![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are just friendly?
I don't care that it may have eventually paved the way for Piranha 3D, The Birds (1963) is actually quite an effective piece of apocalyptic fiction/survival horror—it has a lot more in common with Night of the Living Dead (1968) than Jaws (1975)—but I wish large portions of the audience had not felt compelled to treat it like Mystery Science Theater 3000. I had come to see a big-screen showing of a Hitchcock film I had only seen in pieces, on television. I can only conclude they had come for a classic of high camp; there were waves of laughter at each bird attack, at each death, at moments of tension or chaos. The couple sitting next to me were particular offenders, miming voices for the characters, interjecting mock-warnings Rocky Horror-style. Several times I thought of yelling for everyone to just shut up and watch the movie; I hate people when they cannot take art on its own terms and decide that it's more fun to snicker at the old-fashioned special effects than pay attention to the story. Yes, those are trained crows. Yes, that's fake blood. Yes, the sodium vapor process is not as seamless as CGI, yes, rear projection doesn't look like location shooting and never did, yes, that's a cloud of starlings pouring down the chimney and Tippi Hedren turning her face back and forth in silent-movie anguish—but if you find the premise and the execution of a film inherently amusing, how about you rent and mock it on your own time and stop interfering with the atmosphere it might create for someone else? Thank God, the audience became more subdued in the last third of the movie, which is increasingly claustrophobic and more about suggestion than action until all of a sudden it's not (affording, I suppose, fewer opportunities for the cheaply risible), and I was in fact able to filter out the earlier noise, but I would prefer not to have needed to. I don't understand. Maybe I'm jaded, but not every movie is a post-ironic parody of itself; it shouldn't be treated as such.
no subject
I feel about film as I do about stories and songs: they deserve to be looked at, read, and listened to for what they are. To judge everything by current tastes and expectations is to end up with a very thin experience. This seems to be going beyond that, though--sounds like the audience was willfully not entering in to the mood. Just as almost anything can be rendered a double entendre, so too anything can be mocked if you choose to mock it. And that can even be entertaining for cheap laughs when you're feeling bored or cruel. But ughhhh. So sorry their loss was yours, too.
no subject
It was the last entry in this season's Science on Screen, which I would not call a shlock-fest-it's the program that's enabled me to see The Man in the White Suit and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and I still resent missing Death in Venice (1972).
This seems to be going beyond that, though--sounds like the audience was willfully not entering in to the mood.
I don't want to malign the Coolidge-going population; it wasn't the entire audience, just a much greater percentage than I would have imagined. If it had only been the two idiots next to me, I would have told them to shut up. And I will admit I have mercilessly mocked films I thought were terrible (Oliver Stone's Alexander comes to mind, as it still does from time to time despite years of Mary Renault and Pseudo-Kallisthenes), but I maintain that's because they were. And never in theaters, for God's sake. I suffered through Titanic (1997) in clementine-aided silence.
So sorry their loss was yours, too.
Thank you. That is the correct icon.
no subject
Exactly. I know your frustration, having tried to watch some classic films with an audience new to them. They have to learn to let go of all that, let go, let go, let the film do its magic. I had received The Innocents with Deborah Kerr for my birthday and wanted to invite my daughter and her friends to watch with us, but then I thought better of it. While my daughter seems to be able to detect when something is worth her serious appreciation, a few friends just mock the whole way through (they ruined my last viewing of Night of the Living Dead!).
I'm reading Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write, which talks much about how people need to learn how to be quiet and receptive in order to let the imagination flourish. A little of that should be part of every school day.
no subject
I'm sorry. I hope eventually you got to watch The Innocents in congenial surroundings; I've never seen it myself, but all reports indicate it's excellent.
no subject
I'm sorry, though, that the audience you watched it with couldn't shut up about it.
no subject
I think I can filter for obviously fake special effects, possibly because so many of the movies I watched as a child were from an era even before bluescreen; I do wince sometimes at spectacularly fake blood, but it's also possible to tell whether the director means it for the real thing or the Black Knight in Monty Python. I was going to write that it's like theatrical illusion, but we demand greater realism from films than from the theater, because onstage nobody expects actual ocean, actual chariot races (and it is sometimes downright weird if you get them). Trying to think of a comparable example to The Birds, what I came up with was John Huston's Moby Dick (1956), which I watched a few years ago with
(It does always throw me that Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn are clearly in a swimming pool somewhere in the last shots of The African Queen (1951) after all the footage of the Congo and the Ulanga, but I assume that was done so that nobody died of dysentery outright. I'll give them a pass for that.)
I'm sorry, though, that the audience you watched it with couldn't shut up about it.
I just couldn't figure out why so many of them had come, if what they wanted was to snark. That's what drinking games in somebody's living room are for.
no subject
no subject
Thanks.
no subject
You're not the jaded one.
no subject
I can imagine it; I just don't think it's a good idea.
no subject
So, by way of consolation, a song that always reminds me of a murderous flock of small birds:
Android Lust "Another Void"
http://www.sendspace.com/file/y5btb9
And some tidbit of Japanese folklore I learned last night from a friend who was playing a bullet hell game:
he night sparrow (夜雀) is a folk legend in western Japan. According to legend, if you're out at midnight, the night sparrow will follow you while singing "Chin Chin." The appearance of a night sparrow is a prodigious sign that you will meet a wolf/stray dog soon. Legend also has it that if you catch the night sparrow, you'll suffer from severe night-blindness.
(This from the bullet hell game series' wiki: http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Night_Sparrow)
no subject
It is possible to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) without costumes, callbacks, or stage cast, but it is a very strange experience. You keep looking around for toast to throw or at least some inappropriately applied lipstick.
but when that is not what I am prepared for, it's extremely annoying.
It wasn't possible to predict from the introduction, either. The prefatory lecture was by an evolutionary biologist who talked about mobbing behavior and the conclusion to be drawn from its application to the film, which is that the birds have finally recognized the human species as predators en masse and are taking steps in the same way as crows attack hawks, sparrows go after owls, or mockingbirds dive-bomb cats; perfectly reasonable. And then the titles rolled and people started to laugh.
So, by way of consolation, a song that always reminds me of a murderous flock of small birds
Hee. Thank you. I actually have it, but now I will imagine it as a storm of wings and stabbing beaks.
Legend also has it that if you catch the night sparrow, you'll suffer from severe night-blindness.
Tell me you've got those in the Provinces.
no subject
I do now.
no subject
no subject
Why?
no subject
I had a very similar disheartening experience at the Brattle (of all places!) when they were showing The Dark Crystal a week or two back. Yes, some of the special effects are outdated and Jen is a truly frustrating protagonist (All the "What do I do? Where do I go? Who is this Augrah? Which shard should I take?" voiceovers were dubbed in after a bad preview, apparently) but this young hipper-than-thou crowd talked constantly and laughed ironically at every effect and Muppet movement and every time the Skesis Chamberlain did that simpering whine of his. It doesn't help that he does it so many times that it does grow funny through repetition, but they laughed at it from the very first. I guess I should just be thankful they didn't echo it back at him.
But the art direction is gorgeous, the puppeteering is incredible, some of the large character movements are amazing when you consider how many people it took working simultaneously to pull off what looks so damn natural, and it was all lost on them.
(An example of the high wit on display: "My name is Jen." "THAT'S A GIRL'S NAME, HURR HURR")
I was annoyed and very much felt Get Off My Lawnish about it all (I saw the film first-run in 1982; this film was older than these moviegoers by a third fer crying out loud.) However, I chalked it up to going to the second half of a double feature on a Saturday night at a movie theater that serves booze in a college town. The crowd had just seen Labyrinth and were on quite a few drinks already, so they were well socially-lubricated and in top ironic form in their minds.
Happiness at seeing local movie theatres do good business at war with annoyance at local movie audiences who just don't know how to behave. I'm very sorry it had to happen to you at a Hitchcock film.
no subject
Which I understand! And there are moments of deliberate humor in The Birds, often in that nervy way—the famous scene where the crows settle silently behind Tippi Hedren as she smokes and glances edgily around, never in the right direction until it's too late and the playground is a bristling, black-feathered mass, is the malicious inverse of her first few scenes in Bodega Bay, where she's the one stealthily observing Mitch, waiting for him to realize only too late about her. The know-it-all drunk in the diner who keeps cheerily singing out, "End of the world!" is classic comic relief, although he's also (like so many fools) the character who tells you what kind of film you're really watching. The suddenness with which the gas station attendant drops is funny, it's so marionette-limbed and unexpected, until you realize it's because a bird has essentially icepicked him on flyby. But the people who not only laughed, but started to applaud when the crows mobbed the children, I don't know what the hell. Next time I am yelling for everyone to shut up.
I had a very similar disheartening experience at the Brattle (of all places!) when they were showing The Dark Crystal a week or two back.
I'm so sorry! I saw Labyrinth there in 2007, I think, and the audience noise was mostly in appreciation of David Bowie.
(An example of the high wit on display: "My name is Jen." "THAT'S A GIRL'S NAME, HURR HURR")
*somebody else's head desk*
I was annoyed and very much felt Get Off My Lawnish about it all (I saw the film first-run in 1982; this film was older than these moviegoers by a third fer crying out loud.
Next time, maybe you should bring a cane just in case.
(My introduction to The Dark Crystal was actually the illustrated book, which they had at the Cambridge Library; I didn't see the film until I was in college. Jim Henson properly warped my childhood, though.)
Happiness at seeing local movie theatres do good business at war with annoyance at local movie audiences who just don't know how to behave. I'm very sorry it had to happen to you at a Hitchcock film.
Thank you. I just keep thinking that people who come to arthouse theaters must not come there explicitly to be dicks . . .