Marnie, and The Birds

Yesterday morning I took a box of books to Bookbuyers to sell. They get a lot of people selling books there; I actually went in last Saturday afternoon to tell, and was told it would be about three hours before they'd get to it. Yow! So yesterday I was there when they opened, and was still #4 in line, and the first guy had twelve boxes! So I went to work for a bit and then came back.

It turns out that they took almost all the stuff I had (the main exceptions being some old Inside Macintosh books and even older fantasy baseball books), and I ended up with a whopping $85.00 of store credit! Yowsa! Even the guy buying from me seemed surprised at just how much the set totalled to, but he said he checked it twice, and it was the correct amount according to their guidelines. So I ain't complaining!

A pretty nice start to the day.

The afternoon feature a rather, er, weird meeting which involved another tester expressing to our boss some concerns that I wasn't sure I shared. I ended up feeling a bit befuddled, wondering what the purpose of the meeting originally was, and a bit uncomfortable with it all. But I did manage to express that I had a somewhat different outlook on things. I suspect we're just looking at the project from different points of view. Still, it was weird.

I otherwise spent the afternoon chugging along on my testing, played some Quake with some cow-orkers, and then went to Cafe Borrone and spent the evening reading. Nice and laid-back.

Today was a shopping day. I went to three comic book stores, one of them mainly to remind myself that it's not really going to. Another one was having a sale, and I picked up some paperback collections at 20% off. The third was the store near my apartment, which has been very aggressive about stocking Marvel Comics from the 1960s lately, so I picked up several of those which are on my want list. Progress!

I also went to a good used record store and picked up a few CDs, and asked about their terms as far as selling to them goes. I have a bundle of CDs I want to sell at some point, although I may borrow someone's CD burner and copy the few songs on them that I want to keep, first.

Plus I went to a remarkable store called Storables, which stocks a wide variety of shelving, containers, and organizing stuff. It's a dangerous place, since it's easy to just walk down the isles and go, "I must have something which I could organize with this!" But I escaped with only one thing which I hadn't gone there specifically to buy, which is a good thing.

I topped off the day by meeting Subrata, Mark, and Trish to go see movies at the Stanford Theatre, whose Hitchcock film festival is almost done. Spoilers below, so you might want to skip this section if you haven't seen these films.

Today's double-feature were Hitch's two films starring Tippi Hedren. First was Marnie, in which Hedren plays Marnie Edgar, a young woman who has stolen nearly $10,000 from a company where she was working as a secretary. We see her change her hair color, visit and ride a horse which she owns, and visit her mother, with whom she has a difficult relationship. Then she goes to join a new company under a different name.

Unfortunately she chooses the Rutland company, and the recently-widowed Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) noticed her at her previous employer's, and hires her to see what happens. What happens, of course, is that he falls in love with her, and catches up to her when she commits another theft, which he uses to pressure her into marrying him. This turns out to be especially difficult since Marnie cannot stand to be touched by a man, and Mark sets out to learn why.

Marnie is a twisted film in much the same mold as Vertigo, although I found the latter to be more repugnant. Both involve a man falling in love with a woman and trying to learn about her past and change her into something she's reluctant to become. But while James Stewart in Vertigo seems downright creepy and sick, Connery's Rutland seems more earnest and less unbalanced, albeit certainly rather weird. The film revolves around their personalities and relationship, and is basically a character study of Marnie; the plot is somewhat disorganized and could probably have been edited better. But overall, it's a decent mid-level Hitchcock film.

The Birds, on the other hand, is one of Hitchcock's most famous films, but in my estimation one of his worst. Hedren plays society girl Melanie Daniels, who meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor, who looks strangely as if he were Robin Williams' evil brother) in a bird store in San Francisco. (We argued if the opening shot is of Union Square in SF, but we couldn't tell for sure.) After a playful argument, Daniels tracks Brenner down at his mother's house in Bodega Bay and delivers a pair of love birds to his sister. On the journey across the bay (and 40 minutes into the film!) she is attacked by a sea gull which draws blood.

The first half of the film focuses on the peculiar budding romance between Daniels and Brenner, and her getting to know his mother and sister, and his former lover, the local schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette). Soon, however, flocks of birds begin attacking various people around the bay, killing a local farmer, and a flock of sparrows flies down the chimney to attack our heroes in their house. The attacks continue until people are forced to flee the city.

The natural question to ask here is, "What's going on?" The answer, it turns out, is never revealed to us! Witchcraft? Birds waging war against humanity? Random once-in-a-millennium weirdness? We never find out, as our heroes finally leave their house at night to escape from Bodega Bay, which apparently is where the attacks are centered and largely confined to, and the words "The End" appear over the scene as they're driving off. It's a throw-a-shoe-at-the-screen film, incredibly frustrating.

Talking about the film afterwards, the best that we could come up with is that this was Hitchcock's way of giving his audience the finger, working up his usual level of suspense and then not resolving it. It's really quite a pointless film, and I'd recommend avoiding it.