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Showing posts from March, 2016

The Birds (Review)

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds  is a 1966 "horror" film that was actually considered pretty scary at the time and is still considered to be one of Alfred Hitchcock's best movies. And I'm completely dumbfounded as to why!!! To best demonstrate why I dislike this film I'm going to split this review into two categories: the technical side which will discuss cinematography, direction, acting etc. Then, I will discuss the story elements such as characters, plot and screenplay. Technical On a technical level the film is near perfect (I mean, it IS Alfred Hitchcock). The cinematography is well done, with good angles and shot set ups. The cinematographer seemed to stick pretty heavily to the rule of thirds which I do like as it makes for nice, clean shots. The lighting is typical 60s technicolor, which actually hurts the film's horror vibe. The film would've benefited from being shot in black and white rather than its actual brightly tinted color scheme.

Why Black Widow Sucks (and How She Can Be Fixed)

Ever since the first Avengers film I've never understood people's obsession with Black Widow. She was never particularly interesting to me and seemed to have very little, at times shifting, personality that mainly seemed to consist of dry jokes and generic spy skills. I've seen Vision less than I've seen Black Widow and I care more about him than I do her. Why is that? The problems go hand in hand: personality and backstory, two important character devices that Black Widow has very little of. We need to see how her personality developed before we can say that she even has one. I'll explain what I mean: in the scene of the Avengers where she meets with Loki there's a shot where it shows her breaking down. This was used to fool Loki into giving her his plan, but was there any actual heartbreak used to make it convincing? If not, why wasn't there? Why doesn't she feel any emotion towards her past anymore? What happened to make her such a hardened assass