Saturday. Today was pretty slow. Put in some time in the office working. And spent a bit of time just hanging out with the family watching some Hulu and Netflix.
This evening I went out to see Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds which I have never seen before. This is a weird one for me to have never seen as it is such a classic and has been shown on television so many times, but that is probably exactly why I have never seen it. Growing up without cable, many of the shows that are standard cable movies that “everyone saw” are exactly the ones that I missed because no one ever watched them in any other context because they were burned out seeing them on cable.
The showing was in Bishop Arts at the Texas Theater. Before the move the Dallas Neo Classic Ballet did a performance based on the movie that was… interesting. It was a two dancer ballet that I can’t really explain. It was a good experience and not very long, maybe twenty minutes. It was two or three dance numbers followed by a short film.
The Birds was decent, although overall it was really just a high budget B movie. The plot didn’t exist, it was mostly just a cheesy zombie film that didn’t even bother to try to explain anything, leaving the entire thing as just a huge plot hole. Super lazy writing, no one felt like they had a good explanation for the events of the movie, and so they just didn’t make any. Nor did they address how things would progress, they just gave up making the film and it ended. I like Rod Taylor and he did an okay job in the film, and that’s about the highest praise that it earns. The effects were probably okay for the time, fake dead birds are pretty cheap. The setting was uninspired. The gas station fire scene was good for the time, effective.
Overall, I am glad that I watched the movie. But I definitely do not need to see it again. It was tolerable but drawn out, poorly paced, and just cheesy. Not a strong artistic piece, nor entertaining without an artistic element. Just an extremely cheap film that would today be considered nothing more than a mediocre low budget student film.