Posted this on twitter today:
Gonna make a list of reasons why I love Alfred Hitchcock’s the birds
— Based Goth Alexandra (@theTsaritsa) July 2, 2015
(Contains spoilers)
— Based Goth Alexandra (@theTsaritsa) July 2, 2015
Rumor has it Michael Bay is planning on remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic film, The Birds. Why. Seriously. What the hell.
Why do people do this. Why do people remake classic films? How could anyone possibly improve upon this masterpiece?
This movie is perfect. Even Tippi Hedren, was like ‘Why,’ upon hearing that someone is thinking about remaking The Birds.
It’s like anyone else beside Stephen King remaking The Shining, and we all know he shouldn’t have done that but we know why he personally felt like he had to.
It’s like the time Gus Van Sant remade Psycho with Anne Heche. Truth be told, I’ve never seen Psycho in its entirety, the classic film or the remake, but what is the point of remaking a Hitchcock film shot for shot unless you’re a film school student doing an exercise? I dunno, I know some people who like the Van Sant version, but whatever.
Here is an incomplete list of thoughts I have about the movie The Birds:
1. No one knows why the birds are attacking.
2. Why the birds are attacking is never explained. And doesn’t need to be. It’s more eerie that way.
3. It seems almost as if the birds want to be killing people.
4. Even the sparrows are attacking. Sparrows are really cute.
5. Seagulls are kind of terrifying to begin with. When they attack in a large group, fuck tho.
6. The Birds is essentially a love story, with attacking birds. The bird attacks are one of the factors which brought these two love birds together.
7. There is a pair of actual love birds that our female protagonist, Melanie Daniels, brings to the male protagonist, Mitch Brenner.
8. Love birds. Lol. We see what you did there.
9. The love birds don’t seem to be affected by whatever is making the birds outside attack. I’m speaking of the birds in the cage, but I could just as easily be talking about the human couple.
10. Even though the birds are killing people, our protagonists don’t take the threat seriously enough to leave.
11. Why don’t you stay? We have plenty of leftover roast beef!
12. Lol, they’re just birds.
13. The best actor in this movie is the kid who plays Mitch’s little sister. She is really good at crying.
14. In the beginning of the movie, when Melanie arrives in Bodega Bay, she’s trying to play a prank on Mitch, and pumps the owner of the general store for info on the Brenner family. The owner of the general store can’t remember the ‘little Brenner girl’s’ name, whether it’s Alice or Lois.
15. It’s neither, but I can’t remember her real name either. I always want to call her Alice or Lois.
16. Her name is actually Cathy. Cathy sounds nothing like Alice or Lois.
17. Mitch is a lawyer and tells Melanie how one of his clients shot his wife in the head five times because she changed the station while he was watching a ball game.
18. Melanie finds this amusing while casually playing Debussey on the Brenner’s living room piano.
19. Pretty disgusting. This is my least favorite part of the film.
20. My favorite part of the film is the scene outside the schoolhouse.
21. Melanie is waiting outside smoking a cigarette on a bench in front of a jungle gym. The children are singing some weird song like, ‘She combed her hair but once a year/ risseldy rosseldy meow meow meow/ With every stroke she shed a tear/ risseldy rosseldy meow meow meow.’ And you’re so captivated by the tiny child voices singing this song, and watching Melanie silently smoke, and slowly more and more birds accumulate on the jungle gym, starting with just a few and building gradually until the entire jungle gym is covered with crows.
22. It’s these quiet moments that make the film so disturbing.
23. There is no soundtrack or musical score in this film. Like the television show The Wire, the only music heard in this movie is when the characters are listening to something on the radio or playing something on the piano or singing something in real time.
24. Usually a soundtrack or musical score helps to underline the creepiness of a film. Like when John Carpenter tested the original Halloween, it got mixed reviews/the test audiences didn’t think the movie was that scary. So he composed the Halloween ‘theme’ and added it to the film, and it made all the difference. The lack of musical score in The Birds, however, has a very unsettling effect.
25. Lots of camera tricks, but everything looks really real.
26. I remember my mom talking shit about The Birds when I was a kid. She was like, it doesn’t even look real– you can see the strings attached to the birds’ feet. And yeah, Hitchcock did tie the birds to the actors, but I’ve seen this movie at least a dozen times and I look for the strings every time and I can’t see them.
27. Can we just appreciate the fact that the actors in this film had birds tied to them. Like, even the children.
28. Tippi Hedren had nightmares about birds attacking her (and probably also about Hitchcock being a creeper) for a while during and after making this film. I mean, who wouldn’t.
29. When our protagonists finally do make their escape, because Melanie is injured, we aren’t sure if they made it out alive.
30. They drive away in Melanie’s ragtop convertible. If birds can peck through a wooden door, surely they can break open a ragtop roof.
31. We’re left with more questions than answers in the end.
32. But at least our protagonists fell in love?
33. If this movie were made today there would be an explanation for the birds attacking. It would be like that terrible movie Outbreak. Like the birds had a disease and that’s why they were attacking people. And it wouldn’t be as scary.
34. It was probably all the myna bird’s fault, tbh.
35. Oh Melanie Daniels, you just had to pull a prank on your aunt Tillie. Teaching a bird to say ‘four letter words.’
36. What kind of four letter words did they teach at Berkeley in a general semantics class in the 1960s anyway. Like is she actually learning swear words in class, or is she just picking up new insults from her peers on the ‘quad. Lol.
37. This film could not be made today. Not just because PETA would have a problem with it, but because they would use CGI and it would look so fake.
38. CGI just really sucks and I wish everyone would go back to using puppets.
39. The Birds is basically Jurassic Park before there was a Jurassic Park. I’m only speaking of the original Jurassic Park. They are almost the same movie.
40. Jurassic Park is really good. It’s one of my favorite movies and it’s the type of movie I can pretty much watch anytime. Same with The Birds. I can watch it five nights in a row and still love it.
41. Jurassic Park is great but The Birds is better.
