Word: hitchcocks
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...attached to a new film, a few fond hopes. Think of Robert Donat, suave fugitive of The 39 Steps, double-talking his way out of a political rally and into the clutches of the man with the missing fingertip. Or Cary Grant doing anything in almost any Hitchcock caper: wooing Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, dodging a malefic crop duster in North by Northwest. Grant also adorned the genre's apogee, Stanley Donen's Charade, in which the star has five identities and a protective lust for Audrey Hepburn. Neat plotting, chic dialogue, a funny-grotesque supporting cast...
...Remember, these are the people whose critical enthusiasm raised Alfred Hitchcock from genre master to world master. Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality). They are also greatly enhanced by the firm, but casually stated, French respect for life's realities. A drama like Tell No One takes place against...
...this year, the red-winged blackbird hysteria seems louder than ever. Joggers along Lake Michigan have gotten plucked. Workers on the edge of the city's downtown business district have lunched on street corners instead of park benches to avoid becoming part of a reenactment of Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic The Birds. Experts say it appears urban red wings are more aggressive than their rural counterparts, partly because the city birds are particularly sensitive to (or fed up with) excessive human encroachment on their turf...
...start of such a good movie. Instead, and alas, The Happening is the latest, most dispiriting indication that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has lost the touch that made The Sixth Sense a suspense classic and his standing as a young master of creepiness in the grand Hitchcock tradition. He's just 37, but his best films are so far behind him, it's as if he's forgotten how he made them work...
...Take a page from Hitchcock and hit the tube: I'm thinking a half-hour weekly sci-fi and adventure anthology series called "George Lucas Presents." Let the snobs think you're making pulp TV. Just like Rod Serling did on The Twilight Zone, you'll get away with all kinds of subversion...