An Old Favorite.

I haven't been to the movies in a while, so I thought I'd take us back, way back, to the time of Alfred Hitchcock and his movie, The Birds.  This movie has earned a reputation as a horror film.  To today's desensitized audience like myself, it looks like it tries to be scary and fails miserably.  If you like horror that gives you jump-scares, like most horror movies do, then look elsewhere.  The Birds focuses on building suspense.  We watch, first introduced to Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren, as she tracks down a man, Mitch Brenner, to the small town of Bodega Bay intent on playing a practical joke on him.  The story changes from a playful romance to a suspense thriller when the characters of the story are attacked by swarms birds of all shapes and sizes, and forced to stay inside a boarded up house, while the three women in the house are all traumatized or hysterical, and Mitch Brenner, played by Rod Taylor, tries to hold back the swarm of deadly animals with the sheer force of his masculine presence.

It is at this point that the film reaches its high point, as the birds swarm the house, and constantly thud against it, while the people inside struggle to keep their sanity.  Blood sweat and tears of the actors went in this scene, literally.  Ms Hedren was bitten many times by the birds used in the film, partly because of the director's opinion that actors should be treated like cattle.  There are many horrible stories I could tell about how Alfred Hitchcock mistreated his actors, but that's not my job.

The Birds may have a severe absence of the cheap tricks that we have come to expect out of modern films, but it is a classic, and I recommend that everyone should see it at least once.  I give it an eight out of ten

   
                                      Tippi Hedren (Left) Rod Taylor (Right

Catching the Things that People Miss.

When you go in to The Hunger Games: Catching fire, you expect acting as good as the last one, them to stay true to the book that you read going into the theater, and you expect that they will have stepped up the special effects from last movie's cheap CGI fire.  You get two and a half of those things.
             The movie stays true to the book except in the case of the new "Head Gamemaker," Plutarch Heavensbee, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  You get a couple of scenes with him in talking with the president that put a whole new perspective on the story.
             Those scenes are stunningly well acted out.  The same cannot be said of those which feature leading lady Jennifer Lawrence.  During the first half of the movie, when the story is centered in the highly advertised "Victory Tour," she talks too fast, and her more emotional scenes are played down so that the filmmakers can show off how good their white uniformed "Peacekeepers" are with billy clubs.  When they get to the second half of the movie, which I get the impression was worked on much more carefully, we get the same acting that we know and love out of Lawrence, as well as the awesome acting of new cast members, Sam Claflin, Jena Malone, and Jeffery Wright.  
             The visual effects are improved enough to look like something out of James Cameron's Avatar, except in  the ease of Katniss's trademark fire clothing.  We get a good look at this with the high tech stages of the capitol, the giant hovercrafts that float above everything, and most of all the "Districts," which serve as huge backdrops for forced speeches and scenes of incredible brutality.  The only flaw in these districts are the people in them who in the book are supposed to be starving, but all look stunningly well fed.  A problem that was extremely evident in the last movie.  I suppose there's not much you can do about that though unless you want to risk being as cruel as "The Capitol" themselves