief appearances at some point. My favourite vignette is a song segment performed by Sparks and starring Udo Kier in which Udo is obsessed with women’s asses and needs to get his brain scraped by a surgeon to stop his uncontrollable lust for ass (appropriately called Final Derriere).

 

[Pink Mist]

This is Tim & Eric and David Lynch teaming up to make a movie for MOMA members.

That's a really great line. I was wondering why it seemed familiar when I was reading your review and then I realized I had read that line last night when I was browsing through letterboxd after watching the film. I must have stumbled upon your letterboxd account

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

That's a really great line. I was wondering why it seemed familiar when I was reading your review and then I realized I had read that line last night when I was browsing through letterboxd after watching the film. I must have stumbled upon your letterboxd account

That's funny. Yep. I do double dip with my opinions on both sites. BUSTED.

That bathing bit in this really could be straight from Tim & Eric with almost no changes.

 

[Pink Mist]

That's funny. Yep. I do double dip with my opinions on both sites. BUSTED.

That bathing bit in this really could be straight from Tim & Eric with almost no changes.

Don't worry I double dip too. Though I more or less copy and paste the reviews

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Don't worry I double dip too. Though I more or less copy and paste the reviews

I usually go a little longer here (because I do all my letterboxd from my phone so I don't want to type that much). But I definitely repeat a few lines and core ideas.

No pressure, but friend me if you like. Not to make it weird.
(Though I end up chatting about 90% of what I watch here anyway so it's probably redundant).

 

[Jevo]

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) dir. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

Llewyn Davis is a folk singer in New York in the early 60s hoping to make it big. He doesn't have a place to live, so moves around from couch to couch on rotation when the friends he's staying with at that time grow tired of him. Inside Llewyn Davis follows Llewyn through a week of his life.

It's often said in sports that you make your own luck. Llewyn Davis is the type of person who makes his own misfortune. To put it bluntly he's not a nice person. He has no qualms about using people for his own gain. He's arrogant. He looks down on people he doesn't deem as good as him musically, and he utters those thoughts as well. The whole movie is him jumping from misfortune to misfortune. And almost every time he has a chance to right the ship, but he always does something to make it worse for himself. He's generally unlikeable and doesn't seem like a man you want to be around for very long. But luckily the Coen brothers have a way of making unlikeable people into entertaining characters. And while Inside Llewyn Davis is more subdued than some of their more outright satirical works, they still make Llewyn Davis an interesting person to follow in this movie. Oscar Isaac does more than his fair share and gives Llewyn Davis more charm than he probably deserves. But enough that you see why people are apparently willing to let him back onto their couch despite having been thrown out before. The movie even manages to make you feel a bit bad for him in Chicago when he gets told he sucks less than two minutes after getting in front of the producer, after having spent two days in a car being insulted by John Goodman from the back seat. At first the rejection doesn't even seem to faze him, like a kid who keeps running despite falling down. But it does make him grow more cynical, and he was a big cynic already. Probably a result of his musical partner comitting suicide, apparently from the wrong bridge according to John Goodman. At first in the film it is not readily apparent that he is carrying this grief, but it slowly becomes clear, and it becomes a sort of explanation for some of the way that he is acting. Not all of it though, the glimpses we get into his life before the suicide shows he wasn't an angel back then either. Is Lleweyn Davis a more unlucky Bob Dylan, or a less talented Bob Dylan? Well...

In my opinion Llewyn Davis is Oscar Issac's best performance. He's fantastic, he brings so much to Llewyn Davis, in a very tough role, where so much of the movie depends on him. We don't have to like Lleweyn Davis, but we can't hate him. And Isaac plays the role to perfection. He's such a pleasure to watch.

For me Inside Llewyn Davis ranks among the best of the Coen Brothers films. I don't they've ever made a character study better than this, and it still has elements of their usual wacky characters, but is generally much more subdued than most of their other films.

 

[Jevo]

My next pick is partially inspired The Forbidden Room's use of silent film and damaged film stock aesthetics: Dawson City: Frozen Time

 

[Pink Mist]

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a couch surfing folk singer in Greenwich Village’s emerging folk music scene in the early 60s. Llewyn can’t catch a break and struggles to make ends meet, though mostly by no one’s fault but his own due to his thorny attitude and outspokenness which polarizes him from others. He’s always using people for his own gain and he’s not afraid to look down on people and tell them he thinks their music is shit despite his own lack of success. Although Llewyn is a miserable person who is hard to be around, he’s never miserable to watch on screen as a viewer. Isaac injects just enough charm into Llewyn’s character to understand why people keep giving him breaks and second or third chances that he doesn’t really deserve, even if it is in the form of just a couch to crash on for a night or two. But at this point Llewyn has clearly exhausted much of his support system and most of them are pretty fed up with his schtick. It’s hard to tell if he could have been successful or not because he’s his own worst enemy who is preventing himself from the opportunity for success, just one small illustrative example of that is relinquishing royalties for a song he helped record as a session musician because he needed immediate money to pay for an abortion for a friend he impregnated who hates his guts (but even she’ll still let him crash in his apartment, albeit on the floor not the couch).

Inside Llewyn Davis is a fantastic character study and brilliantly played by Oscar Isaac. I rate it among the Coen Brothers’ best work.

 

[kihei]

Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) Cohen brothers

No question Inside Llewyn Davis is a good movie. It is well directed, well acted and contains frequent examples of quiet, intelligent, edgy, rueful-smile humour. The film cannot be faulted on any technical level. I am left with a big question, though: why did the Cohen brothers think audiences would be drawn to this guy, Llewyn? Oscar Isaac does a wonderful job of not letting Llewyn become too unlikeable. But nonetheless the character is just very hard to be around. It almost seems an act of perverse mischief to inflict this guy on viewers. Some speculate the Llewyn is based on the life of minor league coffee-house folk singer Dave Van Ronk. But who cares about Dave Van Ronk anymore? The Cohens do like to challenge their audience and maybe this was an exercize of that nature. A similar kind of humour, more obvious and more self-consciously black, was used in regard to another less than attractive shmuck of a character in A Serious Man a few years earlier. Perhaps, the brothers thought the Job-like Larry was just too obvious. Maybe they wanted to push the humour into an even more rarefied space. So we get a more slyly subversive take on a far less sympathetic character than Larry in A Serious Man.

The Cohens equivalent in rock music would be Steely Dan. Steely Dan made thoughtful, complex rock music, occassionally playing around with tricky modal forms in a way that challenged their listeners to come along with them for the ride. Nonetheless, they always knew where to draw the line. And their fans did follow because however far out the band got, the music still sounded good. A lot of the Cohens movie require a similar degree of trust and effort from their fans--in fact most of us expect them to go down a different path, to make us work a little. We like it; its part of their attraction. But when they miss as they partly do here and in Burn After Reading or badly miss as in Hail Caesar! then they really appear to be more snootily self-indulgent than cleverly idiosyncratic. That's the thing, though, with artists--you have to take the good with the bad. That's the nature of the risk involved when dealing with film makers as gifted as these two,

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Inside Llewyn Davis
Coen (2013)
“Fare the well, my honey, fare the well …”

The misadventures of a misanthropic folk singer potentially on the cusp of soemthing bigger.

I mentioned this a few months back in a mini-write-up about Burn After Reading. I once read a piece about the Coen’s that divided their filmography into three distinct pots — crime/western, goofy comedy and character studies. I really need to track down that source. This is squarely in the latter. As with Barton Fink or A Serious Man before it, the Coen’s concieve a man and put that man through a very tailored sort of hell. The degree to which that hell is self inflicted versus cosmic circumstance varies. Many of Llewyn’s issues are self-inflicted.

We’re so used to stories of over coming the odds to achieve great success and conversely wrecking ones life and destroying all that achieved success (often in the same, dull movies). And then often rebounding yet again in some way. Triumph and tragedy. Here there’s not much of either. This is a bio of a never was, a man not humbled by any grand occurance (exactly), but rather his own mix of stubborn pride and an inability to not metaphorically step on his own dick. King Midas’ Idiot Brother is not an inaccurate nickname. Llewyn hasn’t grown or changed. He lived another week of life and it shows. But any change would have been meaningless. The cruelest twist of fate is that most of this might not have mattered anyway thanks to the exstinction level event that closes the movie — the arrival of Bob Dylan.

Think you can be better? So what.

Oscar Isaac is phenomenal. We are catching him near the end of a phase of this character’s life. He’s exhausted nearly all of his support systems. He’s got unaddressed greif from the suicide of his partner, but he’s a self destruction machine in the end, torching nearly every bridge he’s offered. He tries to borrow money from the poor dope he’s cuckholdin (an ostensible “friend”) to pay for an abortion for the girlfriend who cheated with him. (That’s LOW and ballsy). And yet while we don’t see him be actively charming you get the magnetism. You can squint and see the good version of Llewyn that drew so many into his orbit in the first place. Testament to Isaac.

The Coen’s, as is often the case, pepper their meangerie with assorted weirdos to collide with the protagponist and send him spinning off in new physical and emotional directions. This man doesn’t really play well with others be it his exasperated ex, the kind fellow folkies, the intellectual hangers on, the odd drifters road tripping to Chicago.

This would all be mean if it also wasn’t so dryly funny. It’s bursting with comedic detail and touches, from the tight apartment building hallways to the boxes of old records to the circuitous way the characters talk to each other. The entire Please Mr. Kennedy recording.

Beautiful soundtrack.

A melancholy masterpiece.

 

[Pink Mist]

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

When I was a child, a gang of seagulls swarmed and attacked me on a beach while I was on vacation in Florida. I was just trying to enjoy a sandwich when suddenly I was surrounded by tens of seagulls all trying to get a piece of me or my meal. It was a very traumatizing moment for me and ever since then my biggest phobia has been birds. I am seriously scared of birds. I don’t trust them; I find them deeply suspicious animals and I am really uncomfortable around them. As a result, I’ve put off watching The Birds for a long time.

As is well know, in Hitchcock’s The Birds flocks of birds swarm a sleepy seaside village and attack and murder the villagers. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a wealthy socialite, just happens to be in town that day delivering a couple of love birds to Mitch (Rod Taylor), an arrogant lawyer who she developed a flirtatious relationship with at bird store. Did Melanie’s appearance cause these bird attacks in town? Is it a Freudian allegory about femininity, sexual repression, or affection? An environmental allegory? Very much open to interpretation and much smarter people than me have endlessly debated what the allegory of The Birds really is. But one thing that is clear to me though is that The Birds is not one of Hitchcock’s finest works. There’s something that is just off in the filmmaking that doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out if its in the script or in how Hitchcock has paced the film. The film has its moments where it really soars and works well such as a some really clever shots (the infamous one being the birds gathering on the playground outside the school), but for most of the film the film just drags really badly. Both Hedren and Taylor are fine in their roles but not amazing or able to rise above the script. I would rate The Birds to be one of Hitchcock’s poorer works.

However, while the birds in The Birds are downright silly and the effects have not aged gracefully, and to most viewers the film isn’t that scary at all, to this sufferer of ornithophobia I found the film to be pretty horrifying and a bit of a nightmare.

 

[Pink Mist]

My next pick is sticking with the theme of a big auteur and is Fellini's La Strada

 

[kihei]

For some not quite understood reason, I can watch The Birds over and over and never tire of the experience. It's a little weird.

 

[kihei]

The Birds (1963) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I was in high school when this came out. I have seen The Birds several times, like maybe eight times, usually at lengthy intervals. So lengthy that when I get around to seeing the movie again, I fall back into thinking it was originally in black and white. Every time. It starts again and I go "Oh, f***, yeah, now I remember. It's in colour." Judging from responses on the net, I am not the only one with this problem. One theory is that most people saw it on black and white TVs initially, but I don't buy it. I think the universe is just messing with all our brains, that's my theory.

Why have I seen this movie so many times? Simple answer. I always enjoy it. This time around I tried to focus on just why I always enjoy it. It's almost like I have never seen it before--I mean, that's how fresh the film feels. It's not even my favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie, which goes to North by Northwest. And I don't think it is Alfred's best either; I am leaning to a largely overlooked and probably unpopular choice To Catch a Thief, which seems to reduce suspense to a virtual essence, an elegant one at that (yeah, yeah, Vertigo is the richests thematically). But to me The Birds is as close to a perfect movie as you can probably get. The pacing is superb which is probably the main reason I never tire of it. But here are some other things I like about it:

1) The way Hitchcock builds suspense. Here editing, shot selection and imagination are invaluable assets. There are an awful lot of bird set-pieces in this film, all of them representing different technical challenges. I love how Hitchcock builds the tension slowly, starting with one ominous bird scene (the attack on the rowboat) and just almost offhandedly upping the ante step by step along the way. Then the editing and Hitchcock's immense technical prowess takes over and he has a field day with the medium.

2) The cast. You could see a superstar version of this movie starring Hitchcock regulars Cary Grant, Grace Kelly and maybe throw in Ava Gardner as Annie. But Hedron, much maligned for no reason at all, and Taylor, much maligned for good reason, are ideal, the perfect mix of self-regarding socialite and thinly-disguised Australian boyo. They have great chemistry, and Jessica Tandy along for the ride with her Broadway acting chops is a treat, too. Very underrated performances all around. Perfect for what is needed here.

3) Hitchock's jaundiced view of children. In how many horror movies are children attacted so frequently and so scarily as they are in The Birds. The kids suffer real damage, not to mention the trauma that comes with it. I mean it is a little weird, actually, but it does make for effective horror.

4) All the great one-scene character actors who populate the thing. There are maybe close to a dozen and they are all wonderful--each managing to develop a personality and particularity with a minimum of broad strokes.

5) The subtext. Well, you could have a lot of fun with the Freudian subtext lurking between the lines of this movie. Start with absent/distant/needy mothers, vulnerable children, throw in an icy blonde, an old flame, a pair of love birds, and what do you get? Actually, I don't know. I've never felt the urge to figure it out. I mean there is a lot of material there to play around with, but the movie is fun enough without getting all graduate student about it.

6) Daphne du Maurier, an author that seldom wrote about horror, but when she did, wow. I would argue that both Don't Look Now, also written by her, and The Birds are two of four or five of the greatest horror films ever made. A lot of that is because du Maurier constructs such rich characters and situations with all kinds of psychological implications that draw the reader ever deeper into her characters' fates. We care about her people, sometimes deeply, and to me that has always been the major prerequisite for a great horror story.

7) "Of cours, it is a horror movie, dummy." A lot of people don't consider this a horror movie. Way, way too many for my taste. I concede that Don't Look Now and The Birds both transcend the genre, but they are great horror movies--look at the plots, what else would they be? The Birds is also a great action movie but people never give it credit for that either, maybe because there is not a single gun scene in the movie that I recall and no fight scenes/car chases/big explosions, save one. But you get scene after scene with birds as attack weapons. The tension is amazing and in the second half of the movie virtually non-stop. So credit where credi is due on both the horror and action scores.

8) Alfred Hitchcock at his best is not really comparable to any other director before or after him. He possesses Eisenstein-level technique and devoted it to one specific genre. In a way Hitchcock is almost synonymous with suspense to me because he created the most brillliantly effective examples of the genre. Nobody does it better.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

The Birds
Hitchcock (1963)
“A gull?”

Melanie and Mitch have a meet-cute at a bird shop. Technically they’ve met before, but Melanie doesn’t remember. There’s sparks and the banter of future paramours who clearly like each other, but just not at this moment. She decides to surprise him at his Northern Californa home. She’s quickly accepted into their small-town world (well, mom takes some warming up). But there’s more than personal drama at play. The birds, you see, are acting funny. They’re massing and soon … attacking. Our heroes are forced to mount a defense.

This is one of those movies that when it’s on, it’s on. When it’s off it’s not.

That’s a terse way of saying whenever those cursed birds are up to shit, I enjoy it very much. Whenever they’re not, with one or two exceptions, I’m just not that into it. I feel kinda basic and unsophisticated about this but so be it.

The scene of Melanie enjoying a smoke outside the school with the sing-song children voices off in the distance and the steady gathering of birds on the recess equipment behind her is a stellar bit of Hitchcock’s fame suspense vs. surprise dictum. The gas station scene is another. The sound work — cutting from the explosion to a near silent ariel shot with birds gradually pipping up as the crowd the sky — again masterful. This Hitchcock fella might just have a career! Melanie and Mitch making their way up the street to poor doomed Annie’s house under the ever watching eyes. Awesome. The climactic bloody assault on the house. The couple of moments of visceral horror (pecked out eyes, poor doomed Annie again) still shock me every time no matter how many times I’ve seen this.

The film’s biggest strength is the unanswered mystery. Why did the birds act that way? It’s never addressed. And blessedly so since any explanation would probably be dumb. The lack of answers are largely what makes this endure, at least to me. I even remember watching it as probably about a 10 year old or so and that bit really stuck with me. Might be the first movie I watched that included such notable ambiguity. I think storytellers and consumers too often want or demand answers, which while reasonable, isn’t always necessary or effective. It’s much scarier and more lingering when we don’t know. Embace questions without answers!

But on the flip side, there’s a fair amount of down time. Some of that drives the dramatic build up and that’s cool, but I actually don’t find Melanie and Mitch (and the others in their orbit) to be that compelling. Except maybe poor, doomed Annie. Melanie is a bit of a tough hang. Beautiful and charming, for sure, but also pushy, entitled and a little oblivious in ways that makes it hard to see why someone would find her worth the hassle. I’m probably over thinking this. She looks like Tippi Hedron. Whatever my reservations about here character though, she didn’t deserve to be called evil.

One odd bit I couldn’t shake: Jessica Tandy actually is 21 years older than Rod Taylor so the on screen mother-son relationship works out in actual, real-life math, but it doesn’t show on screen. I had to look it up because my initial thought was, “Is she even older than him?” It’s a mix of Tandy (54 at the time!) looking about 10 years younger than her age and Taylor (who was 33) looking about 10 years older.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

I would argue that both Don't Look Now, also written by her, and The Birds are two of four or five of the greatest horror films ever made.
[...]
I concede that Don't Look Now and The Birds both transcend the genre, but they are great horror movies--look at the plots, what else would they be?

Would you please make up your mind about this? ;-)

Movies: - Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Mid-Spring Edition. Happy Beltane!

Movies: - Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Mid-Spring Edition. Happy Beltane!

 

[kihei]

Would you please make up your mind about this? ;-)

Movies: - Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Mid-Spring Edition. Happy Beltane!

Movies: - Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Mid-Spring Edition. Happy Beltane!

Well, yes, I can appreciate your confusion. So when I recently saw both again I had to admit that at some level they are horror movies, but I still think that they transcent the genre by such a degree that that's not the most important thing about them nor the best description. Indeed, now that I have had more time to think about it, I have just come to the conclusion that they both are clearly Westerns.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Well, yes, I can appreciate your confusion. So when I recently saw both again I had to admit that at some level they are horror movies, but I still think that they transcent the genre by such a degree that that's not the most important thing about them nor the best description. Indeed, now that I have had more time to think about it, I have just come to the conclusion that they both are clearly Westerns.

Ahahah, yeah you need some consistency. Everything should be a Western from now on.

But yeah for sure they transcend the genre. I said it again and again, Don't Look Now is a rare example of a true fantastic film, it's horror, but it's more than that.

 

[Jevo]

The Birds (1963) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Socialite Melanie Daniels is accosted by lawyer Mitch Brenner in a pet shop. Mitch remembers Melanie from a courtcase about a prank of hers gone wrong, and decides to mistake her for an employee, inquiring about getting a pair of love birds for his 11 year old sisters birthday. The shop however is out of love birds, so he leaves empty handed. Being intrigued by his flirting, Melanie buys a pair, and uses her father's newspaper connections to track down Mitch's home adress. However he's in Bodega Bay some 60 miles north for the weekend. She goes on a trip up there with the birds. The Brenner house is across the bay from the town, so she rents a small boat so she can sail up there unseen and place the birds inside. Mitch spots the birds, and then Melanie returning to the town by boat. He races her there in his car. As Melanie is about to dock, a gull attacks her. And then more strange bird behaviour starts in Bodega Bay.

Nature rising up against humanity is not something that was invented with The Birds. But the use of birds as the villain is a novel approach, and when you watch the movie you wonder why it isn't more popular. Bird attacks are a scary concept. But I think watching the film that you can also see why it probably isn't more popular. It's really hard to do well. Now I don't doubt the special effects were quite innovative and very labour intense to make. But like many other kinds of special effects they haven't aged well. It's simply too obvious the birds are added in post, and that the actors are just flailing about randomly. Now that's not something that would necesarilly be solved with modern CGI, and CGI birds would likely look even less convincing than what we have here. It points to the fact that the concept is just extremely hard to pull off convincingly. But as good a job as Hitchcock does here, I simply haven't ever been able to suspend disbelief enough to buy into The Birds.

The Birds is a horror, but the build up is quite different than most others. There's no early indication that something is amiss. I invited my girlfriend to watch the movie with me, and described it as a horror or sorts. Half an hour into the movie she asked if it was the right film, because it felt more like a rom-com than a horror. And she was right. The movie deliberately misleads it's audience. Which is only a half-truth, because anyone who had seen any of the promotional material for the movie back in the day, would have known that the birds are going to attack. So there's perhaps no need for an early indication of something amiss, instead the audience will come that expectation already, and that changes the perception of the first part until the gull attack on Melanie. It's interesting to think of promotional material as part of the movie experience, but it of course losses some of the effect in the age of television, home-video and streaming, where such things aren't part of the experience.

Alfred Hitchcock does a lot of what he does well here. The man could probably direct a movie in his sleep and still create more tension than most other directors. For me the build up to the attacks are great, but it falls apart during the actual attacks for the most part where I simply lose suspension of disbelief, and I find myself waiting for it to be over instead of being engaged. An exception is when Melanie is trapped in the phone booth. That is a really ingenious set-piece and it's pulled off super well.

For me The Birds is one of Hitchcock's poorer works. There's plenty of his movies I would gladly rewatch again, but The Birds isn't one of them.