I just watched the Birds last night and I want to know, was this guy always a hack? I've also seen Psycho and Rear Window, both were "meh" but I assumed they were just of their time. Then I watched the Birds and realised the guy is just British Speilberg. All style and no substance.
>>219576849Hot buttered cajun style fingerbanged asshole
>>219576849I've only seen the birds but I reckon it was pretty good
>>219576849The Birds is a black comedy. Most Hichcock movies are black comedies or at least have subtle tongue in cheek humor. Some are full on farce like North by Northwest.
>>219576849I prefer Rope and Shadow of a Doubt
>>219577012for me it's The Trouble With Harry
https://theyshootpictures.com/hitchcockalfred.htmLook at that filmography, 50+ year career and only good for 5 of them. Major hack.
>>219576849Watch Vertigo and some of his shorts
>only good for 5 of them>Notorious >Strangers on a Train>Frenzy>Foreign Correspondent>The 39 StepsJust off the top of my head. All of them superior, and more entertaining, than what we get today.
>>219578306I said years not films and obviously being a little loose with it, still it's a poor signal to noise ratio for such acclaim. And today doesn't count, the world's been artistically dead for multiple decades running.
>>219576849should have just been one big bird
>>219578100He had an incredible run for at least 25 to 30 years... no director will ever match him, but tonally the scripts are all over the place. North By Northwest is almost a Tarantino film.
>>219581304in my headcanon, from Blackmail to PSYCHO, Hitchcock is unstoppable... a force of nature with a talent that is just unparalleled in cinematic history. I wish he had gotten to make all of those films that Paramount execs denied him, you hear stories about him weeping publically in boardrooms when he couldn't make his sex film, but Frenzy really captures a moment in time with women's lib.
He's overrated but making films within the Hays Code is terribly limiting for a horror director.
This year was the first year I ever saw THE WRONG MAN and I CONFESS. Hitchcock is one director where I can't really say which decade he's the best in... the 30's, 40's or 50's. I mean PSYCHO is basically a 50's movie, five years later that film would've been something completely different and probably in colour as well.
>>219576849
>>219576849The Birds is the best apocalypse movie of all time. Its subtext is very deep and nuanced, read Camille Paglia's short book about it
The Birds is avian kino. If you want to have a go at him, then at least use Vertigo.
>>219581304Spielberg from 1975 - 1995 comes closest for me, and most Hitchcock fans would probably only rate 5--15 years of Hitch's career.
>>219581660>The Birds is avian kino.I daresay the effects hold up very well, surprisingly
>>219576849>>219576937>>219582015The younger generation often can't appreciate the monumental effort and ingenuity that went into making a movie like Birds. Nowadays the answer is to throw a shitload of CGI at everything and call it a day. Back then you actually had to find a way to put whatever you wanted to put on the big screen. Birds is a very technical movie in this sense, as they had to came up with lots of tricks and techniques to get the desired results on top of the usual circus acts with live animals. The logistics alone must've been a nightmare yet the final movie speaks for itself.
>>219582477I agree. In fact i´d like to add that circumventing issues has always been one of the building blocks of cinematography helping to define stuff like pacing and tone. There is an obsession these days with showing stuff, since they spent so much time creating CGI models and whatnot they like to showcase it but that seems to come in detriment of visual storytelling. For example, back in the day it would have been immoral to show sex so they resorted to those waves against the rocks or whistling kettles to express passion or tension... or, if we move a few decades we could think about how Ridley Scott hide the xenomorph among lighting tricks and and fragmented detail shots on the first alien movie. This approach generated far more tension than seeing the whole xeno´s body in broad daylight as it´s seen in covenant. There is no mystery, no tension to that. Even horror movies were better back in the day. You think of movies like Seven on which the mystery is built precisely because of what we don´t see and compare it to gorefest shit like saw or the rob zombie movies. Then again this is but a symptom of a culture of instant gratification, new audiences just can´t endure the tension of build ups, they just get distracted and start checking out their phones. A sorry state of affairs.
