By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 0.5 cats
Director: James Nguyen
Starring: Aan Bagh | Colton Osborne | Janae Caster | Tippie Hedren | Whitney Moore
Year: 2010
Running time: 105
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1316037
Diane says: “Perfect! My sweetheart and I had recently re-watched Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS and earlier in the day we were alarmingly strafed by gulls.
“The story: In Santa Monica, a software salesman falls for an up-and-coming model. Their weekend getaway turns into a fight for their lives, as gulls and vultures start to attack the city’s inhabitants and their cars as payback for man-made climate change.
“BIRDEMIC is, above all, an amazing lesson in movie-making. It teaches us about what we take for granted in a well-made film. Here are some painful examples:
- The abrupt changes in lighting in a two shot.
- The complete lack of sound in some dialogue scenes.
- The length of time devoted to a car driving on a windy road.
- The images of attacking birds dropped in from a video game (?).
- The affronting loops of music.
- The mismatched chronology in a brief scene at the office.
- A sex scene with a woman in her underthings and a fully dressed man. (I keep wondering: did the actor refuse to remove his clothes, or did the director say, “Nobody wants to see your body”?)
“BIRDEMIC also provides a lesson in how hard it is to be objective about the art we make ourselves (writing, painting…). We love our babies. Even if we study the masters (Nguyen reveres Hitchcock), we can fail to recognize the gap between their work and ours. 1 cat“
“Made with the same production values of a 1973 made-for-tv movie, or a project produced, directed, filmed, and acted by a high school Film Studies 101 class of that same era. The establishing shots: guy in a convertible driving around L.A. highway and surface streets; a stop at a gas station where he pumps his own gas; meeting the girl of his dreams from high school, who is now an up-and-coming model (who gets a chance at a photo session for Victoria’s Secret!), with whom he had never spoken before, managing 12 lines of extremely dull and awkward dialogue, then they exchange business cards and promise to ‘catch up’.
“We see him playing basketball with another guy on a schoolyard/park tennis court, telling his friend about having met his high school heart-throb, shooting a single hoop, and then wiping their sweaty faces and saying they should leave. So they walk to the very edge of the court to stand in a tiny swath of shade from a tree, exchanging lines as sophisticated as those spoken by 15 year olds smoking in the school parking lot, while guessing as to whether one of them will get laid: ‘A day without sex is a day wasted.’ and ‘Too hot, since when do we have heat waves in winter?’ When the model-girl later gets a call from her agent, it’s difficult to remember who is who, because both women are blond with the exact same bobbed haircut, with similar faces and voices.
“As they leave the restaurant we see the soon-to-be-deadly birds, 6 of the largest parrots/conures I have ever seen, squawking as they fly, but they don’t attack anybody.
“I didn’t care enough to remember any of the characters’ names.I may have listed the various scenes in the wrong order, because it’s hard to remember when Nothing Happened. The scenes listed above took roughly 30 minutes of film time, at which point I couldn’t take it anymore. I fast-forwarded to see some bird attacks, but couldn’t find any (I watched it on tubi, and there were multiple commercial breaks that I was forced to view, which made it too tiresome to sift all the way through to the end ).
:I can’t believe this guy has made 2 sequels to this piece of ‘artistic’ crap. Read the wikipedia notes on the production, they’re hysterical.”