John Esche

Alfred Hitchcock's works tend to be divided into beautifully plotted (mostly romantic) mysteries and thrillers which depend more on scares than ideas, and viewer response to them tends to be divided along similar lines. My taste runs more to the mysteries, and so may be somewhat skewed when it comes to THE BIRDS which may well be Hitchcock's second most famous thriller after PSYCHO, and as such normal critical standards may well be suspended. No, as beautifully set as this film is, very little in the plot or dialogue makes a lot of sense, and the special effects, while outstanding for 1963, don't bear close examination in 2021, but Hitchcock knew how to structure a thrill (1973's THE EXORCIST learned from Hitchcock and THE BIRDS that the greatest way to heighten horror is to deny that it is possible or let the threat build S L O W L Y as in the crows gathering on the school "monkey bars") so that most of the scares still hold up. Tippi Hedren is no Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly as an actual actress, but she is just what Hitchcock wants as the beautiful victim he can surround with excellent actors to flesh out his situations. The bottom line is that the film's greatest weakness, the non-ending and failure to explain the attacks, may not matter to fans. Thrills don't depend on logic . . . or even that the original short story the film was based on was inspired by an actual massed bird attack on a crowd in Boston in the 1840's. We're far more aware of ecological concerns today than when the film was released in 1963, bit while it may not add much to the practical discussion, it certainly feels timely in a macabre sense. My two stars are for the movie as a film for ALL audiences. Fans of mindless thrillers would probably give it four or even five if possible.

If there is any reason to watch this show, which is only marginally pretty and smart only in comparison to . . . what? . . . the failed tryout musical DIANA (also wasting bandwidth on Netflix)? ...other than the all too brief scenes where the male leads have their shirts or pants off, it hasn't shown up in the first two episodes screened. I have no problem with "scenery," but if you're used to a diet of entertainment that assumes you actually have a mind and more than a 6th grade education, "Pretty Smart" should leave you feeling distinctly undernourished. Once an episode the writers do what appears to be their best to have "Grant" (the one with the spectacular abs and the pushy hair) say something stupid with a sophisticated moral buried in it, but if you're of a certain age, "Pretty Smart" will have you longing for the intellectual rigor of an "I Married Joan" or "My Sister Eileen." I feel certain it hasn't even occurred to them how homophobic their "Jaden" character is in 2021...or how far from heterosexual "Grant" (supposedly in love with one of the sisters who think they are the stars of the show) comes across. They say one never went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but "Pretty Smart" seems as good a test as any of that idea. At least it is one streaming show which won't be stealing awards from better shows on broadcast networks.

Your reaction to this darkly overblown sci-fi "shoot-em-up" shamelessly trading on the name of Isaac Asimov's classic series will depend on a number of things ranging from your familiarity with and respect for Dr. Asimov's science fiction works to his basically optimistic, humanistic philosophy. At heart, Asimov respected the ability of reason to resolve problems. From this basic respect came the famous Three Laws of Robotics (and the Laws of Humanics which followed) as well as the philosophy behind Harry Seldon's Psychohistory and the hope for the future of humanity he laid out through it, the Two Foundations and their successors (spoiler) as plotted through Gaia and R. Daniel Olivaw. You will find none of that in this TV FOUNDATION which has as little to do with Asimov's original as the (fun) action film film I ROBOT had to do with Asimov's (even better) original robot stories and novels. Asimov's originals were on a grand cinematic scale but, to date, have suffered at the hands of hacks who believe that MOVIE fans of sci-fi will only accept xenophobic violence and will run in horror from anything with intelligence or subtlety. This FOUNDATION should appeal mainly to those shallow taste mavins, but may suffer from their problems following plots tortured into unnecessary complications.

It was probably inevitable that someone would attempt to capitolize once again on the name Titanic and the success of James Cameron's admirably made epic and other films of the story going all the way back to 1912(!), but any "professionals" associated with this sub-amateur rip-off (and a very few of the cast on land and a superfluous doomed submarine look like they may be - footage salvaged from the cutting room floors of professional films?) will probably want to omit Titanic II from their resumes. One has to assume that the only "name" attached to the project, one-time serious actor Bruce Davidson, needed a credit to keep his SAG insurance current. The rest make this look unfortunately like a failed student project with no budget, only campus friends for cast, "cgi" from a high school student's old Commodore computer and a script that was intended as parody (NONE of the scientific babble or nautical dialogue would pass muster in a grade school water safety class). With its echos of actual films from The Poseidon Adventure to The Last Voyage, perhaps this project was originally intended as parody. What a pity their producer/director/author chose to take himself and his erstwhile project so seriously and turn it into a real disaster movie in the wrong sense of the term. Careers have recovered from worse but they generally involved people with actual talent. (Ishtar was *not* worse. Not even close.)