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PsychoRating:
Release Date: 02 September, 2003 Retail Price: $12.98 OUR Price: $11.68 You SAVE: $1.30! Cast: Complete Cast (17 total) |
Psycho Reviews
Bah...
I am an Black American, and Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors. "Psycho," the original, is one of my favorite movies. After catching the original on the Oxygen channel I realized that I'd never seen the remake, so...I rented it. I probably expected to much from the remake. While the movie did ATTEMPT to do justice to Hitchcock's film, it didn't quite...make it. I was sure that, for example, UPDATING the movie, would add some uh...actors of color, but this film remains as lily white as the original. While Hitchcock couldn't really be faulted for this (he was simply a man of his racist times), Van Sant could. How realistic is a movie, supposedly set in 1998, with an all-white cast? What planet did this movie take place on? (As a sidebar I'd cast Jada Pinkett Smith as Marion...between the short hairdo and her stabbing death in "Scream 2," she would be excellent...but I digress). Okay. Politically correctness aside, let's talk turkey. Some things were added to this movie that were simply uncalled for. Norman Bates masturbating? Visible flesh wounds? I think the director misses the point. Hitchock's version was excellent because he knew the arts of subtlety, implication, and he left something to the imagination. We WONDERED what Bates thought when he spied on Marion...we WONDERED how badly she was sliced up when she was killed in the shower...and it made for interesting viewing and thinking. Whereas chocolate syrup was blood in the original, the blood-red blood in this version was just...sickening. OVERKILL! And as with the self-gratification and stab wounds, they didn't NEED to be shown in the remake any more than they did in the original. Sometimes additions can be overkill.
Vince Vaughn was NO Anthony Perkins. Perkins was, and always will be, Norman Bates. Vaughn was like, the poor man's version; there was something about him that didn't quite...add up. You know...if it don't gel it ain't aspic. And his portrayal didn't "gel." Heche as Crane was okay...but...I don't know. Bah. And I don't know why they turned her boyfriend into a redneck, but...that was just awful. And finally, with the addition of Julianne Moore and William H. Macy, I thought I was watching "Boogie Nights" or something. (Could Van Sant's masturbation scene be an...homage to the that movie...of sorts?)
Um...all in all...a decent EFFORT. So I give it an "F"...for EFFort. But definately NOT an "A."
Psycho Sematics
Let's face it; Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is untouchable to the standards of it's art form. No one in 1960 had ever seen something like a naked woman taking and shower, then brutally murder by an unknown assailant, then disturbingly and slowly, fall to a painful death before. What Gus Van Sant had in mind must have been just plain idiotcy and gulliblity. Why would you want to make a remake of a classic film, run done in color, shot-by-shot and with updated sources? Hogwash, I say! Why on God's green Earth would you hire Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche to play Norman Bates and Marion Craine? First of all, Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh ARE Norman Bates and Marion Craine, and there's no way you can change that. Instead of the boy-next-door creepy image that Perkins' Norman gave us, we get the perverted and giggling Norman that Vaughn portrays. Instead of Leigh's head strong and likable Marion, we get Heche's unsure and dumbass Marion, who acts more like Sharon Stone than Janet Leigh. And what about the other castmembers? William H. Macy and Julianne Moore give the only deccent performances as Det. Arbogast and Marion's sister, Lila. Viggo Mortensten gives a alright performance as Marion's headstrong lover, Sam Loomis. But what about the scenes of the film? Yes, there are scenes. But how good are they from the original? That's questionable.
What Van Sant does to the "new" scenes in the film is a bit of underminded script writing, spite the fact that they didn't really need to write much of a script. Newly updated dialouge is introduced, including one scene where Lila Crane in the original says "I'll go get my coat", in this version says "I'll go get my walkman". It doesn't really add context to the story, but it doesn't ruin it either. But what about changes? Terrible is all I say. The original Psycho house, the one house that is practically burned in the back of our subconscious minds, is replaced by a cheap-looking British house that looks like it was built in a matter of 80 seconds. One of the most dislikable scenes in the new film, is that when Norman is spying on Marion from the peephole, he starts masturbating. That is just plain disgusting and really unnecessary. When Marion is being stabbed, Van Sant inputs quick glimpses of rain clouds crashing over and moving quickly, which doesn't add any effect to the scene whatsoever. Finally, gestures and facial remarks are slightly changed to add more modern approach, such as Lila wink-wink to Norman in the checking-in scene, all the way to Marion when first seening the killer in the bathroom next to her, does a creepy gasp and then a shreking scream. All the less, "Psycho" is not all that bad, but it could be better than it is. Stick with the original and you'll see what I mean.
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