ChristineCB

Mel, your two mentioned candidates have no reliance on 'more modern technology' compared to the previous versions. Each remake had rely on casting, acting and directing.

In so many modern remakes, there seems to be an auto-kickstart function that says "Our technology improvements will make this a hit".

And ignores that bad casting, acting and direction will sink that boat.

The new STEPFORD WIVES is a good example, although I think Matthew Broderick and Nicole Kidman was the biggest pairing mistake. Matthew REALLY needs to keep playing War Games wunderkids or miming John Lennon rockers. Putting him with grownup women just doesn't cut it. And certainly NOT with Nicole. Jeepers... (psst, Matthew, if Tom Cruise couldn't cut it, you ain't gonna, either.)

I really think these remakers never set their Casting, Acting and Directing goals high enough. Or even "above" the original. And that's why I wonder "why bother?!!" If you want to show off technology, do Toy Story 4. (I see "3" is already being finished.)

I'd certainly consider a remake. I often sit in films and think, "Boy, if ONLY they'd included this scene I'm thinking of - !!"

But you can tell from my vast film-maker's success, I also consider other things.

kelp

"The Nutty Professor" 1963 Original, by Comic American Genius Jerry Lewis.
Completely ruined by a re-make for Eddie Murphy.
Why? Well......money of course. The funny thing is, when one speaks about re-makes such as this, the new cinema goer usually will answer.."What? They made it before!???

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR...YOU MAY GET IT!

Cheeky Bob

I think those bashing Gus Van Sant's Psycho are missing the point slightly - because it was more of a bonkers conceptual art piece than a commercially-driven remake, and on that level it was as fascinating as anything by Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho, Zidane).

Or, more to the point, Jorge Luis Borges - as it's essentially a big-screen adaptation of his famous short story 'Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote', in which an author named Pierre Menard laboriously copies the text of Cervantes' masterpiece word for word - only to create something totally different, because while Cervantes was writing in the idiom of the time, Menard is deliberately writing in an archaic style, and so on.

And so it is with Van Sant's Psycho. Unlike most remakes, he doesn't just lift the plot and characters, but he also duplicates the original camera angles, editing and almost every other element of the Hitchcock film (which he had playing on a monitor on set just to make sure he got it right). Yet, as with Pierre Menard, he's created a completely different film - it's gone from being a cutting-edge contemporary thriller to a self-conscious pastiche of the late 1950s in terms of decor, costume, music and cinematic approach. Even the Bernard Herrmann score "sounds" different, because while it was shockingly new in 1960, it's now become the epitome of horror cliché.

So the 1998 Psycho is clearly no substitute for the original, but it was never intended to be. In fact, I'd argue that the more familiar with the original you are, the more surprisingly rewarding and entertaining Van Sant's version is. (And there's even one aspect of it that's unarguably superior to the original - as the investigator Arbogast, the great William H. Macy wipes the floor with the stolid Martin Balsam).

image45

'believe my rating system for Remakes lies' for a moment when I opened the thread I felt you were asking if your itrader feedback was a bit off the truth. Its amazing what a long day does to your eyes and the ability to think.

"Seya next time!"

ChristineCB

Not for me. Not for anyone in the theatre which saw it with me.

I cannot be missing the point "slightly". I have to be missing it in, like, Jupiterean proportions. Galactic proportions.

The changes he made: an obvious jerk-off scene (very fitting for Van Sant because the whole THING is nothing but his masturbatory exercise, I feel - I'm only sorry I had to witness it, much less pay for it; I'm sure he knows all about those kinds of activities - first HAND)...

The Sony Walkman. A ha! A real tip o' the hat to 1980s Technology there...

Cussing. Gee - no one has EVER done that before, yeah, we GOTTA put in cussing - a REAL leap for mankind! uh huh...

And that's about it. I don't see ANY evidence that he tried to improve one thing. And, like you said, if his intent was merely to 'lift' and totally plagerize the original, well, he did that. With lesser actors (well, William H. Macy, I'll give you - he's done more laudable work than I can find in Balsam's career, but if push came to shove, I KNOW Balsam would be wiping the floor with Wm H...)

I see no evidence that he tried to improve anything. The only evidence I saw that he demonstrated was an obviously keen interest in masturbation. Gee - that's another giant leap for 12-year boys and Van Sant.

So yes, I've missed his point. But probably not "slightly". Children with lightboxes can trace masterpieces, too, but art is MORE than tracing and plagerizing. I still consider his version an affront, an insult and a waste of celluloid and all the delivery services needed to cart it from one theatre to the next.

Cheeky Bob

That's because that's the last thing that he was trying to do. It's an extreme act of homage to the original, not any kind of substitute or "improvement".

I didn't say that, because that's not what he did. First of all, the "plagiarism" allegation is ridiculous, as plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else's work as your own without attribution or permission. Van Sant clearly isn't doing that - all the necessary rights were cleared, and he went out of his way to highlight what he was doing with Hitchcock's original. No-one could possibly be in any doubt about what his source was, and the name of its creator.

As for "lift", you don't seem to have grasped the point I was making about Borges' story. Borges was using the fictional story of Pierre Menard to illustrate that even if two people write absolutely identical texts, they will nonetheless be completely different if one was written by a Spaniard in the sixteenth century and the other by a Frenchman in the twentieth. And so it is with near-identical films made by an expatriate heterosexual sixty-year-old Englishman in 1959 and a gay American in his mid-forties in 1998. The mere fact that they're so similar serves to emphasise the vast differences between them.

That's because he wasn't trying to. Universal offered him the money to remake Psycho and weren't too bothered about what he did with it. Which is why he decided that this was a perfect opportunity to do something he'd fantasised about but never thought he'd get funding for - which is to remake a film in the most literal way possible, by duplicating all its constituent parts. I cited Douglas Gordon above, though Andy Warhol may be an even more apposite comparison.

Depends on the art, depends on the artist. Marcel Duchamp's 'L.H.O.O.Q' and 'Urinal' involved minimal physical effort on his part, yet they're key works of the last century's avant-garde.

Unfortunately, the one thing that the Van Sant Psycho absolutely demands is a totally open mind! You're welcome to dismiss it out of hand, of course, but the fact is that the 1998 Psycho is radically different in terms of its basic conception from most remakes, and therefore shouldn't be lumped in with them.

In fact, to underscore the differences between the films, the original Psycho was intended as a commercial thriller but was widely regarded as an art movie, while the remake was intended (at least by its creator if not its backers) as an art movie, but it was distributed and marketed as a commercial thriller!

(Don't get me wrong - I absolutely don't think that the Van Sant Psycho is any kind of unsung masterpiece, and the mere fact that it relies on intimate knowledge of the original for virtually all of its impact makes it arguably redundant from the start. In fact, a bit like the 1947 The Lady in the Lake with its 100% first-person POV, it's an illustration of the fact that some ideas should probably have remained on the drawing board. But I do have a more than sneaking admiration for the way Van Sant actually managed to get it made as he intended - unlike another mad idea that Steven Spielberg came up with, which was to take five very different directors and give them the same budget, script and actors and see what they came up with...)

ChristineCB

To me, it looks like Van Sant was so thrilled with the mechanical ability to put camera pods where the Hitchcock originals sat. Mechanics are so wonderful and necessary, but they are not artists. Rebuilding an engine from the plans and parts is not art - it's Henry Ford's mass production.

If Van Sant's whole reputation is built on re-creating shot-for-shot colorized versions for classics, I'm disappointed that he can't do his mechanics' duties in a few days for each film. Since all thinking has been done for him and placement of cameras and actors are all that's left, he should be able to churn these out faster than Max Sennett two-reelers.

Van Sant's got a deserved reputation. He asked for it, he's earned it. But 3rd graders copying off the same book report accomplish as much.

I still find that, without any interest by the filmmakers to improve, remakes are terrible wastes. Van Sant's clear goal of shooting for mechanical sameness underscores my point.

Cheeky Bob

Yes, but this is what Van Sant wanted to experiment with. He cited the undoubted fact that plays get adapted all the time by different directors, but screenplays generally only get filmed the once (a rare exception is Alan Clarke's Scum, which was filmed twice with mostly the same actors but completely different sets). To be honest, I think it might have been more interesting if he'd taken the Joseph Stefano screenplay and filmed it in his own way (a bit like the Spielberg example I cited), but the problem with Psycho is that every element of it is so iconic that it's impossible not to be influenced by it.

(On the other hand, giving the Stefano screenplay to someone who'd never seen Psycho might have been rather more intriguing - in fact, if I remember rightly, Van Sant deliberately picked Chris Doyle as his cinematographer for that reason, though I'm assuming he must have watched it at several points during the production.)

Actually, Van Sant is one of the most original directors working in mainstream American cinema - which is why it's automatically intriguing (at least to me) that he'd attempt a project like this.

It's also worth noting - and I'm sure Van Sant was well aware of this! - that Hitchcock famously said that he'd very happily entrust the actual filmmaking chores to somebody else if there was anyone he trusted enough. Which may be another reason Van Sant opted for this particular director to try out his experiment.

(Talking of which, I've just thought of a really bizarre coincidence - the Scum example I cited was entirely off the top of my head, but I've just remembered that Van Sant's other "remake" is of Alan Clarke's Elephant, though this time it departs significantly from the original).

I can't tell if that first bit is supposed to be sarcasm - but as far as I was concerned, I went to the 1998 Psycho because it was by the director of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, the bedrock of Van Sant's reputation at the time and two of the most imaginative American films of their respective decades. Which is why I'm not about to dismiss something he does out of hand: I'm assuming that there's a worthwhile motive behind it, even if (as in this case) it's the realisation of a whacked-out idea that he never thought anyone would actually fund.

Yes, but that's because you're still reading the Psycho remake as having the same intent as, say, Three Men and a Baby or The Wicker Man. As I've tried to argue, it's actually a completely different type of film, and I'm not aware of any direct equivalent outside the more experimental end of the arthouse spectrum. Which is one of the things that makes it such a fascinatingly bizarre one-off - I don't necessarily think that it should be repeated, but I'm glad that someone tried it once!

ChristineCB

I think it has been done again and again.

The Model T ("In any color you want, as long as you want black").

Robots in factories.

Paper dolls, folded over and cut out by 6 year olds.

Believe me - it's been done. Van Sant stands at the zenith of mongoloidal reasoning.

D Cairns

Frustrating that nobody will even listen to Cheeky Bob's arguments. I agree that the Van Sant concept is not a very clever one (and I think most of us could tell that without the film having to be made) but the KEY point is that in the medium of film, the idea of a shot-for-shot remake was unusual, a fairly original concept in the same way that Duchamp's mounting a urinal as art was original. You can like it or loathe it, but he thought of something that hadn't been seen before. Dragging in mass-produced automobiles is besides the point.

So the argument still stands: PSYCHO the remake is not a typical example of Hollywood recycling and ruining its classics, its an EXCEPTIONAL example.

Most bad remakes are bad because they mess with things that were central to the success of the original: THE WICKER MAN depends on believability, the avoidance of the fantastical; THE HAUNTING depends on NOT showing overt supernatural manifestations; THE LADYKILLERS depends on a FRAIL old lady sheltering a gang of professional criminals, and is FUNNY.

In the case of that film, the Coens deliberately changed lots of stuff because they didn't want to carbon-copy a brilliant original, they wanted to create their own roiginal take on the idea. Respectable enough, but unfortunately what they proved was that each creative decision made by the original filmmakers was close to being perfect, and by going off in radically different directions they ruined the idea.

ChristineCB

As I remained seated during Van S's PSYCHO, trying my best to avoid heaving vegetables at the screen (wow - a dash a creativity - at last!!), I tried my best to appreciate the mechanical rote effect of re-creating shot-for-shot pure copies.

I have no appreciation for it.

Mechanics in garages are more creative, and at least when I pay them, I get long term benefits.

What glories does Van S's film heap onto film history? "Hey look! I can copy someone else's camera placement, time after time! Wow! Isn't THAT a miracle?!!"

No, this film is really a great example of how I've distilled what impresses me about remakes: I degrade remakes that don't show evidence of attempts to improve upon the original.

Their failure or success in those attempts is also a factor in my ratings.

But when filmmakers don't even try to improve - they lack the resources but don't have the smarts to not try - then I degrade that aspect as well as the endn-result.

And Van Sant's PSYCHO is a whole other animal which I've reserved the greatests scorn for.

ChristineCB

(Honest - thanks for bringing up PSYCHO, and I hope my degree of venom for your arguments and that film don't stop you from other arguments for it.)

This version of PSYCHO is probably the groundworks for this thread, and my self-study, into why I degrade some remakes and why I tolerate or enjoy others.

mel walton

CHRISTINE CB
Hi Chris, nice to hear from you. I don't know about technology, at least, not enough to grasp all of this. like the fella said "I don't know art, I only know what I like" Seems like one actor can make all the difference, sometimes. In those instances, Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. whatever, it paid to make those remakes. I, no longer, go to the movies - I watch Turner Classic movies a lot, so, I don't know modern actors: am I missing anything? Thanks, Chris. I'll be looking for any future posts by you. all the best, mel walton.

ChristineCB

Mel. GOODBYE MR CHIPS was shown recently and I mentioned that I love the original and have barely watched the Peter O'Toole version.

I believe my disdain for the O'Toole version rests solely because I give him values other than the "everyman' values I give to Donat. O'Toole has been in too many of my favorite films and for him to broach into MR CHIPS' territory, well, it seems at least invasive. "Why are you stepping on Donat's signature role? Don't you have enough of your own? Let the man have his."

Not arrogant, like Vaughan's Norman Bates, but still wrong. Vaughan had to think this was a chance to do a hallmark performance in his career, so he believed the rewards were greater than the risks.

But O'Toole? Could he possibly believe HIS Mr Chips would be a hallmark performance in his career? That his film version would outlast the grand original?

To me, this is choice borders on an All Risk/No Reward choice for him.

It's, like, man, wow - the Celluloid Forest is overgrown, Dude, and we need to chop it down and make ANY film or the Solar System will be overwhelmed by this uncontrolled abundance of film stock, man. Dude. Y'know.

My suggestion: go make more editions of THE ENDLESS SUMMER. Those are great little works with tremendous camera work.

samkydd

I'll get me coat!

"...the chairman of Littlewoods stores made a Keynote speech!"