The Birds sucked!

[Alidar Jarok]

I know I've ranted about this before and plenty of people have disagreed with me, but seriously, this movie is retarded on many levels. I'm not going to even care about the fact that the birds being crazy was never explained or resolved (they just left the town at the end, big freakin deal). I'm not even going to stick to the fact that birds killing people looked corny as hell and never seemed credible as my only point. I also didn't find the characters all that likable. My only recourse to get through the movie was to add "in bed" to every single line by every single actor in the movie. It actually works pretty well.

But, bottom line. I love Rear Window, I love North by Northwest, I love Psycho. But The Birds sucked. Seriously, why do people love it?

 

[Spot's Meow]

I don't know. It reminds me of The Exorcist in that everyone talks about how great and scary it is but when I actually got around to watching it I just laughed at the cheesy effects and felt pretty bored the rest of the time.

Some movies, I guess you just had to be there at the time to get it.

 

[Small White Car]

I'm not going to even care about the fact that the birds being crazy was never explained or resolved (they just left the town at the end, big freakin deal).

This is the same complaint given to Spielberg's 'War of the Worlds' too, but I don't quite understand it.

They're all disaster movies. Do people get upset when the hurricane, earthquake, or tornados simply go away at the end of the films featuring them? What about a volcano movie where there's an eruption which eventually stops? Does that need explaining?

I mean, why is it ok for a hurricane to come, destroy, and leave but when birds do it then it's a problem?

 

[exodus]

Young people.



No seriously, the big thing with the Birds was the fear of nature out of control. In other Hitchcock films the "villain" was usually human or something within the human psyche. The Birds were like that decades example of "Aliens" or "JAWS". A swarming unreasoning never ending force of nature threatening mankind.


Stop focusing on the special effects of older films and try to understand the psychological elements of these films. They didn't have ILM back in the day, so they had to rely on engaging your mind instead of your eyes.

 

[Agenda]

The Birds is awesome. The entire movie is a psychosexual oedipal melodrama. It's crazy.

 

[Trekker4747]

Excelent movie.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Love this movie.

Beyond all else it inspired DePalma's "The Clams."

 

[Christopher]

I mean, why is it ok for a hurricane to come, destroy, and leave but when birds do it then it's a problem?

That's an interesting point. I never thought of it in terms of a natural disaster. Still, the birds don't leave at the end. There's no resolution -- things just escalate to a peak, the characters retreat, and the story just stops. There's no denouement, no closure. It ends and you feel like there should still be another reel coming up, like they stopped too soon.

As for the effects, they were as good as they could've been at the time. Matte shots with flapping bird wings would've been impossible to do effectively with the bluescreen techniques that were standard at the time, since those are too inexact and too bad at coping with motion blur. It would've looked far worse if done that way. So Hitchcock borrowed Disney's unique sodium-vapor matte system, which produced far more perfect mattes than bluescreen but was dependent on a unique prism that nobody ever figured out how to replicate. It allowed the composite shots of the live birds in flight to be as good as it was physically possible for them to be with the technology of the time.

 

[Gaith]

The Birds is awesome. The entire movie is a psychosexual oedipal melodrama. It's crazy.

Exactly. Youtuber Rob Ager, who also did this great video essay on Pulp Fiction, put up a detailed explanation/analysis on the movie, though he's since pulled it (alas) for personal sales on dvd. His remarks amounted to the following:

As a single, attractive young woman, the heroine threatens the hero's mother's near-monopoly on her son's affection. (His daughter gets a pass for being her own granddaughter.) The ferocity of the bird attacks rise in direct parallel to the emotional involvement between the man and woman. By the end, however, the birds (representing the mother's repressed fury) have traumatized the woman to the point where she's nearly lifeless. Having lost her sexual and romantic power, she pretty much becomes an adopted child, closer to the man's daughter than her own former self. With the threat to the mother's son's affection and attention thus neutralized, the birds show no interest in attacking them as they make to leave.

 

[Trekker4747]

I'm not even going to stick to the fact that birds killing people looked corny as hell and never seemed credible as my only point.

You realize the movie was made in 1963 and that special-effects of the time were "limited" at best, right?

Right?

 

[JiNX-01]

... the birds being crazy was never explained or resolved...

I think that's because Hitchcock didn't cast any mynah birds or parrots.

 

[Kegg]

There's no denouement, no closure. It ends and you feel like there should still be another reel coming up, like they stopped too soon.

It's a Hitchcock movie. He ends when the plot ends (there is almost never a coda). It's an excellent, unsettling little ending that doesn't spell a lot out.

I'll say this of The Birds: The narrative logic is conveinent. They attack Tippi Hedren when it's interesting to do so, they don't attack anyone when it's more conveinent for them not to do so. By not explaining the rationale behind the Bird attacks the writers are able to make them arbitrarily swing around and do whatever it is most interesting for them to do at that point in the mvoie.

That said, it's simply an intense, tense, and invigorating movie; one of Hitchcock's best.

 

[Bones2]

I thought The Birds was great. North By Northwest, on the other hand, was terrible. I mean, the resolution to the plane chase was the stupidest thing committed to film, and his dialogue with that woman on the train was abysmal.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

That's an interesting point. I never thought of it in terms of a natural disaster. Still, the birds don't leave at the end. There's no resolution -- things just escalate to a peak, the characters retreat, and the story just stops. There's no denouement, no closure. It ends and you feel like there should still be another reel coming up, like they stopped too soon.

That pretty much sums up my feelings a bit better.

BTW, as for when I said it looked corny, I wasn't talking about special effects. I was just talking about the concept of the birds killing people. Pretty much no one could die unless they fall down and get covered in birds. So what happened? They fall down and get covered in birds an awful lot!

 

[SlyCardie]

If you didn't like the original, then gear up for Michael Bay's version.

 

[Trekker4747]

If you didn't like the original, then gear up for Michael Bay's version.

Oh. Dear. God.

Help us all.

 

[Christopher]

If you didn't like the original, then gear up for Michael Bay's version.

This time, the birds explode!

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I'm not going to even care about the fact that the birds being crazy was never explained or resolved (they just left the town at the end, big freakin deal).

That's kind of the point of the movie - to leave an unsettling feeling with the audience that not everything in life can be explained away and made happy, rational and safe.

The fact that the story seems unfinished is deliberate - we expect there to be a third act because "that's the way things are always done." Just because movies usually follow a certain structure doesn't mean they have to. Just because birds usually don't go nuts and attack people en masse doesn't mean it can't happen.

I'm just waiting for Hollywood to remake The Birds with a rational explanation and a happy ending. That would be the ultimate in Hollywood cluelessness.

If you didn't like the original, then gear up for Michael Bay's version.

The 2005 date gives me hope that that horrid notion has been shelved. Great story idea for The Onion, tho. The comments section is hilarious. "The only way it could be worse is if Uwe Boll is hired on to direct it." Now there's an idea!

 

[Sheep]

If you didn't like the original, then gear up for Michael Bay's version.

This time, the birds explode!

Shit just got real.

 

[Trekker4747]

I just hope there's a scene in it of some military guys/vehicle walking toward the camera in slow motion!