PSYCHO (1998)
An experiment?  Or an anti-experiment?

So, I saw this one last night, super-cheap as usual for a movie that I never intended to go out of my way to see. I was never iron-hard against the idea of a clone of Psycho (I hesitate to call it a "remake", and "re-creation" seems to give P98 too much credit), but I also failed to see the point, if there was one.  

That's the question, isn't it?  Why the hell was this movie made?  What did anybody hope to gain? When you've got as enormous a pool of talent as we have in this movie, why would you want to have them basically clone somebody else's work?

  I've only seen one person defend the idea behind this movie (other than the cast and crew, and since they were paid for their work, they don't count), and he said something along the lines of "But we will see multiple productions of the same play, won't we?"  This overlooks an important point: MOVIES ARE NOT PLAYS.  Movies are not even plays on film.  They are no more the same kind of art forum than are poetry and prose.  The same rules do not apply. 

He also, for some reason, called it an "experiment", but isn't it just the opposite?  To take something that's a proven success and try to duplicate it as close as possible doesn't strike me as experimentation, it strikes me as to logical conclusion of bandwagon-jumping.  To "re-create" (as they call it) this movie is a very bizarre notion. 

But let's say for a moment that it is an experiment.  What are we trying to determine?  I can imagine a few possibilities.

First, no director's ever going to get his name in the papers with a movie like Good Will Hunting. Hey, I liked GWH as much as the next guy, but it's not the kind of thing that directors become well-known for. Would something like this do it?  (as it turns out, yes.  Director Gus Van Sant became a more or less household name after this movie, even if it was in the same kind of disgusted mutter that you often hear Michael Bay's name pronounced in)

The only other experiment I can think of (other than "let's find out what we can possibly gain from such a silly notion") is to see if a clone of a movie can succeed in a climate where the original is, on some level, losing favor.  If we keep everything in the film a constant - the shots, the script, the acting, and music - we can pretty much clone a movie, in theory. If we do it 38 years after the original, and more or less churn out the same movie, will snotty cinema purists reject the new film on some silly basis when they accepted the original, while it's pretty much the same film? And will fickle audiences eat it up in a way they're not doing for the original Psycho at the video store?

  If that's the case, experiment failed. You have to keep everything except the date a constant for this one, and here we've got some glaring problems, largest of which (literally) is the dreadfully miscast Vince Vaughan as Norman Bates. The result is definitely an inferior film. 

Not that it matters much - the movie flopped, and I hope that this serves as a lesson to future filmmakers. 

  But whatever the reason for the film's flopping (great poster, at any rate), that it's a rather poor movie is fairly obvious to anybody who sees it.  The biggest reason is Vince Vaughan. If he'd injected any more "crazy-man" tics into Norman, he'd have grown a mustache and twirled it around his finger, cackling with fiendish glee. He's TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE in this role. Most everybody else in the film is quite good, even though they're stuck in horrible surroundings, but Vaughan is a joke. He's shown he can deliver a good performance, but this isn't it. 

But more importantly - there's one scene in this movie that illustrates perfectly why this movie fails. We're shown Anne Heche stopped at the stop light while people mill about in front of her car. My jaw dropped here, because the 60's clothing and sets, which were a little perplexing at first, gave way to 60's visual effects, with these pedestrians who obviously were never actually on this street, so awful is the FX job. And I'm staring at this, amazed that Van Sant would do this, and I miss the shot of Hitchcock and Van Sant in their cameo, which is of course what we're supposed to be looking at.

  The minutae hopelessly distracts from the point of the movie. 

All this 60's clothing and sets, set clearly in 1998 (right down to the minute) invokes Austin Powers more than it does the original Psycho. Trying to keep track of what's been Hitch-pilfered, and what's Van Sant's own is distracting. Enjoying it on its own is very difficult for those who have seen the original.  

Now, I'm making this sound like an awful movie, but really, it's not too bad, and has its moments.  Like the dilation of Heche's pupil so that you know just when the exact moment of death occurs - very creepy (although the later shot of her eye, pupil contracted, erodes its effectiveness). I liked the bizarre, life-flashing-before-the-eyes death of Arbogast (what the hell's that about? Sheep in the road?  Chick on the couch?  Weird!), and I liked the live birds in the fruit cellar. And I liked "Mother"'s departure from the shower scene - in the original film, it looked like flight and escape, but here, it looks like a stomping off from a mission accomplished. 

Van Sant & company have cranked out a curiosity, nothing more. A colossal waste of collective talents' time, of course. But as a curiosity, why shouldn't the curious give it a look? You could do worse. If you haven't seen the original (and shame on you if you haven't), you might actually even enjoy this one on its own terms.