Well I wound up getting passes to see PSYCHO (1998) after all. They had a giveaway here in Austin at the ADVENTURES IN CRIME AND SPACE store. A really cool book store that sells everything from old Mickey Spillane paperbacks to those wonderful Ace Doubles. Pulps and vintage Sci-Fi... a thing of beauty I tell ya.
Well, a couple of days later I went and saw the film.
It’s not a repugnant film. It’s pretty decent.
I found it to be a very... interesting and oddly weird feeling experience watching it though. Kinda like someone dreamed a different version of the film.
Now, before I start getting into this heavy I just want to say I think the supporting cast of this film was superior to Hitchcock’s across the board. William Macy did a wonderful job in the detective role, and hell even James Remar as the Highway Patrol fella was pretty darn cool.
But this film, while attempting to be a ‘shot for shot recreation’ didn’t even live up to that hype for me. For example...
The scene where Marion and Norman are in his parlor and Marion is eating while they talk... well... It’s not the same shot. Oh sure it’s very close, but you can tell that whoever was actually FRAMING the shot was vastly inferior to Hitchcock’s Framing.
This is the sort of thing that you would only notice on a film that attempted to be a shot for shot, and normally you’d never run into this. In the shot where Marion is on the right side of the screen eating and Norman in on the left side, the camera has been raised and angled down a bit more. How do I know? Well, during the shot I felt my gaze being drawn to her bowl of sliced fruit and the plate of sandwiches. And that distracted me just a bit, but I noticed it, and thought.. that’s an odd reaction.
When I got home I pulled out my DVD and took a look at the same shot in Hitch’s version. The food is below the frame. Janet Leigh’s fork disappears below the frame and then returns the food to her mouth.
What’s the big deal? Well, when someone is eating, your eyes are naturally drawn to what they are eating. Hitchcock, a noted eater, knew this so he cut the distraction out of frame. In Van Sant’s version... well the food distracts just a bit.
Ok that’s pretty darn nit picky, but well the chemistry between Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche was weak enough to allow me to pick up and obsess on this sort of thing.
Oh and speaking of them. I have to complement Vince Vaughn on not doing a Anthony Perkins imitation. I can’t imagine trying to step into the role and give it a new feel, especially when the original role is so incredibly burnt into the conciousness of the film going public.
Anne Heche on the other hand... Wow, what a total no brainer. She’s awful. Now regularly I wouldn’t say that Janet Leigh was a particularly great actress, but Anne Heche certainly made her seem so. They’re both pretty, but watch the scene where Anne Heche is driving. When you hear the voices in her mind... well she just doesn’t seem to really be hearing them. In Hitch’s... well, Janet Leigh is perfectly reacting to them (of course Hitch was off camera reading her the lines to provoke the reaction). When Heche is supposed to be ‘paranoid’ when the Highway patrol guy is tailing her... well, she looks less paranoid and more like, “I should be looking paranoid.” Her eyes just didn’t communicate. She didn’t grip her steering wheel nervously, her palms weren’t sweaty. She was just uninteresting. Therefore when she pulls into the Car Lot I was lost just a bit because from her acting it didn’t seem like she was worried, so why was she at the car lot. You see... this stuff was popping up for me all during the film.
Also, there’s the whole BRA issue. In the original, Leigh wears a white Bra at the beginning to denote innocence. The second time we see her in a Bra... well it’s black, and she’s taken the money. It’s a fairly simple case of color psychology.
Van Sant or whoever was in charge of the art direction chose an orange bra and a green one. Ok, the green one could denote greed or envy, but what the hell does ORANGE mean. Then again I guess Bras aren’t supposed to mean anything, they’re just supposed to hold breasts up. It worked.
I strongly disagree with the masterbation sequence because, well I just don’t believe Norman could do that. You see, generally a psychopath can’t release on his own, the act of killing is his form of ejaculation. And when you have a psychopath with multiple personality syndrome... well I don’t think the ‘Mother’ persona would have just sat back and allowed Norman to choke the chicken. Character wise it just didn’t work for me. Not that I have anything against masterbation... gosh it’s a wonderfully fun pasttime to pass the hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. And if more people did there probably would be a whole lot less repression in the world. But hey, that’s just what I think, not that I would ever touch my penis other than take a natural urination with it. Oh yes, perish the thought, not I.
Besides after Judge Reinhold’s Phoebe Cates episode is it really a shocking or evil act? Now if Van Sant had gone into a 75 shot 45 second masterbation sequence... well it still would have sucked because I still don’t buy that Mother would let Norman lope the mule, stroke the noodle, let loose with the mongoose....
Here are the things I liked.
I liked Norman Bates’ toy soldiers, and the floor shot in his room.
I liked Macy’s fall better and overall his death was vastly improved.
Sigh... ya know I hated them storm clouds and the cow and the other thing.
I loved the end shot.
Overall it’s a rental film. It’s not, for me anyway, a nighttime or even matinee film. Oh, and IT’S A LOT BETTER THAN JACK FROST!!!!
