thoughts on the 1998 remake of psycho

My opinion on the 1998 remake of Psycho is that it wasn’t that badly done. It was pretty good on the contrary. I mean naturally it’s not as good as the original or actually let me rephrase that, it has its differences, but see the thing is I cannot say that for everybody because everyone has their own unique perception and when it comes to movies, everyone is different. People tend to say it is not as good as the original because they use the original to base the performance of the remake but some people see it as better because it is newer and by that I mean it is closer to the movies of today as it was made for today’s audience. It seems more realistic and it is faster paced. People of today see melodrama as corny and there were a lot of corny moments in the original that the remake does not have, for example, the famous hotel scene where Marion offers to lick the stamps in the original.

There were a lot of differences in the remake and as I said, this movie is much faster paced than the original. Let’s analyze the hotel scene for example. Marion seems much less caring and melodramatic in the remake and Sam’s personality is much different and in my opinion better and more believable. I like the fact that they updated little things like the money stolen for example from 40 thousand to 400 thousand, which today is more believable. Marion in the remake seems less nervous in her runaway scenes and I hope everyone agrees with me on this. Look at the original. Everything she did was completely nerve racking for her as well as for us from seeing her boss on the road going through the California Charlie scene till the hotel scene. California Charlie himself is different and he had a kind of sleaziness to him. He didn’t even notice the Cop at all and probably didn’t even care if he did after she left.

I would like to comment on the color scheme as well. The movie looked very orangish if I am not mistaken. She wore a lot of orange and the background seemed orange in comparison as well. To me I felt that the new director in a way was trying to commit the movie and still keep a black and white kind of view despite the fact that the movie was in color. Apparently I heard that green was the new color of evil. I mean even though it was a sheik, colorful movie (or so I thought), I would have still stuck to black because green is too bright a color for darkness but that’s just me. What do you guys think?

I just want to make a small comment about Vince Vaughn as a small tangent. In order to get the full experience I feel people should watch this before any of Vince’s newer comedic movies. Well because if you watch the movie with the mindset of Wedding Crashers or Old School then just seeing him will put a smile on your face and his laugh will set you bursting with laughter. I think Vince did a good job because even though he didn’t have the originality or the thinness of Anthony Perkins (I say this because Anthony’s bony, skinny face did worked better with shadows ads it made him look more mysterious and creepy whereas Vince’s shadow work just made him look like he’d been swimming in Twinkies), he did a really fine job to portray creepiness.

Now that were talking about creepiness lets discuss Anthony’s portrayal of Norman compared to Vince’s portrayal of Norman. I think Anthony Perkins did a much better job of course because not only was he physically perfect for the role, his acting was better too. Perkins made Norman seem so innocent like a child which made the movie scarier after our realization of Norman as mother. Vince didn’t do a bad job as I said earlier but Vince looks more grown up and manly than Anthony making him seem more threatening. We see Vince as threatening from the start whereas we saw Anthony as innocent and even pitiful. Marion in the original isn’t really creeped out but amused by Norman whereas in the remake we can tell that she is creeped out from the beginning. After their talk she doesn’t seem repentant at all but just wants to leave. The masturbation scene was pretty disturbing but today we need something that really creeps us out and that did the trick so well done.

I just wanted to say that the scariness of the remake is different because they wanted to go for the immediate scariness not the later scariness of realization that Norman and Mother are the same. The energy takes place in different parts in both movies so where one part would be slow in one, the other would be faster and vice versa. So in those ways the remake did well even though personally I think the original was much better. Please comment so I can see what you guys thought. i will update this after I have more time to reflect