This image was lost some time after publication.

Have you ever had those moments where you just love Hollywood so fucking much that you take it in your arms and squeeze it so hard that you don't realize until it's too late that you've crushed all of its adorable little bones in your delirious, smothering embrace? We're kind of having one right now after reading in today's Var about how new Mandalay Pictures president Cathy Schulman plans on improving upon Alfred Hitchock's maddening avian backstory problems in their much-clamored-for remake of The Birds:

"We think we have a very contemporary take," Schulman said. "In the original, the birds just showed up, and it was kind of like, why are the birds here? This time, there's a reason why they're here and (people) have had something to do with it. There's an environmental slant to what could create nature fighting back."

While they've obviously made a trendy commercial concession by so transparently pandering to the An Inconvenient Truth set, Mandalay does deserve some credit for preserving some semblance of the integrity of the seriously flawed original, rejecting a briefly considered suggestion that the killer fowl be portrayed by penguins, by far the hottest of all bird species. Fortunately, a quick-thinking development executive noted that their antagonists' flightlessness would render their attacks, now properly motivated by the melting of their Antarctic home, "Like, a little boring? What are they gonna do, peck someone's shins to death?," averting a creative disaster.