Hitchcocks

I decided to do the curious case of watching Hitchcock followed by The Girl. In other words, the making of of a couple of films, more specifically  Psycho, The Birds and Marnie and Alfred Hitchcock obsession for blonds, his relation with his actresses and his wife, ultimately his awful demeaning relationship with women in general.

Not good films, both of them. Entertaining? Maybe a bit. Poorly executed, poorly written stories. Especially The Girl, especially Sienna Miller’s Pippi Hedren. Turns out, Hitchcock it’s even more repulsive than he looks in the pictures! 

“It’s only a bloody movie.” In this film, Helen Mirren brings her natural talent, but even with her charms her Alma doesn’t really transcends in any special level. It’s just another chattered and disvalued wife behind some really obnoxious husband. As for the rest of the cast and crew, oh wait a minute, I’m mixing everyone from both films at this point, but from Hitchcock, no one’s really given enough depth.

What’s curious and entertaining about these films is the actual behind the scenes, it’s the making of the films, the scenes where actresses and actors are playing other actors, like Scarlett Johansson’s Janet Leigh, like Sienna Miller’s Pippi Hedren, Sienna being more exposed to these situations, especially in making of The Birds, with the birds scenes!

The Girl.

It’s about an old man, that can’t get it up anymore, and being utterly nasty and unattractive doesn’t help much either. Between an old man not accepting his last stages of life, followed by his obsessions for his work and his actresses you have Hitchcock. But there are different interpretations in the film’s lines; one of them it’s really the question, does the man is in a crisis of a man’s menopause, or does he really had a particular fixation on the woman? I kept questioning the real motives to every line of this film. 

Unfortunately, Sienna Miller’s Pippi didn’t help at all being that it was poorly and awfully weak, mainly bad written. I just felt like going over to the imdb and see Pippi’s biography and build my own dimensions of this character. The only logical reason for Sienna’s Golden Globe nom, besides the whatever aspect of the award itself, is her effort to be a human being that moves around, that speaks, that has a brain, that blinks, that thinks, that surely has something on her mind. Also, it is an absolute treat to look at her performance when she is acting, Pippi's acting for the films! Acting within the acting. I think when they were trying to translate Alfred Hitchcock’s vision, fixation and his own molding of Pippi, they forgot to bring the actual dimensions of the person itself. Between Pippi’s acting under the directions of Hitchcock, between Hitchcock’s creation of this person, they forgot the Pippi Hedren. 

Still, Sienna Miller does look like a doll for many times throughout the film. It was an absolutely unfortunate character. And when I thought I couldn’t be more repulsed by the man, Cock, he did get worse in The Girl, even though Toby Jone’s Hitch isn’t as repulsive as Anthony Hopkins’. It just isn’t, when actually it should be, because I watched the making of Psycho, than The Birds and Marnie, as you can see, the dates get together correctly, the man gets older, and the older he gets the worst he behaves with his actresses. Pippi caught the culmination of this man’s fixation on his actresses and their blond hair. Sienna Miller just couldn’t do anything about it, could she? It’s such a strange character, such a strange performance, because it’s just hard to understand which way they wanted to take this woman. Nonetheless, she looks utterly drop dead beautiful.

The famous Sienna Miller.

I have a sudden urge to watch her films all over again, but looking at her film career, there aren’t that many interesting films. And I’ve seen the majority of them, the interesting ones. I wonder when was the moment she became a star, the timing, it probably wasn’t from any film. I don’t have a clue. I don’t remember her story anymore. But I do wish she had more interesting films. I really do, because I could look at her beautiful smile all day.