#thanks for the bird fear Alfred Hitchcock

[imdoingwhateverisnext]

Nights of the Roosters

The past two nights, the door in which I normally enter and leave my home through have had 2 giant roosters sitting on the porch. I tried to shew them away, but they seemed almost sedated. I called every one I knew with livestock knowledge to no avail. I was concerned for the birds because my pit bull murders chickens if she sees one on our property. I did not want to have to clean up the carcasses. My son usually does that if he is home, but this time he wasn't.

The birds weren't being harmful or aggressive, they were a little loud at times, but they were mostly just sitting there. It had been raining a lot the past two days, so maybe they just wanted shelter and this was all they could find, I thought to myself.

I left to go to the store from my back porch through the sliding glass door. When I came back home I honked my horn multiple times as I drove past the side porch to see if the noise would scare them off. It did not. Neither rooster even flinched or fluttered a feather. They both just looked at me as if to say, "Lady, we are just sitting here, what is all of this noise for?"

I'll admit, I do not like birds that much (thanks Alfred Hitchcock). I appreciate the beauty, and I really love to look at them flying and hear their songs. I do not like any bird to come flying toward my face, nor do I like being chased by them. I fear the beaks and talons. My grandma had huge geese that used to chase me to my car with their wings outstretched. I don't know what I thought they were going to do to me, but their heads came up to just below my breasts, which is too tall for a bird to come running towards me, and I did not like it. I ran every time.

These two guys were large for roosters. They looked almost like twins. As far as chickens/roosters go, they were very beautiful. The feathers, brown and red and shiny as if they had just gone to a spa. They looked like someone had left them on my porch as some sort of peace offering. I suddenly thought back to the poor goat from the original Jurassic Park movie. Sitting there waiting, oblivious to it's inevitable fate. My pit bull would be the T Rex in this story.

They obviously knew not, the horrors that would surely await them less than 6 feet away behind a closed door. When it comes to chickens make no mistake, this dog is a killing machine. She is fast, strong and kills efficiently. She doesn't want to eat them, she just wants to kill them (if they are on our property). I don't like it. I keep her inside or fenced in with an electric wire at the bottom of the chain link (the only solution we could find to keep her from digging out and attacking birds and rabbits). Occasionally the fence fails, and like the raptors of Jurassic Park, she will test them from time to time. When the fence fails, she is gone. She is an escape expert. I once thought about trying to make a living just letting her test other peoples fences for weakness (like a computer hacker finding the chinks in your digital armor. Sometimes she will return home covered in blood, but most of the time just mud. She loves people and I have never seen this dog harm a kid or human (not ever). She is very timid and loving when she is around people (rambunctiously lovable at times). I retrieved her from a kill shelter. She was on doggy death row. She is blind in her left eye. She was approximately 3 years old when we got her (so they thought).

I felt bad for the roosters because they had no idea how close they were to their own demise. If she were to see or catch a whiff of them, she might try to run past me to get to them, then...bad news for all of us. Them for getting slaughtered, and me for having to carry the corpses to the end of my property near the creek. I have only had to do it once. It was a large chicken, it was still warm. I had just seen it near the front door, in less than 2 minutes it was a warm bird carcass with a few loose feathers lying around a pool of blood, right next to my car in my driveway. I knew if I tripped over it in the dark wearing flip-flops it would be way worse than if I just carried it away by its warm bloody foot, hanging upside down as I squealed, screeched, and and tiptoed through the tall grass like a grossed out little girl.

At 2 am I heard the loud rooster crow. It was so loud because they were 6 feet away from me behind a door and thin window pane.

Added bonus when I looked outside, I thought I had never seen chicken shit as large as this before. There was so much of it too! Maybe I was biased because it was in my daily path of walking? I remember going to the zoo and seeing an eagle shit, and I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, what if that hit my windshield as I was driving? It would break through it!' These rooster turds were not windshield shattering in size, but they were definitely slip in shit and break my leg sized.

The next day, after daylight around 8 or 9, they wandered off (I suppose looking for food). When my son came home the birds had returned. He tried his best to scare them away kindly.

Later after dark, my daughter came home. She tried shoving one off the porch with her foot, it wouldn't budge, but just looked at her. They are either sedated or beyond domesticated. I am not sure which.

My son, as soft-hearted as he is, said he felt bad to chase them off the porch with a broom. He did it three different times. The last time was more aggressive than before. However, he was the one who washed the shit off of the porch, so he was pretty highly motivated I assume.

I must say that I have never been so stealthily and completely double cock-blocked before. I suppose all I can say right now is touche to these birds and whom ever brought them to my house. Well played and please stop shitting on my porch, thank you.

***They have returned two nights in a row. I don't know if they will return tonight, but I will be looking and listening for them; for their safety and my convenience.

How these strange things continually happen to me is outside of my realm of total understanding. I suppose I should just be thankful for the continuous stream of weird and funny material to write about (considering how boring my life actually is).

[apocalypticavolition]

Let's (re)Read The Eye of the World! Chapter 29: Eyes Without Pity

Hello and welcome to my rewatch of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds! Despite being entirely about Alfred Hitchcock and not fantasy novels, this post contains massive spoilers for the series The Wheel of Time, from book 0 to book 14. If I could spoil books -2, -1, and 15 through 17 I would, but spoiler alert: They're never going to happen. Very sad.

This chapter starts with a wolf icon, which is a reflection of all of the new wolf powers that Perrin is going to be unwillingly developing this chapter. It's pretty straightforward.

Perrin exchanged glances with Egwene. She stuck her tongue out at Elyas’s back. Neither of them said anything. The one time Egwene had protested that Elyas was the one who wanted to go around the hills and he should not blame them, it got her a lecture on how sound carried, delivered in a growl that could have been heard a mile off.

Elyas is going above and beyond in terms of trying to keep these two kids safe, but he's yet another dude who is completely biting Egwene's head off. Girl puts up with way too much crap in this first book. And way worse in the next book. Thank goodness it'll be her turn to be awful in book three I guess.

“We’re wasting time,” he said, starting to stand, and a flock of ravens burst out of the trees below, fifty, a hundred black birds, spiraling into the sky. He froze in a crouch as they milled over the trees. The Dark One’s Eyes. Did they see me? Sweat trickled down his face.

More corvid slander, but I'll take it because they're about to be genuinely terrifying in a book filled with a lot of competition.

Elyas shook his head. “In the Borderlands I’ve seen sweeps with a thousand ravens to the flock. Not too often—there’s a bounty on ravens there—but it has happened.” He was still looking north. “Hush, now.”

It would be absolutely hilarious if one of the reasons that the Blightborder was constantly expanding was that the removal of carrion eaters from the ecosystem encouraged the exact kind of unnatural ecologies that thrive in the Blight.

Abruptly a fox burst out of the trees, running hard. Ravens poured from the branches after it. The beat of their wings almost drowned out a desperate whining from the fox. A black whirlwind dove and swirled around it. The fox’s jaws snapped at them, but they darted in, and darted away untouched, black beaks glistening wetly. The fox turned back toward the trees, seeking the safety of its den. It ran awkwardly now, head low, fur dark and bloody, and the ravens flapped around it, more and more of them at once, the fluttering mass thickening until it hid the fox completely. As suddenly as they had descended the ravens rose, wheeled, and vanished over the next rise to the south. A misshapen lump of torn fur marked what had been the fox.

A list of the Shadows' most competent servants:

Semirhage, for sending a super continent into civil war and coming closest to making Rand undo existence

Graendal, for almost winning the Last Battle single-handedly

These ravens

A second-to-last-place tie between virtually everyone else

Belal

Thank you I will not be taking notes.

Think, if you want to stay alive. Fear will kill you if you don’t control it.

Good advice, Elyas. Sadly, completely wasted on these two, as Perrin's fears never come close to killing him and Egwene's uncontrolled ones are entirely post-traumatic and not really her fault.

Moving in a stumbling trot, Perrin exchanged a glance with Elyas. The man’s yellow eyes were expressionless, but he knew. He said nothing, just watched Perrin and waited, all the while maintaining that effortless lope.

On the one hand, Elyas really doesn't seem to appreciate that this isn't the time. On the other hand, he's the only person who makes Perrin take any steps towards his personal growth, so it's hard to be that mad at him for it.

The wolves had no notions of time the way men did, no reasons to divide a day into hours. The seasons were time enough for them, and the light and the dark. No need for more. Finally Perrin worked out an image of where the sun would stand in the sky when the ravens overran them from behind. He glanced over his shoulder at the setting sun, and licked his lips with a dry tongue. In an hour the ravens would be on them, maybe less. An hour, and it was a good two hours to sunset, at least two to full dark.

I just love stuff this whole sequence. I don't have much to say about it, it's all just... grim and tense. Everything feels hopeless and I know for a fact that things are going to be all right.

Perrin looked at Egwene again and blinked away hot tears. He touched his axe and wondered if he had the courage. In the last minutes, when the ravens descended on them, when all hope was gone, would he have the courage to spare her the death the fox had died?

This is an interesting semi-recurring issue in Perrin's arc, one that kinda steps on Rand's toes and clashes with a few things; his having to learn the things that aren't his calls to make, whether it's marrying off his staff or deciding when to put someone out of their misery. It's something that could have been a better character beat if it had been focused on instead of his refusal to take responsibility, but like I said it's just weirdly clashing with that instead.

I think it's an artifact of the fact that the three ta'veren boys were originally going to be one character, maybe? Perrin was clearly the grab bag choice for overflow, either because Jordan had an intermediate step of trying to do two ta'veren before realizing even that was too much or because once he did the split he wanted to do three and didn't notice how the third leg of the tripod was shorter than the others.

Safety, that’s what. We made it, you bloody fools. No raven will cross that line . . . not one that carries the Dark One’s eyes, anyways. A Trolloc would have to be driven across, and there’d need to be something fierce pushing the Myrddraal to make him do the driving. 

Thanks for telling them that salvation was on the way, Elyas. The terror they felt being completely unnecessary is clearly very funny to you!

“A stedding,” Elyas roared. “You never listen to stories? Of course, there hasn’t been an Ogier here in three thousand odd years, not since the Breaking of the World, but it’s the stedding makes the Ogier, not the Ogier make the stedding.”

I believe this claim of Elyas's, since this particular stedding probably has the best documented history of the uninhabited one. It does make me wonder though why this one was overlooked the whole time. It was empty in Hawkwing's day when the population crisis wasn't anywhere near what it is now, and it's good enough land for the Ogier to work.

No questions. Not now. No explanations. Not ever. But a small voice taunted him. But you would have done it, wouldn’t you?

I'm trying so hard to not be unfair to Perrin, so let's just leave things at "Dude obviously cracked under the stress of their situation", but like... Jeez bro. It's a fucked up thing to think, even under the stress.

Artur Paendrag Tanreall, Artur Hawkwing, the High King, united all the lands from the Great Blight to the Sea of Storms, from the Aryth Ocean to the Aiel Waste, and even some beyond the Waste. He even sent armies the other side of the Aryth Ocean. The stories say he ruled the whole world, but what he really did rule was enough for any man outside of a story.

Is this another story having grown in the telling or early installment weirdness? In the established canon, the fleet that Artur sent to Shara never accomplished anything, which is really the more sensible outcome of a naval assault on an incredibly defensive nation. But it's been a thousand years and Shara's such a mystery that people definitely could believe it. I'm just not sure if Jordan believed it at the time too.

Artur Hawkwing died the very day the statue was finished, and his sons and the rest of his blood fought over who would sit on Hawkwing’s throne. The statue stood alone in the midst of these hills. The sons and the nephews and the cousins died, and the last of the Hawkwing’s blood vanished from the earth—except maybe for some of those who went over the Aryth Ocean.

Ishamael must really love these cruel ironies. He can be a real Bysshe!

[redshirtgal]

We know the first photo is an early publicity photo of Yeoman Janice Rand taken before the first season aired. And we know the second photo photo is the same Yeoman Rand wearing her signature beehive. So how did we get from the first hairstyle to the second? 

Gene Roddenberry had already approved one change in Yeoman Rand’s look. Instead of the blousy top and plain black slacks worn by females in both the first and second pilot, a more fitted tunic and a short skirted uniform was designed by William Ware Theiss. But Gene also wanted a more futuristic hairstyle for Rand. So Theiss designed her signature beehive. But those are not his hands in this set of photos. So whose are they?  They belong to Virginia Darcy, who was already a well-known and respected Hollywood stylist by the time she began working for Star Trek. Darcy was the one who actually took Theiss’s design and created the wig itself that she meticulously put on Grace Lee Whitney’s head every morning and adjusted it into place.

According to Whitney, the wig was created from two Max Factor wigs placed over a cone and woven together. Naturally, it was very heavy. Grace claimed it had to be nailed into place every morning to keep it from shifting when she moved. Virginia Darcy became one of Grace’s closest friends according to her autobiography, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy. Virginia would dish up the gossip from the days of when she was the hair stylist for Ester Williams on the set of the movie musicals in which Williams would display her swimming skills. However, Ms. Darcy’s stories often had Grace in stitches and that would set them both off laughing even more loudly. The sound evidently carried from the dressing room onto the nearby set and A.D. Greg Peters would often storm in angrily, telling them to tone it down because they had just ruined another of his takes.  *Special thanks to Billy Kobylak for letting me post these two rare photos. The back of Rand’s head was something you rarely saw in this much detail. 

Indeed if you had asked anyone she had ever worked with on a Hollywood set, he or she would likely have told you that Virginia Darcy loved to laugh and was known for keeping things lively. Yet she was very disciplined and a perfectionist when it came to her craft. 

By the time Virginia was hired for Star Trek’s first season, she had already accumulated quite a resume. Starting off as an apprentice in the major studios such as MGM, Universal, and Fox, she joined the Make-up and Hair Stylist Guild in 1947. Ms. Darcy was credited (and sometimes uncredited) with working on a number of Alfred Hitchcock films such The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Birds, and Marnie (she remained good friends with Tippi Hedren right up until her death in 2018). She was also a stylist for fourteen episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. That wasn’t all. Darcy had worked in movies such as Miracle on 34th Street and Cape Fear and in quite a number of popular television shows including The Munsters, McHale’s Navy, and Wagon Train. Virginia Darcy only worked as a hair stylist with Star Trek for one season, but her career continued. She served as a hair stylist in Funny Girl and Funny Lady as well as Kung Fu and The Dukes of Hazzard among others. In 1985, Virginia and two others were nominated for an Emmy for their work on the mini-series North and South. Shortly afterwards, she retired but kept in touch with her many friends and colleagues. Ms. Darcy died at age 98.  Now why would we go to so much trouble to spotlight a person who has what one would think is a minor position? Ms. Darcy wasn’t just any hair stylist. She had a stellar reputation before she was hired for Star Trek. And those hair styles, especially that of Yeoman Janice Rand’s, helped create the illusion we were watching the future unfold before us every bit as much as Theiss’s costumes, Matt Jefferies’ spaceships, or Wah Chang’s props. She is another example of Gene’s intention of hiring the very best people for his new show. 

[crowdvscritic]

crowd // REBECCA (1940)

Photo credits: IMDb.com

If you’ve ever felt like you can’t live up to expectations, have I got the movie for you. 

We meet our heroine (Joan Fontaine) in the south of France, working as a companion to an older woman touring Europe. But the highlight of her trip is meeting the dashing Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who proposes and whisks her to his home in England, Manderley. But the new Mrs. de Winter learns she has glamorous shoes to fill, specifically those of the first Mrs. de Winter. Rebecca, the previous mistress of Manderley, hosted elegant parties, earned the adoration of the staff, and left her husband in a fog upon her death. Maxim’s new bride is competing with Rebecca’s ghost not just for her husband’s affection but for her own happiness. 

Here’s the thing about Alfred Hitchcock movies: They don’t age. Like Rebecca, they remain captivating and beautiful for new audiences long after their time has passed. Rebecca may not be a pop culture icon like North by Northwest, Psycho, or Vertigo, but it’s just as well-paced, just as thrilling, and just as accessible. (Or as much as The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, To Catch a Thief—wow, I could keep going quite a long time.) While I’ve yet to marry a fancy pants widower with a fancy pants English estate—though I’m happy to report I do still have that option available to me—I still found Mrs. de Winter’s situation relatable. Mrs. de Winter is fighting for her her own slice of identity from the leftovers left of the hostess with the most-ess Rebecca. Wrestling with a queen bee for respect is a contest every woman knows too well—most of us are just lucky we aren’t tussling with a memory in effigy.

Rebecca’s tension doesn’t build thanks to sudden violence like Psycho or the mysterious circumstances of North by Northwest—it’s a slower burn, like Rear Window or Vertigo. The circumstances we watch may not be unusual, but a subtle dread manifests thanks to social anxieties and fears of the unknown. Anyone who has lived through the horrors of middle school knows the isolation that comes with not fitting in your own skin or with the people around you—unfortunately for Mrs. de Winter, she can’t just hold out till graduation. She has married into a world of privilege and into the arms of a man haunted by his past, and our unease grows with every new revelation that builds a new bar on her gilded cage. While I won’t spoil the ending, I will say its most dramatic moments feel entirely earned by then, though you would have never guessed in the first scenes that’s where we were headed.

Bottom line: Rebecca is still a thrill 81 years later.

POPCORN POTENTIAL: 9/10

[agentmanatee]

6, 10 and 15 for Jemma Simmons? Thank you <3333 💕💕💕

Did you want to punch me in the gut with these 😈 asks? Because that's what they feel like 😉

6. Their vices (physical or emotional)

Dissections, Jemma craves to know how everything functions and that means getting elbow deep into dead animals

Arrogance, Jemma knows she's superior to others and that means she's not always willing to listen when she thinks she's right

Desire to save the world and everybody she loves on it means she risks overstepping a moral line (ie, making ChroniCoulson with Fitz, bringing May back from the dead...not that everyone's glad she did those things, but she did do them without their express permission)

Fitz, all logic goes out the window when it comes to protecting/saving Fitz

10. Fears and phobias

She can't save someone who needs her to

Losing her loved ones

Not being able to recognize those she loves

Losing Fitz, whether it is him out of her life or him out of this world or to his mind, losing Fitz is her greatest fear

The Doctor

Her own dark side

Losing Alya in life or in memory

Fitz forgetting her

Dementia

Having to say goodbye forever

Birds - She likes to say her extensive knowledge makes her know just what those flying beady-eyed creatures are capable of, but really Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is the scariest movie she has ever seen - Fitz has sworn to secrecy but lords it over her

15. What it takes to make them cry

Feeling powerless

Facing her greatest fears

Losing loved ones 

Watching her team and family suffer

Saying goodbye

The Pixar movie Coco has her sobbing when she learns that spirits fade away as the last living memory or them is forgotten

[amanda-teaches]

59?

59: Do I have any strange phobias?

Oh my gosh, I guess it would depend what you consider strange. I’m afraid of birds, because my dad showed me the Alfred Hitchcock movie when I was 7 and the next week I was attacked by a seagull at Seaworld. Totally valid fear, in my opinion, but people think it’s weird.

I’m also afraid of flying, but so is Dean, so I’m in good company.

Thanks for the ask, honey!

Ask Me Questions

[jonathan-cranes-mistress-of-fear]

My horror headcanon: Jonathan is afraid to watch Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' because it reminded him of that traumatic punishment his Great Grandma would do to him. One time when he once watches it with his friends, he would cover up in his blanket to avoid watching a scene that has birds in it. Even though he wouldn't mind watching everyone in this movie being attack by a birds in terror, he would avoid watching it entirely. Do you like my very own headcanon?

Yeah, I like that! I’ve never seen that movie, but from what I do know about it, I’m sure it would be triggering for Jonathan That being said, I think he’d watch it to help him overcome his fear because I headcanon that Year One Crane conquers his phobia of crows, seeing as he has them for companions in other comics. it just makes sense to me.

It’s still a GREAT idea and I thank you for sharing it with me!

[aion-rsa]

Why The Woman in the Window Fails to Channel Alfred Hitchcock

https://ift.tt/3byAIVa

This article contains The Woman in the Window spoilers.

Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window is not shy about its Hitchcockian influence. It’s there in both subtle and overt ways from the very first scene. During one of the film’s opening shots, the camera pans around Amy Adams’ ridiculously spacious New York City brownstone and passes a television screen that is inexplicably playing the ending to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) in slow-motion, with Jimmy Stewart wrestling against the grip of an out-of-frame Raymond Burr.

With a very similar premise to Rear Window—a slightly deranged New Yorker pries into the hidden lives of her neighbors—The Woman in the Window freely owns up to its influences and aspirations. Sadly, Rear Window, this is not. Which may explain why 20th Century Studios (back when it was called 20th Century Fox) delayed the movie for reshoots, and then Disney ended up selling this otherwise incredibly polished and stylish thriller to the industry’s algorithm farm upstate: Netflix.

Admittedly, The Woman in the Window is not intended to be a direct remake of Rear Window or any other Hitchcock picture. The talent involved is too smart for that. Rather the film is taking a plethora of inspirations from various Hitch joints, and marrying that Master of Suspense ethos with a modern sensibility created by author A. J. Finn, who wrote the novel the film is based on. I have not read the book, but the bestseller clearly benefited from the boom of “grip lit” novels—thrillers often centered around the unreliable perspective of flawed female protagonists—in the 2010s.

So it is that The Woman in the Window’s Dr. Anna Fox (Adams) is an exceedingly troubled individual, suffering from a trauma we only learn late in the story was caused by the tragic death of her husband and child. Those deaths were in turn precipitated by Anna’s own infidelities, which left her distracted while driving on an icy road. Hence the audience is asked to question everything we see in The Woman in the Window, including whether Anna really met the woman she thinks is Jane Russell (Julianne Moore) and if Jane was then actually murdered across the street.

In essence, it’s the same setup of Rear Window where Anna thinks her neighbor (Gary Oldman in the newer movie’s case) murdered his wife, but the accusation is clouded in doubt for even the audience since Anna is such an unreliable narrator that for two-thirds of her movie, she convinces us that she’s going through a divorce instead of grief.

And yet, none of these added elements distract from the fact that this movie wants to be Hitchcock, or at least the heir to what many consider to be his masterpiece. It’s there every time Anna spies on her neighbors through the long lens of her old school camera, which unsubtly harkens back to Stewart’s Jeff doing the same in Rear Window. And it’s woven into the silver mane of hair on Oldman’s head, which intentionally echoes Burr’s sinister everyman who lives in the apartment across from Jeff’s.

Even the film’s opening shot more covertly recalls another Hitchcock classic starring James Stewart: Vertigo (1958). With its slowly spiraling image of snow drops drifting in a circle through the air—an image we later learn is the last thing Anna saw before her family died—we’re retroactively reminded of the spirals that consumed the mind of Stewart’s Scottie in that film. The zoom-in, pullback dolly shot Hitch also made famous in that movie of nerve-inducing stairwells is likewise visually referenced in The Woman in the Window, with the stairwell in Anna’s home recreating the same high anxiety composition as a set of stairs in one of Hitchcock’s earliest films, the silent British production, Blackmail (1929). I’m also fairly convinced that the shot of Adams opening her eye in the second image of The Woman in the Window is a visual recreation of Janet Leigh’s frozen death stare in Psycho (1960).

Right down to its plot about wives causing a case of mistaken identities, the Hitchcockian overtones are heavy in The Woman in the Window. So why doesn’t it work?

For all of Hitchcock’s innovative understanding of the filmmaking craft, and panache for droll showmanship as the “Master of Suspense,” his own passions and fixations (particularly at their most perverse) colored his work with an eerie madness. Or at least the best ones. Sure, he is one of the first directors to make himself a household name via attention-grabbing cameos and almost car dealership-like theatrics in the rollout of new movies’ marketing. And when Tippi Hedren asked him why her character in The Birds (1963) would open a door if there are menacing noises on the other side, he replied, “Because I said so.”

But then, despite its popularity, The Birds is hardly one of Hitchcock’s best films. And the hypnotic effect he created with the better ones often spoke to something truer, and frankly uglier, than the glossy veneer of his star-studded casts. Ironically, this is probably truest about the two Hitch films Woman in the Window most desperately emulates: Rear Window and Vertigo.

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In both films, one could sense the devious pleasure Hitchcock took in casting Jimmy Stewart—the all-American face of Frank Capra classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—as his on screen avatar.

In the case of Rear Window, Stewart still plays an ostensibly heroic individual. Jeff is a man’s man and a photojournalist who goes into warzones, vacations on safaris, and breaks his leg while covering a high performance car race from a dangerous vantage point. But there is something more unsettling beneath all that machismo which is what won the attention of a much younger high society girl, Lisa (Grace Kelly).

There’s a gnawing suspicion about the awfulness of his fellow man, and a peculiar desire to revel in it. When Jeff can’t do that from behind enemy lines, he’ll settle for studying it in his own backyard—it’s a view he shares with a slew of neighbors overlooking a lower Manhattan courtyard. He doesn’t start spying on them though because he heard a scream and fears for a woman he just met. He does it out of boredom while his leg is bandaged up. Well that, plus a perverse curiosity, be it in the form of lust for the dancer across the way, Miss Torso, or a voyeuristic fascination with the despair of a woman he nicknames Miss Lonelyhearts. That he discovers a man murdered his wife is entirely happenstance.

Only after he seduces Lisa into sharing his obsessions—to the point where she’ll break into the neighbor’s home—does he realize she’s the perfect girl for him. And after she’s been fully indoctrinated, she shares his “ghoulish” disappointment (her word) when they’re falsely made to believe for a moment that Lars Thorwald’s wife is alive and out of town. That of course turns out to be a misdirection. Lars (Burr) is having an affair and has his mistress pose as his dead wife for a train ride.

Mistaken identity becomes even more pivotal in Vertigo, Hitch’s most revealing cinematic manifesto for how he sees himself. In that film, Stewart appears again but as someone who is hardly depicted as an alpha male. The only hero in this story dies at the beginning when Stewart’s Scottie is so crippled by terror that he cannot save himself as he dangles from a rooftop. The police partner who comes back for him to lift him up ends up taking the literal fall.

Afterward, Scottie (like Anna Fox) is seen as damaged goods by himself and everyone who knows him. Particularly in the 1950s, being diagnosed as suffering from acrophobia or any form of mental illness was treated as an inherent form of weakness and a deficiency of character. An onscreen judge spells this out after Scottie again appears to let his vertigo ruin him, causing him to fail to save the woman he thinks is Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). He can’t find the wherewithal to follow her up a bellow tower, and is then treated to the horror of seeing a woman fall to her death outside.

Of course the twist of the movie is that Novak is not playing Madeleine; she’s Judy Barton, the woman whom Madeleine’s husband Gavin (Tom Helmore) has hired to impersonate his wife and seduce Scottie before running up a high stairwell. At the top, Gavin waited to throw his actual wife to her doom. Unfortunately for Judy, Scottie’s broken mind wouldn’t stop looking for her until one day he found the woman he thought he loved still walking the streets of San Francisco.

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The Woman in the Window blends these narrative elements. Once again, a protagonist with a phobia (agoraphobia here) mistakes a blonde woman—Julianne Moore’s Katie—for another character’s wife. When Jennifer Jason Leigh barges into Anna’s brownstone, it’s meant to be as bewildering as when Scottie sees Novak still walking around, now as a brunette, in Vertigo. Of course Woman in the Window plays with the convention by making it the biological mother of Oldman and Leigh’s adopted son whom is murdered, as opposed to the actual wife. Indeed, Moore’s Katie just enjoys playing into Anna’s misconception that she’s the wife of Oldman’s Alistair Russell.

But these reliances on miscommunication and unreliable narrators aren’t really in service of anything other than the twist. The thrill, such as it is, amounts to little more than Anna’s epiphany of staring into a photograph and realizing thanks to a reflection that a blonde woman played by Moore really was inside her home. The rug is then even further pulled when it’s revealed that (SURPRISE!) it wasn’t Alistair who murdered Katie, but Katie’s actual biological son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger).

However, the twist is as empty as Anna’s painfully quiet home. It’s intended to be a “gotcha” reveal, but it never really gets under the skin.

By contrast, the idea that Madeleine is really Judy in Vertigo is a gateway to explore Hitchcock’s vices: blondes and the desire to control them. It’s why Stewart’s Scottie becomes as manipulative as an auteur with a fetish, and as possessive of his new paramour as the filmmaker who’s still trying to replace his greatest leading lady collaborator after she’s retired from acting to be the Princess of Monaco. Scottie maniacally remaking Judy into Madeleine, and Jimmy Stewart remaking Kim Novak into Grace Kelly, is some bizarre but intoxicating allegory about Hitchcock and his own self-image of his obsession.

Notably, Vertigo wasn’t a hit in 1958. In fact, it flopped at the box office and was only reevaluated as a masterpiece in the 1980s, after Hitch’s death. It was too weird and, intentionally or not, introspective for the ‘50s. And personally, I still prefer Rear Window for better balancing the director’s eccentricities with his commercial instincts to make a top notch thriller which can be revealing about the darker side of human nature yet still remain addictively entertaining and playful.

Woman in the Window attempts to wear the style of both, but has no controlling idea to add to those affectations other than a subversion of their twists: it’s the son who murders the other woman instead of the husband who kills the wife. The meaninglessness of this mangled reversal is why it feels so cheap when the movie devolves into a slasher flick, with Ethan chasing Anna to the rooftop as if he were attempting to star in “Scream 5” instead of “Rear Window 2.”The Woman in the Window is a loving impersonation of Hitch, but be it a thriller or a comedy, an impersonation is never going to carry a movie.

The post Why The Woman in the Window Fails to Channel Alfred Hitchcock appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3wfZJwt

[deannadupont]

For me it was a terrifying Freddy Kruger moment! We were at Barataria Preserve and spotted what we thought was a large hawk in the sky. Then it landed a ways in front of us. We then saw what looked like an eagles nest in a tree up the path. As we traveled forward on the walkway, it was a huge bird in the tree, not a nest and what had landed was another huge bird just like it. I am extremely fearful of birds that don’t talk. I actually like talking birds but any other ones scare me to death thanks to Alfred Hitchcock. Having to pass these two things that now were on both sides of me was horrible. I did not know at the time what they were. I took a picture and used gogle lens. It showed me that they were vultures! Well, that did not help my fear. We made it past. Ok good, they didn’t kill me. I joked about how they would probably be laying in wait on our way back. A while later, we finished the trail forward and started back. Same place, as we rounded the trail, there they were. One in the branches and one in the middle of the path in front of us. Staring at us, daring us to pass. It looked like an old western with the gunslinger at high noon. This vulture had no fear! I had enough for all of us. It then flew up on the low branch directly in front of us and right over our heads. We would have to go under it. Right under it. We lived, of course. But I aged at least 5 years and am pretty sure I am still being laughed at by a colony of vultures somewhere in Barataria. They know. Birds know. Lol The video is only on Facebook and it’s long and will be boring to most people. However, there is a moment in the video where I tell Alicia to go first and as she gets ready to pass, the vulture lifts its tail and proceeded to poop. It was literally aiming for her! They know! They do! Lol (at Barataria Preserve) https://www.instagram.com/p/CKGhZpNjSiz/?igshid=1qppa2s63xj6p

[janiedean]

hi lavi, could i ask who your favourite films and/or directors are? i'm a bit bored, and i really watch all genres. thank you

aw sure XD well okay this is complicated because a lot of my favorite directors haven’t made movies that would automatically make it into my top ten and some movies in my top ten aren’t by my favorite directors but I’ll just give you the top ten movies + top ten directors and movies I like best from each XD

movies:

blade runner (scott is a v. good director tho lately he’s meh, I’d recommend his old stuff up until gladiator not including it tbh tho it’s not bad I just don’t really like it, esp. alien and thelma and louise, plus black hawk down and the martian are the two best post-gladiator)

casablanca (best curtiz movie tbh)

some like it hot (more on wilder later but ANYTHING of his is gold)

a perfect world (more on clint eastwood later same as above)

the man who shot liberty valance (more john ford later ^^^)

last tango in paris (I KNOW IT’S CONTROVERSIAL AND I KNOW EVERYTHING BUT IT’S STILL A REALLY GREAT MOVIE separate art and artist please guys /o\)

rashomon (more on kurosawa later)

nosferatu (the original silent movie by murnau please check anything murnau did his silent movies are The Best)

der himmel uber berlin/wings of desire (wenders is like a director I love a lot but he’s not for all tastes so I’ll just recommend the american friend here too)

merry christmas mr. lawrence (oshima is usually great but this one is just My Fave TM)

FIFTEEN FAVE DIRECTORS (not in any particular order)

billy wilder: GUYS WILDER IS AMAZING I LOVE WILDER SFM ANY WILDER MOVIE IS GOLD my faves other than some like it hot which is perfect, flawless and virtually not reachable by anything are the apartment, sabrina, the lost weekend, sunset boulevard, ace in the hole, one two three!, irma la douce, front page and the private life of sherlock holmes (BEST HOLMES MOVIE EVER) but like anything of his is amazing

stanley kubrick: guys are we serious like every kubrick movie is a gem, my faves are paths of glory, full metal jacket, 2001: a space odyssey and the shining but really watch everything

clint eastwood: guys I really love eastwood bear with me. EVERYTHING is recommended other than the above movie which is his best imo, but other than that, unforgiven, the bridges of madison county, million dollar baby, gran torino, bird and mystic river are masterpieces but if you love yourself watch the iwo jima movies both flags of our fathers and letters from iwo jima, and when it comes to good shit starring eastwood that he didn’t direct, ALL THE LEONE MOVIES HE MADE WITH HIM ALL OF THEM, plus the don siegel ones - dirty harry and the beguiled (ESPECIALLY THE BEGUILED) are gems okay. yes, dirty harry is a gem for its genre fight me.

john ford: guys ford was a genius okay i love everything he chose to do even if I didn’t agree with his politics I guess, but anyway, other than liberty valance: STAGECOACH (TOTAL MASTERPIECE I WILL FIC ONE DAY), the searchers, the last hurrah, THE GRAPES OF WRATH (PLS WATCH THE GRAPES OF WRATH) and the quiet man.

michael cimino: GUYS PLS WATCH CIMINO MOVIES I LOVE CIMINO SFM WATCH ALL OF THEM tho the best is the deer hunter, but thunderbolt and lightfoot is also excellent, and gates of heaven and the year of the dragon are some of my faves slkdgjkldsgj GUYS I REALLY LOVE CIMINO LOVE YOURSELF WATCH THE DEER HUNTER

akira kurosawa: kurosawa is The Best, no like The Best, and prob. your best choice if you want to try out japanese film because he has a very approachable style - my fave’s rashomon because I’m obvious and not original, but other recommendation are seven samurai, ran, throne of blood, the hidden fortress (which was taken as an inspiration for star wars too!), the lower depths, YOJIMBO and sanjuro (its sequel) and also drunken angel, and ikiru. lOVE YOURSELF WATCH KUROSAWA

terry gilliam: okay gilliam is really my jam and I love everything his head chooses to go for. my uber fave forever is the fisher king (I LOVE THE FISHER KING TO PIECES IT’S MY ULTIMATE COMFORT MOVIE), but try also 12 monkeys, BRAZIL AKA THE BEST 1984 ADAPTATION EVER and the monty python movies ofc

roman polanski: guys I know it’s controversial people but he does very good movies. should you choose to engage: the pianist, fearless vampire killers, rosemary’s baby and chinatown are movies you really wanna see

frank capra: it’s a wonderful life ruined me forever, but then there’s it happened one night, arsenic and old lace and mr smith goes to washington which will forever have my heart ;____;

quentin tarantino: …. tarantino might be my jam. like. a lot. everything is recommended tbh esp. the two kill bills, inglorious basterds, pulp fiction and reservoir dogs but really, everything tarantino is

alfred hitchcock: SOME CLASSIC SUSPENSE HERE GUYS. north by northwest, psycho, NOTORIUS, spellbound, rope, the man who knew too much, rear window, to catch a thief and the birds are your friends too

mario bava: GUYS LOVE YOURSELF WATCH GOOD ITALIAN HORROR EVERYONE COPIED FROM. black sunday is the best but also black sabbath (where did the group take their name from :PPP), the whip and the body (BDSM christopher lee!), chain reaction and operation: fear are total excellent shit

fritz lang: LANG IS THE BEST LANG IS A GENIUS watch M, metropolis, the dr. mabuse movies, the woman in the window, rancho notorius, the big heat and while the city sleeps to start with but all his shit is amazing

francois truffaut: for some a+++ french cinema, the 400 blows, jules et jim, fahrenheit 451, the green room and the last metro

for my fave comedy director, go with mel brooks. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

also: I had recommended an anon a bunch of movies from different genres here plus some directors I regrettably didn’t mention here (ORSON WELLES) so here you go :D if you want more specific stuff ie just italian movies or whatever I’m glad to provide :D

[club-pesca-blog]

Five Fave Fab Birds

Janice Winkler

 The Penguin is a non-passerine bird. This means it cannot sit on a perch.

The emperor penguin might look like a seven-year-old child, if we take height into account, and might weigh as much as I did when I was younger and did not want to eat.

Like all penguins, and all humans, it looks at the sky in awe of other birds – planes included – hoping to make it to a futuristic future where its body is feather-light in the air.

Just like me, it likes fish and it loves eating squid, but it doesn’t fry it or anything.

It can hold its breath for eighteen minutes under water, like the record in women’s history of submerged breath holding.

The emperor is the only penguin that breeds during the Antarctic winter. Nothing, not even the coldest of weathers, prevents it from bringing new life into the world.

They tend to die when they are around twenty years old, but if they are lucky, they can reach fifty, as the men of the 1920s only could.

 Surprisingly, the humming bird is also non-passerine.

It measures from 5 to 13 cm long, the Bee Hummingbird being the smallest of all.

Picture it, the bee variant. It is the size of a potato knish. You could savor a bee hummingbird just by separating your lips and letting the bird fly in.  

In Spanish, it is also called Zunzuncito or pájaro mosca (fly bird) or elfo de las abejas (bees’ elf).

I guess the fly attribute is due to its size, but if I think of a fly – and I’m actually looking at one now – I can only sense dirt and rubbish.

“Bees’ elf”, on the other hand, sounds much more honoring. Someone has recognized the status of the bee hummingbird over the smart and humanity-provider bees.

An elf must be a friendly leader.

There should be a fairy tale titled “The bees’ elf”.  

 Eclectus parrots are flirtatious.

The males have evolved green to camouflage with the rainforest leaves.

The females are bright red to sexily let their macho mates know where they are hidden: a hollow where to nest.

The males fly to get food for their lovers, which they give them, beak-to-beak.

The females take care of their “houses”.

The males provide.

They mate.

They give birth to cute chicks, which will then become homemakers or food providers.

And life cycles on, either exciting and tiring or comfortable and boring.

 Crows are obviously passerine: “…perched above my chamber door / Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door. / Perched, and sat, and nothing more…”

 Though the visitor in Poe’s poem was not a crow but a raven, to the ordinary eye (like mine) both species look the same.

 As for crows, they gained celeb-status thanks to Alfred Hitchcock.

 The Chihuahuan Raven is a mix of both, with the shape of a raven but the size of a crow.

 They are always dressed for fancy parties.

  Unlike penguins, an ostrich may weigh as much as I do now that I do eat quite a lot.

 They have superhero running speed.

 I would love to rent an ostrich which would take me on vacation.

 I would sit on its feathered body, embrace its long neck with my two arms and we would go on an amazing ride together.

 I would not fear that any dangerous animal could chase us.

 It would be fiercely kicked off by my ostrich,

 my sweet and caring ostrich.

 --------

A partir de Abril, en Club de Pesca:

THE PLEASURE OF WRITING

English as a tool, not a barrier.

Jueves 18 a 20, por Janice Winkler.

INFORMES e INSCRIPCIÓN: poesiadelplata@gmail.com

[crownviper-blog]

VERY LONG CHARACTER SURVEY.

RULES. repost —— don’t reblog. tag ten people. TAGGED BY. @honeycut​! Thank you! TAGGING. @fricde​, @acritas, @theeternalsun, @thesxmmersword, @magicbound, @rahovart-underneath, @arielshepard, @detancarville, @cxrvinae, @desertbloomx, @temerianloyalist!

BASICS.

FULL NAME: Vernon Roche. NICKNAME/S: Minus commander? Absolutely none, as it should be. AGE: 43. BIRTHDAY:  February 3rd, 1229 (February 3rd, 1974 in modern verse) ETHNIC GROUP: Temerian  NATIONALITY: Temerian LANGUAGE/S: Common Speech (Polish and English in modern verse). SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Bisexual. ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Biromantic. RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Verse dependent, though generally Roche is single and often enough engages in one-night stands. CLASS: Previously lower-class and in poverty, now a comfortable middle-class. HOMETOWN / AREA: Razwan, Temeria CURRENT HOME: Razwan, Temeria PROFESSION: Commander of The Blue Stripes, Temeria’s Special Forces. Evidently a part-time regicide. In the modern verse, he is an agent for internal security.

PHYSICAL.

HAIR: Brown and graying. Kept short, but often messy. A touch of curl. EYES: Warm brown, humorously tepid in comparison to his temper. NOSE: High nose bridge, slightly tipped downward and sharper. Cuts a stronger profile.  FACE: Rounder with a noticeably squared-off jaw. Either because of difficulties in life, his perpetual frown, or a mixture of both, he has stress lines mostly around his brows and mouth. There is a scar marring the upper left corner of his forehead.  LIPS: Thinner and regularly seen in a frown or a scowl, scheming, contemplating, or simply displeased. Has a strong cupid’s bow.   COMPLEXION: Tanner than many of his compatriots, his complexion is usually a touch darker as a result of consistently being outdoors. There is a yellow hue to his skin which makes him look more warm than cool. BLEMISHES: Other than scars? None. SCARS: Considering his line of work, surprisingly few. Over his years in service, Roche has accumulated 5 notable scars, all deep and endured with little complaint. He’s one at the upper left corner of his forehead after having been nicked by a blade. There is one long scar running along the lower half of his left arm earned at a different time but still with an enemy’s blade. At his front, Roche bears the result of a strike to his right hip. There are two at his back, one adorning his left shoulder blade (left by an arrow) and the last at his left hip (sword). TATTOOS: He has 6 in total. His most notable one is the huge back tattoo depicting two snakes coiling around a sword (service tattoo). Below it resting just above his left hip are 3 fleur-de-lis dedicated to Temeria. On his right arm is a half-sleeve showing a hawk – a bird of prey – holding an arrow. To his front, Roche sports the roman numeral for 1267 (MCCLXVII) that represents the year he took command of The Blue Stripes. The Blue Stripes (inked in as 5 horizontal black bars) is found on his upper right abdomen, edging close to the side. His final tattoo is found on his left lower arm showing swords laid out in a circle.  HEIGHT: 6′0″ / 183 centimeters. WEIGHT: 174 pounds / 79 kilograms. BUILD: Slightly above average at 6′0″. He is a toned man, but not abundantly muscular. Those muscles he does have speak to strength and purpose, not aesthetic/looks. Being a soldier with a long career, he is naturally athletic in appearance and keeps himself strong and able, but training/sparring/exercise cannot be done in excess due to desk work he is also responsible for. ALLERGIES: N/A. USUAL HAIRSTYLE: Roche cares little for maintaining his hair. Often kept under a chaperon (clearly not applicable to his modern verse), his hair is left messy and unkempt. The most he will do is keep it trimmed short. USUAL EXPRESSION: First and foremost: he is undeniable intimidating. Stern and intense, most people are discouraged with the prospect of merely approaching him.  USUAL CLOTHING: In combat or on duty, Roche is dressed in a blue-striped gambeson with gambeson chainmail underneath. Belts tie around his arms to anchor his elbow guards. He wears a dark-gray high-collar shirt beneath the chainmail alongside a lighter plain cotton shirt. A hefty belt cinches around his waist beside one much thinner, the two working to keep his sword in place. Preferring brown pants, his legs, too, remain protected with shin-high guards over top worn brown boots. Outside of combat, Roche leans on plain white-cotton shirts combined with brown pants and boots.

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR/S: Failure to keep his men safe, loss of control, the disillusion of his empire, or dying without the respect as one deserving of respect. ASPIRATION/S: Primarily to keep Temeria safe and thriving. Little else matters. POSITIVE TRAITS: Resilient, shrewd, brave, practical, realistic, tenacious, confident, and honest (albeit brutally so). NEGATIVE TRAITS: Ruthless, hot-tempered, abrasive, tactless, domineering, insensitive, very ‘ends justify the means’, and loyal (or nationalistic/patriotic) to a fault. MBTI: ESTJ. ZODIAC: Aquarius.  TEMPERAMENT: Choleric, aggressive, and commanding. SOUL TYPE/S: The Warrior & The King. ANIMAL: Snakes. VICE/S: Violence, cruelty, and a stronger appetite for sex.  FAITH: Roche is agnostic, religious beliefs turned cynical after years of hardship in and out of duty. Nonetheless, there is an underlying belief in Melitele. GHOSTS? No. AFTERLIFE? He can’t be too sure, though, honestly, he doesn’t concern himself with the thought. Roche believes, however, that you are not truly gone beyond death. REINCARNATION? No. ALIENS? No. POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: Definitely Temeria and its crown. He cares little for nobles and royalty, but the Temerian leader, if harboring admirable qualities (like that seen in King Foltest), wins Roche’s full faith. ECONOMIC PREFERENCE: Enough to be comfortable. Never again will he be in poverty, but Roche is a humble man with no desire for excess.  SOCIOPOLITICAL POSITION: He has NO love for politics including sociopolitics. However, he does worry himself with questions of a new successor to the throne due to its effect on Temeria’s strength and independence. The condition of the people isn’t as strong of a concern. EDUCATION LEVEL:  Formally schooled, but not for very long. Roche is able to read and write and knows much about the political climate between countless nations, but he is no scholar. The opportunity for schooling came some time after he enlisted.

FAMILY.

FATHER: Thoroughly despised and despicably hated. Roche will kill him if ever he saw him – the only problem, of course, is that he has no idea who his father is. The man ran away before Roche was ever born. MOTHER: Deceased. Roche’s mother was a humble woman who resorted to prostitution as a result of poverty. The dangers of sex work, primarily its filthy diseases, robbed her of her life shortly after Roche turned 16. The relationship between the two was strained, but benevolent. In his modern verse, Roche’s mother remains a prostitute until he turns 23, but with greater strides in sex-education and sexual health, she does not pass away in untimely fashion. Rather, she lives in Vizima, Temeria, and Roche occasionally visits to tend to her and catch up on lost time due to his hectic work life.  SIBLING/S: N/A. EXTENDED FAMILY: N/A. Roche’s family on his mother’s side cut off all communication once they’d learned of his abandoned-mother’s job. NAME MEANING/S: Vernon is derived from the English meaning prosperity and growth. In an alternative sense, it also translates to conquest. Roche is of French origin and translates to rock or stony hill. HISTORICAL CONNECTION: N/A.

FAVORITES.

BOOK: Most likely some classic epic. In the modern verse, it is The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. MOVIE: (Modern verse) Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. 5 SONGS: Much prefers silence to noise in both verses, but for the modern he has a taste for rock and ambient mood music: Radiohead’s Jigsaw Falling Into Place, Massive Attack’s Paradise Circus, Nine Inch Nail’s Every Day is Exactly The Same, A Perfect Circle’s Pet, The Smashing Pumpkin’s 1979. DEITY: N/A. MONTH: May. SEASON: Spring. PLACE: Razwan, Temeria. WEATHER: Warm, clear, and pleasant. SOUND: The calm before the storm – preferably waged by him. SCENT/S: Pine, especially after the wash of rain. The crisp and clean.  TASTE/S: The flavor of well-aged wine. Bitter and savory, but rarely anything sweet.  FEEL/S: The adrenaline high that comes with combat. Triumph after a hard-fought battle. Being comfortably sated after a bout of vigorous sex. Satisfaction in shutting a bastard down right quick. ANIMAL/S: Roche would never keep an animal around, but if he were to choose, then dogs. NUMBER: 5. COLOR: Blue.

EXTRA.

TALENTS: Commanding, leading, inspiring strength in others, rebelling, and “persuading” (i.e. torturing) those to his side and/or opinion. BAD AT: Keeping his temper, treading gently on sensitive matters, respecting someone’s worries/concerns/feelings, and restricting himself. TURN-ONS: Independence, stability, rationality, strength and persistence, being readily able to defend oneself (physically or verbally), confidence, and aggression. TURN-OFFS: Arrogance, snotty/bratty behavior, petulance, being too loud, recklessness, and the pompous. HOBBIES: Reading & sparring. TROPES: A Father to His Men, Anti-Hero, Cold-Blooded Torture, He Who Fights Monsters, Hot-Blooded, Jerk With A Heart of Gold, My Country Right or Wrong, Tranquil Fury. AESTHETIC TAGS: ( roche: temeria’s finest. )

FC INFO.

MAIN FC/S: Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock. ALT FC/S: N/A. OLDER FC/S: N/A. YOUNGER FC/S: N/A. VOICE CLAIM/S: Mark Healy. GENDERBENT FC/S: Absolutely not.

[filmista]

Vintage horror: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock decided to make a different kind of film than he had ever made. US censorship had become more relaxed and B movies gathered thanks to their rotation in drive-in theaters many times their cost. This gave him the opportunity to experiment with the horror genre and to display his versatility to the world.

To cut costs, he used instead of his usual film crew team of the popular television series Alfred Hitchcock presents, lesser people. Only composer Bernard Herrmann, and his personal assistant Peggy Robertson were allowed to participate.

Hitchcock managed to complete the film for one million dollars. However, he was not convinced of the quality and even toyed with the idea to shorten the film and use it for television. But as so often his wife Alma had a positive influence on him and the film was brought into cinemas.

Psycho became a huge success in no time and one of the first so-called hypes. The influence that the film has had on the horror genre, shouldn’t be underestimated. In 1998, Gus Van Sant made an exact remake of Psycho; The film was butchered worldwide under the motto "if it ain’t broke, then don’t try to fix it."

Throughout film history there probably hasn’t been committed a murder that is as famous as the one in Psycho. Almost everyone knows the iconic scene in which the character Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is attacked while showering with a knife. In the 45 seconds that the attack lasts, director Alfred Hitchcock used more than seventy angles. When the attacker flees and the horrible violins on the soundtrack die down a little, Marion collapses and takes the shower curtain down with her in her fall.

Leigh died in early October 2004 at the age of 77. In her career, she has portrayed more than one impressive role. Yet she will always be remembered, for coming to her end screaming in that damned shower.

For her role she got her only Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Leigh became a horror icon as did her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis  ("Halloween" (1978), "Halloween H20: 20 Years Later" (1998) and 'Halloween: Resurrection' (2002)). In H20 mother and daughter act side by side. Psycho apparently led many viewers to become afraid of the bathroom and Leigh admitted several times that she wasn’t able to shower without fear after seeing the film.

If you look at that particular moment without  any context in the year 2017 you’ll find it incomprehensible even silly, why precisely this one murder has become so famous. So many years later, it looks pretty old-fashioned. It’s not so much about the moment itself but rather the impeccable, unpredictable buildup to it:  It is a massacre that no one saw coming. And one that by the standards of that time was very intense and in your face.

By the time the Marion Crane comes to her grizzly end, Psycho is a small three quarters of the way…

The film begins with office clerk Marion Crane she works hard but earns too little. She wants to marry her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin), but she also has to survive on a meagre quite miserable salary. One day she receives from her boss the task to take a large sum of money to the bank. In a fit of despair and desperation Marion decides to keep the money for herself and then she flees. After a long journey, she stops to spend the night in the first, completely random motel that she encounters.

It turns out to be the Bates Motel, where the timid and shy Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) works alongside his mother. He has it turns out a weird fascination with mommy dearest, who lives in the sinister mansion that stands behind the motel. Norman and Marion eat something together, and she decides to take a shower. How that shower ends we all know. Afterwards Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) and her friend (Sam Lomis) come to investigate, assisted by inspector Arbogast (Martin Balsam). It soon becomes clear that Norman is not quite who he seems.

It’s now almost impossible to imagine how big the shock must have been when Psycho was first released to the public. At the time Marion gets in the shower, there is no reason to not believe that she is not the protagonist of the story. Hitchcock himself had bought almost all the copies of the book Psycho to ensure that no one would know the plot twist. He also made his cast and crew swear to not reveal the twist.

What also helped to increase the shock effect was the marketing campaign of Psycho. In 1960 it was still normal to enter the room after ten minutes or even after the first half of a film. That was different in Psycho. Large posters were distributed to cinemas, Hitchcock claimed that nobody (even though you might have been the Queen of England or the President of the United States) was allowed in the room after the beginning of the film. It caused a real hype and there were long lines at the box office.

Even before the release of Psycho horror films were made, but they were especially made for young audiences. A great director had never ventured into the genre. Hitchcock was at the time a familiar face because of his tv series. His latest film attracted a large audience: an audience that was totally not prepared for the gruesome massacre of the main character. Several reviewers described how visitors began to panic and run through the cinema. The screeching violins on the soundtrack, they would only notice during the second or third viewing, because the music simply didn’t rise above the screams of the audience.

And to think that the scene was almost stopped by the censorship committee. In 1960 several (Christian) clubs had  much to say about the content of films. They found the famous shower scene obviously much too explicit. But Hitch convinced them that the violence wasn’t all that bad…

According to him, you do not see a woman being stabbed, that is only the illusion of the assembly. That the film is shot in black and white was a deliberate choice of the director. That would help, according to him to make it less gruesome. For many, the film was nevertheless still too much to handle. Walt Disney famously denied Hitchcock access to his park because he had made “that disgusting Psycho movie”

The Bloody script couldn’t appeal to most studio bosses. Because of this Hitchcock decided to fund Psycho largely out of his own pocket, with his house as collateral. He was by this time sixty years old and wanted to deliver something exciting, something that would shock. He had, had enough of the big stars and expensive films. He wanted make something on a small scale. A bold choice, but one that worked out. Psycho was his most successful film  yet and the director made his fortune.

All these things contribute to the legendary status that the film still enjoys. About the production a biopic was made, with Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock. But even without that knowledge in mind Psycho is worth it, as pure entertainment. Of course, the film is slightly old fashioned for modern standards, but the great atmosphere, memorable scenes and legendary soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann are certainly not.

For instance just take the dinner that Marion and Norman have, immediately before she is killed. It is a fairly normal conversation, one we could all have but because of the strange way Hitchcock puts it on screen it doesn’t  feel that way. Hitchcock chooses strange, crooked angles and always take the stuffed birds on the wall onto screen. An ordinary dialogue becomes suspenseful even frightening. It’s amongst other things, for that kind of little things that Hitchcock is called the master of suspense.

I read the novel by Robert Bloch on which the film was based a while ago, the book is to put it mildly not a good book, it's even hard to read because it's so poorly written.

Quality wise It’s miles away from what we ended up with in the film. It is essentially a poorly written novel, of the kind you can buy at an airport the scenes are absurd, the horror gorier, absolutely disgusting (in the shower scene, there is talk of decapitation) and far from subtle and even the dialogues are not as sophisticated. And this is not only the merit of the director but also of the talented screenwriter Joseph Stefano.

The actors deliver performances of high calibre. This time, no big stars like James Stewart or Cary Grant, but the back then relatively unknown Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh played the main roles.

Perkins is especially memorable as the nervous, strange Norman Bates a man who is difficult to seize up and get through. A man whose best friend is his mother and with who you can both sympathise and easily feel hatred for. You really care about what happens to him. And that is a rarity in many modern horror films.

One of the characteristics of a Hitchcock film are the strong interpretations of the actors. Anthony Perkins is great. And It’s a mystery why he stayed Norman Bates in the shitty sequels, as he probably could have done so much more. He was the right man to interpret this particular role though.

Unlike in the book where the main character was obese, older, careless and unsympathetic, Hitchock and Stefano made the character likeable, young, slim, sensitive and even attractive in a nonchalant, almost imperceptible way. Although personally I’d never ever go out with a man that looked at me like this:

I like to think I have common sense and not a death wish...

And it works. You're attracted by the intriguing character with his frail voice. You feel compassion for him, you even feel sorry for him, and at times you feel that a relationship with Marion could possibly flourish. Consequently, the film in the first place is a tragedy and then a horror film.

The question of whether It’s Hitchcock's best? Might divide opinions. The American Film Institute for example, once chose Psycho as the most suspenseful  film ever made. Anyway Psycho is much more than just one of the films with the most famous murder in film history. It is one of the most influential and best films ever made. And an excellent movie to get acquainted with the work of Hitchcock.

The film was groundbreaking at a time when horror was actually really more  something of the past (Frankenstein, Dracula, ...). The shock element in the film has quite naturally become a little less shocking with the passing of time, but the manipulative narrative technique and masterful interpretations continue to impress and strike a chord.

It’s a film that has inspired many other thrillers and horror films (Raging Bull, Jaws, Cape Fear, Halloween, Dressed to Kill, ...) and, moreover, created a new genre that’s still alive and kicking today, the slasher film. It’s a monument of cinema and should be seen at least once, or more than once by any film lover. 

“It's sad, when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son. But I couldn't allow them to believe that I would commit murder. They'll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man... as if I could do anything but just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me. They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I'm not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching... they'll see. They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say, "Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly..."

[mrmichaelchadler]

Home Entertainment Consumer Guide: January 24, 2018

4 New to Netflix

"Abducted in Plain Sight" "American Gangster" "The Fighter" "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

6 New to Blu-ray/DVD

"4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" (Criterion)

Criterion has taken some deserved flak over the last few years for its catalog's heavy focus on Western European and American filmmakers. They've endeavored to expand their vision over the last couple years with more directors from countries other than France and the United States. I'm particularly happy to see them embracing the work of Romanian Cristian Mungiu, whose "Graduation" and "Beyond the Hills" were recently inducted into the most elite Blu-ray/DVD club in the world. Now they get to his breakthrough (and still best) film, the 2007 winner of the Palme d'Or. With new interviews and a new transfer, the time is right to reappraise one of the most acclaimed works of the '00s.

Buy it here 

Special Features New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Cristian Mungiu, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray New interview with Mungiu New interview with film critic Jay Weissberg on the New Romanian Cinema The Romanian Tour, a short documentary from 2007 on the film’s reception in Romania Press conference from the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, featuring Mungiu; director of photography Oleg Mutu; and actors Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov, and Alexandru Potocean Alternate and deleted scenes Trailer New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by critic Ella Taylor

"First Man"

Way back in September 2018, it seemed almost certain that we would get a repeat of the 2016 race for major awards wit "La La Land" and "Moonlight." The directors of both films were returning with their anticipated follow-ups and audiences in places like Venice and Toronto were going crazy for both "If Beale Street Could Talk" and "First Man." Five months later, neither director nor picture landed Oscar nods, although it almost feels like a positive for both. Now history will fully regard "First Man" as an underrated drama, a movie that deftly conveys the true danger and heroism of the space race with amazing technical elements and tight, confident direction. The film looks incredible at home, and sounds even better. A decade or so, people will be surprised it didn't win multiple Oscars, much less get nominated. 

Buy it here 

Special Features Deleted Scenes Shooting for the Moon – Take an intimate look at the production of First Man and the collaborative relationship between Director Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling. Preparing to Launch – It's difficult to believe that First Man is the first major feature film to tell the journey to Apollo 11. Hear from Director Damien Chazelle and his cast why now is the time to tell the story of this historic event. Giant Leap in One Small Step – A heroic character study, First Man sheds light on all the hard working individuals that got us to the moon and back. Mission Gone Wrong – Watch as Ryan Gosling reenacts a test piloting sequence gone terribly wrong. Go behind the scenes to see how he trained to nail the landing, performing the majority of his own stunts. Putting You In the Seat – Through the use of innovative technology, most of First Man was shot in-camera. Take an in-depth look behind the lens of this epic film. Recreating the Moon Landing – Filmed in IMAX to show the vastness of the moon, find out all that it took to recreate the most famous moment in NASA history. Shooting at NASA – Hear from Ryan Gosling and Director Damien Chazelle on how shooting at NASA brought unparalleled authenticity to First Man. Astronaut Training – Go behind the scenes of the three day boot camp each of the actors underwent prior to filming First Man. Feature Commentary with Director Damien Chazelle, Screenwriter Josh Singer and Editor Tom Cross

"Halloween"

I'll never forget the buzz in the room at the World Premiere of "Halloween" back in September. I'll also never forget that sinking feeling in my stomach, relatively early, when I realized the film just doesn't work. Yes, I'm in the minority here, and I love that people are taking to the story of Michael Myers again (also Jamie Lee Curtis rules) but this is a case of hype and marketing leading viewers to see something that just isn't there. Actually it's more the power of nostalgia, like when you hear a new album from a band you loved when you were a kid, refusing to realize that they've lost a beat and don't write songs like they used to. Again, I'm happy "Halloween" was a hit. I just wish it was a better movie. 

Buy it here 

Special Features Deleted/Extended Scenes Back in Haddonfield: Making Halloween The Original Scream Queen The Sound of Fear Journey of the Mask The Legacy of Halloween

"The Hate U Give"

George Tillman Jr.'s adaptation of the hit novel works because of how much the director trusts his cast, particularly Amandla Stenberg and Russell Hornsby, to overcome the inherent cliches in the narrative. Tillman is careful to make his film both incredibly timely and yet also embedded with themes of inequity and protest that reflect the history of injustice and the civil rights movement. And yet, most of all, this is a story about people. Tillman recognizes that if we come to believe in and care for the characters than the messages will come from them, organically and far more powerfully. This is a movie that should have made more money and received more critical attention. It certainly will on DVD.

Buy it here 

Special Features Extended scenes: Maverick and Seven Protecting Their Home Uprising Seven's Graduation Featurettes: Starting a Conversation The Talk Code Switching The Heart of Georgia Thank U Georgia Starr: Shine Your Light Audio Commentary by George Tillman, Jr., Amandla Stenberg, Russell Hornsby, Angie Thomas and Craig Hayes

"Notorious" (Criterion)

The Criterion choices from the historic career of Alfred Hitchcock are always interesting. Probably at least in part due to ownership, Criterion hasn't been releasing the "hits" like "Vertigo," "Psycho," or "The Birds," bringing home some of what could be called the less-popular Hitch films like "The 39 Steps," "The Lady Vanishes," and this gorgeous 4K restoration of the incredible "Notorious." Don't get me wrong. "Notorious" has its diehard fans, but it's just not on cable as much as, say, "Rear Window." And so it's nice to see what could be called underrated Hitch being given the lavish, Criterion treatment. Like so much Hitchcock, "Notorious" is a film that gets better with each viewing. 

Buy it here 

Special Features New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Audio commentaries from 1990 and 2001 featuring film historian Rudy Behlmer and Alfred Hitchcock scholar Marian Keane New interview with Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto New program about the film’s visual style with cinematographer John Bailey New scene analysis by film scholar David Bordwell Once Upon a Time . . . “Notorious,” a 2009 documentary about the film featuring actor Isabella Rossellini; filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, Claude Chabrol, and Stephen Frears; and others New program about Hitchcock’s storyboarding and previsualization process by filmmaker Daniel Raim Newsreel footage from 1948 of actor Ingrid Bergman and Hitchcock Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of Notorious from 1948, starring Bergman and Joseph Cotten Trailers and teasers PLUS: An essay by critic Angelica Jade Bastién

"Once Upon a Deadpool"

Well, this is a weird one. So much of the success of "Deadpool" and "Deadpool 2" has been built around the fact that it is the only major R-rated superhero franchise. So what does Fox do? Release a PG-13 version! At least you have to give them some points for creativity, as they didn't just release a censored version but shot some new footage with Fred Savage that spoofs "The Princess Bride." Still, the foul mouth and disturbing references are part of the charm of Wade Wilson, and so a PG-13 version of him feels inherently flawed. It's the kind of thing that may have made for fun special feature on a Special Edition, but you have to be a diehard Deadpool fan to add this one to your collection. 

But it here 

Special Features None...but the movie is kind of a special feature itself

from All Content http://bit.ly/2U80iFs

[kayla-abroad]

Week Three

Fun

     This past week I have done so much from seeing some plays on the West End, stumbling upon a vintage market, and a even going to Brighton beach.   The two plays I saw were very different, but both amazingly good in their own ways.  Theatre will forever have such a place in my heart, so experiencing it here has been extra special.  Friday, I went to the East End of London for the Jack the Ripper walking tour.  For some really strange reason, I truly couldn’t tell you, I’ve always found various serial killers fascinating.  On the tour the guide explained everything from the background of Jack the Ripper and showed us various spots where the crimes took place.  It was crazy to try and take yourself back in time to those moments.  Walking around the East End made me laugh because inside my head all I kept hearing on repeat was the EastEnders theme song.  Growing up my Mom, Aunt, and Nanny (grandma) always watched it, and we’d sing along to the tune. Dobe dobe doobee doo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYa_KfLTtM) ...  Staying with the apparent serial killer theme, on Sunday, Dante and I were on a quest to find The Cereal Killer Cafe in Shoreditch.  This cafe makes all sorts of crazy concoctions using cereal...heaven.  On our way there we stumbled across an amazing Vintage market that had everything from shoes, clothes, records, and artwork.  I ended up leaving with a couple handmade tote bags with screen printed designs to gift to my sisters back home.  The entire stretch of the way to Cereal Killer Cafe there were a ton of thrift and vintage stores.  The area of Shoreditch screamed Brooklyn and reminded me so much of home.  We bounced in and out of each one on our way to the cafe, perusing through anything that caught our eye that moment.  Not only were there so many stores that sparked my interest, but along the way there were loads of food trucks.  Every single stand looked delicious.  Not entirely sure if it was because I was starving or because it truly was delicious, but every single stand and food truck looked killer.  Eventually, we arrived at the cafe and it was such a blast from the past.  The entire place was decked out with memorabilia from the 1990s.  Even though I was just a toddler at the time, most of the 90s pop culture carried on and continued throughout my childhood, so I was raised on it too...I’m technically a 90s baby too, alright!  Kim wound up meeting us there and each of us got different versions of the cereal chiller bowls.  Essentially, a cereal chiller is a traditional bowl of cereal but a bit fancier with some ice cream thrown into the mix.  The bowl I ended up picking was called the “Oreo-M-G”, and it contained Reese’s Puffs, Oreo O’s, Oreo cookies, Frosted Flake ice cream, and is topped off with chocolate milk.  It was honestly heaven.  After we finished eating, we went through a couple more shops and found the coolest sunglass store.  Browsing around I found a pair of the most extreme, in your face, Gucci looking sunglasses that screamed Elton John.  I decided to treat myself to the Elton glasses because I purchased tickets for my Mom and I to see him at MSG in October and they’re absolutely perfect to wear for that occasion.  Dante is pictured wearing them above.  Brighton was super cool to see, it honestly reminded me a lot of the Jersey Shore/Coney Island.  At first the rocks were fun and different, but quickly my feet hated them.  I loved all of the colorful buildings and street art throughout the town.  But, the highlight for me was the Royal Pavilion.  Stepping inside I was totally mind blown.  I could not get over the theatricality and intricate details in each room.  My one complaint about Brighton would be the birds.  For some weird reason I have a terrible fear of birds.  This may possibly stem from watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds at too young of an age, but who knows?  Anyway, birds freak me out so much to begin with, but these Brighton birds were on another level.  I was trying to take an Instagram worthy photo of my 99 ice cream with the pretty Brighton view... when out of no where a seagull comes for me and my perfect ice cream!  Thank god I have fast reflexes and it came no where near my ice cream, but I was shaken up.  If I’m to be honest, for the rest of the day I was on edge over the birds and kept having mini panic attacks.  Bird anxiety aside, Brighton was such an very interesting place to roam around and explore.

[foreign-feelings]

7: Top 3 music artists 27: Top 3 hashtags you use 37: Top 3 accents to hear 47: Top 3 people you miss right now 57: Top 3 cheesy romance movies 67: Top 3 historical figures 77: Top 3 recipes you want to try 87 : Top 3 things you wish you had known earlier 97: Top 3 holidays to celebrate 107: Top 3 embarrassing moments 117: Top 3 kinds of tea 127: Top 3 cheesy romance movies 137: Top 3 scents 147: Top 3 fears 157: Top 3 romantic dates

7: Top 3 music artists- this is like the hardest question in the world and it changes frequently... no particular order it's Miyavi, Beyoncé, and David Bowie? Random I know 27: Top 3 hashtags you use #love #same #meashell37: Top 3 accents to hear - Puerto Rican, Swedish, Japanese 47: Top 3 people you miss right now - my bestie Ali, my gramma, and my Cousin 57: Top 3 cheesy romance movies - 10 things I hate about you, The Notebook and Prime 67: Top 3 historical figures - Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol and Vincent Van Gogh 77: Top 3 recipes you want to try - sweet potato risotto, lobster (I know I've never cooked one.) and any of Francis Mallmann's Gaucho grilling recipes. I'd do anything to learn how to cook like that omg. 87 : Top 3 things you wish you had known earlier - saying "no" is more about self respect and less about being rude, living with someone is entirely different than how you imagine it, everyone shows love differently- not everyone's love looks, smells, sounds, tastes or feels the same as mine and that's ok. 97: Top 3 holidays to celebrate - Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day 107: Top 3 embarrassing moments- that time I called an ex by another of my exes name, that time an ex and I got walked in on while having sex by his mom, and that time at the water park where my bikini top came off in front of hundreds of people. 117: Top 3 kinds of tea - roobious honey suckle tea, Thai tea, and Green tea with Lemon 137: Top 3 scents - my fiancée cologne (can't think of the name atm), lemon grass and peach 147: Top 3 fears - BIRDS CLOWN & FUCKING SCARY ASS MASKED PEOPLE157: Top 3 romantic dates - picnic at the botanical gardens, aquarium and then dinner with live jazz music/dancing and museum & planetarium date with late night ice cream. (These are my top 3 most romantic dates I've been on) Always love your asks @rube-de-leon thanks love 💕