Didnt expect this film to be as good as the original. Macy in this shot-by-shot color recreation of Alfred Hitchcocks horror masterpiece set at the Bates Motel. Gus Van Sant directs Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore and William H. Psycho (1998) (1,132) 4.6 1 h X-Ray R.
In 1998, director Gus Van Sant ( Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) released a shot–for–shot, line–by–line Psycho remake.Jamie Lee Curtis would reprise her role as Laurie in four more films: 1981s Halloween II , then in 1998 in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later , 2002s Halloween.Unlike modern horror films, 'Psycho' never shows the knife striking flesh. Even if you have not seen this Hitchcock classic, you have seen its tropes reverberate through modern horror cinema. Many critics consider it to be the first slasher film.
The remake clumsily stuffs Hitchcock’s refined filmic innovations into an anachronistic reframing without the enrichment of reinterpretation or adaptation.Psycho movie reviews & Metacritic score: Intrigued by the notion of taking an intact, undeniable classic and seeing what would happen if it were made again.In the words of William H. In fact, it won the 1998 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Remake or Sequel. Hitchcock shot in black and white because he felt the audience could not stand so much blood in color (the 1998 Gus Van Sant remake specifically repudiates that theory).Van Sant’s replication was received poorly by viewers and critics alike.
Most variations from the original Psycho reflect a failure to replicate Hitchcock’s original sound, pacing, blocking, cuts, and camera movements.Although Van Sant follows the original structure precisely and copies the most important shots mimetically, he also introduces variations, for better or for worse, that make his text different from the original. Macy as Detective Arbogast in Psycho (1998).The Psycho remake was touted as a mirror image of the original, yet Van Sant’s version “differs from the original in more ways than you can wave a butcher knife at.” Some of these differences are an intentional marker of Van Sant’s authorship, while some reflect changes for contemporary audiences. It’s not coming together somehow.” William H.
Cast Of Psycho 1998 Film Update The Characters
Some of Van Sant’s casting choices successfully update the characters’ roles to the contemporaneous context of the late ‘90s. By extension, he adjusts the psychoanalytic dynamics at play between the characters. An erring castIn effect, Van Sant reinterprets the characters of Psycho through his choices in casting. Unfortunately for Van Sant, his ‘restaging’ of Psycho is an inept husk of the monumental original. Van Sant himself has stated that classic films can be restaged in the same way that theater productions restage classic plays.
Like the art student copying Van Gogh, does not create a character at all, but merely copies someone else’s, an endeavor that cannot help but fail as an act of creation. Vaughn clunkily mimics Anthony Perkins’ gestures in a “stale imitation” without embodying any modicum of the absorbing, eerie poise that the original Norman Bates personifies. When I first viewed the Psycho remake knowing that Vince Vaughn would portray Norman Bates, I actively shed my associations with Vaughn’s typecasting but still found myself unable to accept his performance. Heche’s Marion is more light–hearted and flirtatious, and thus “conveys almost nothing of Janet Leigh’s hard–boiled intelligence and mounting neurosis.” Heche’s ability to project a new version of Marion Crane is an achievement in comparison to Vaughn’s empty performance of Norman Bates. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who first adapted Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho for Hitchcock and later worked with Van Sant on the Psycho remake, lamented that Anne Heche “play an entirely different character the dialogue and the character sounded like two different people.” Anne Heche as Marion Crane in Psycho (1998).Throughout Van Sant’s Psycho, Marion Crane is less serious with her boyfriend Sam Loomis, less alarmed by figures of authority (namely, the policeman and the car salesman), and less perturbed by Norman’s general creepiness. The few advantageous casting choices are, however, obliterated by the stunning inadequacies of casting for the leading roles.Anne Heche plays a flimsy version of Marion Crane in the Psycho remake, and Vince Vaughn renders a gauche Norman Bates.
Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates in Psycho (1998).Many critics take note of the inversion of body types in casting Marion and Norman in the Psycho remake. Additionally, Vaughn as Norman radiates faux femininity that awkwardly presupposes Norman’s inculcation by the Mother aspect of his psyche. To me, this repetitive gaffe symbolizes the Psycho remake as a whole: it inexplicably insists on inserting an ineffective and pointless variation into what purports to be a replication of its source material.
A shot–for–shot failureWhat irritates me most about the Psycho remake is its wavering between re–inventiveness and replication. The inversion of the leading actors’ body types was undoubtedly intentional on Van Sant’s part, and perhaps injects a more direct insinuation of heterosexual desire into Norman’s character. Norman’s ability to at turns look alternatingly feminine and ferocious and the resultant “visual rhyme” of his doubling identification with various characters is thus interrupted in the remake.
Let’s examine the aberrations in the Psycho remake that I personally find most dissonant because they are the essential, change–making shots in the original film: the motel parlor scene and the classic shower scene.In the Psycho remake, the Bates motel itself is transformed into a neon eyesore. These ineffectual deviations from the original in the shot–for–shot Psycho remake are underscored by Van Sant’s inability to perfectly replicate Hitchcock’s directorial style. Its insertions of variation from the original are sonorously vacant of meaning contextualized within the laborious replication.
Norman’s blurred taxidermied birds retain none of their menacing appeal in the 1998 Psycho remake.In the original, Norman’s taxidermied birds that surround the room are sharply defined by a deep focus lens. Beyond this collapse in the characters’ rendering, Van Sant’s framing of their interaction qualifies the Psycho remake’s failure to replicate Hitchcock’s film. The interior mise–en–scène of the Bates Motel in the Psycho remake is a satisfyingly accurate recreation of the original.When Norman invites Marion to dine with her in the motel office parlor in the remake, we are forcefully confronted with both Heche’s and Vaughn’s inability to convey the nuanced characterization of their source material. The exterior set design of Bates Motel is a much more faithful depiction of Hitchcock’s original.
The painting covering the peephole that Norman has carved from the office parlor and into Cabin 1 was “Susanna and the Elders.” In the remake, it is replaced with “Venus with a Mirror,” intoning themes of female narcissism and rape. A short while later, we suffer through a new rendition of the peephole scene. In the remake, a stark failure to achieve this deep focus contrast reduces the stuffed birds to background noise and deprives the viewer of any sense of the characters’ relationship to objects in the scene.
Hitchcock’s deliberate marketing and promotion of Psycho changed the film industry forever. Some things cannot be done twiceWith all the incompetence of the Psycho remake in comparison to Hitchcock’s filmic mastery, its meaninglessness is surpassed by the historical context of cinema. I would love to give Van Sant the credit of adding his own authorial mark, but, again, these variations are vacant of meaning and out of place in a shot–for–shot remake. These cut–ins serve absolutely no purpose other than to mask the director’s ineptitude at replicating Psycho’s iconic murder scenes that defined the slasher film genre. When Mother/Norman later murders Detective Arbogast, the scene cuts into unsettling imagery of a masked, nude woman and a goat on a wet road.
Before Psycho, it was common for moviegoers to enter the theater in the middle of a feature.
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