Viggo mortensen and ann hesche in psycho 1998 clips youtube movie#
Now that enough time has passed, I’m hoping some viewers can see the movie less through the lens of “they shouldn’t have” and be able to look at it as the odd cinematic experiment that it is. The ideas behind the movie may have been misguided, but the execution ranges from competent to skillful. It’s very well made, because Van Sant is a good director copying a great director.
Danny Elfman’s sweetening of Bernard Herrmann’s legendary score packs a punch, and the movie is always interesting even as it falters. Some of the actors’ interpretations of their respective characters offer enough difference to be compelling (yes, even Vaughn at times). The changes beg the question: if you’re going to do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, why not just do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho?īut, if we consider this remake of Psycho to be a kind of “cover version” of Hitchcock’s original, there are things to like in it. Yes, Vaughn is miscast and, yes, some of the costuming and production design is garish and, yes, Van Sant makes the inexplicable decision to sometimes deviate from Hitchcock’s template to cut away to stock footage of clouds or cows or to spell out any subtext and literally show Norman Bates masturbating to Marion in the shower, effectively undoing his very motivation for killing her. I know it’s probably blasphemous to say so, but I still find it pretty watchable. And that’s how we got Psycho ’98, a well-intentioned experiment that falls short because it more or less has to.īut the movie isn’t all bad. The problem is that to successfully prove this theory, the resulting film almost has to be unsatisfying. This is, I suspect, a major reason why Van Sant wanted to conduct the filmmaking experiment in the first place.
Changing just one element changes the entire alchemy of the thing, and the Psycho remake changes every single element by recasting, using a new director, shooting in color-you name it. Psycho 1998 isn’t Psycho 1960 for the simple reason that it can’t be Psycho 1960. Why doesn’t it work?īecause filmmaking is alchemy. They’re working with material proven to be great. Macy, a highlight as detective Arbogast, Julianne Moore as Marion’s sister Lila, and Viggo Mortensen as Marion’s lover Sam Loomis. Taking over for Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates is Vince Vaughn, an out-of-the-box choice and arguably the remake’s biggest weakness Anne Heche steps into Janet Leigh’s shoes as the doomed Marion Crane, whose overnight stay at the Bates Motel leads to the worst shower anyone has taken. Ever the outsider artist, Van Sant decided to cash in all of that goodwill by finally realizing a long-held desire to do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho-which, truth be told, is maybe the only way to even try to remake Psycho, even if the finished film doesn’t quite work. That alone has to be worth something.Ĭoming off the enormous box office success and a bunch of Oscar nominations for Good Will Hunting, indie director Gus Van Sant suddenly found himself with a great deal of studio clout. Think of it as a $20 million experimental film now that is has been tried and failed, we know that the experiment doesn’t need repeating. It only serves to make the original movie that much better (as though such a thing was possible) by demonstrating all the things Hitchcock does so perfectly that the remake gets perfectly wrong. While I’m never going to consider it a “good” movie, I’m strangely glad that director Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho exists.
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