Where's the Birds love? A gas station blows up!
'Never Leave Me'
Buffista Movies 5: Development Hell
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I do love The Birds. In fact, I was very tempted to drive up to Bodega Bay this weekend.
I almost put it tied for 10, if only for the green dress. But the dialogue and acting are just so bad I think it would have to go in a special "so bad it's good" category.
I feel like it's underrated, but I don't remember much about the dialogue and acting. I just like the whole mood of it, the birds everywhere being menacing by virtue of being birds.
I will amend to note that I also really like the 39 Steps (particularly the rawther kinky handcuff scene) and Notorious.
I just like the whole mood of it, the birds everywhere being menacing by virtue of being birds.
Completely tangential and off topic, but P-C, have you seen any of the footage from the Planet Earth miniseries showing megaflocks of millions of birds moving across the African plain? The narration noted that these megaflocks can take up to six hours to pass.
The narration noted that these megaflocks can take up to six hours to pass.
Passenger pigeon flocks would sometimes take two days (I think) to pass over.
Now they're all gone.
Heh. Now that you mention it, I may be understating the narration in my memory. These flocks were huge. Their motion was fascinating to watch.
And yeah, it made me think of the passenger pigeon.
According to wikipedia:
It is estimated that there were as many as five billion passenger pigeons in the United States at the time Europeans arrived in North America[1]. They lived in enormous flocks, and during migration, one could see flocks of them a mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long, taking several days to pass and probably containing two billion birds.[2][3] Over the 19th century, the species went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction.[4]
P-C, have you seen any of the footage from the Planet Earth miniseries showing megaflocks of millions of birds moving across the African plain? The narration noted that these megaflocks can take up to six hours to pass.
I haven't seen that. Ooooh. So many birds.
Ayiyi, this is fucked up:
A particularly cruel method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting attention to other birds flying overhead. When the flock would land near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger. This was the origin of the term stool pigeon. [8]
I don't get why you need to sew the bird's eyes shut.