Carrie (2013)

I Can STILL See Your Dirty Pillows

I love my Film Criticism class.  At first I was a little bit resentful that I showed up for class to find that we were watching the 1976 Carrie movie.  I had already seen and reviewed this movie!  And more than that, I didn’t really like it that much.  But after the movie, I found out some very exciting news: our midterm was to watch the new remake of the movie and compare the two.  I had already considered seeing this movie out of potential morbid curiosity.  But even better than that, I’d have to assume I’ll just be able to pull my midterm right out of this review.  But you guys will get the Director’s Cut of my midterm about the movie Carrie, based on the novel by Stephen King, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, directed by Kimberly Peirce, and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Gabriella Wilde, Ansel Elgort, Alex Russell, and Barry Shabaka Henley.

Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a shy weirdo that gets abused by her schoolmates for not understanding what’s happening when she gets her first period in the shower.  To top that off, her mother (Julianne Moore) abuses her because she thinks Jesus gave her a period as punishments for her sins or some such nonsense.  But Carrie starts to realize that she’s not just an ordinary creepy girl.  She starts to realize that she can do things with her mind; a phenomenon she finds is called “telekinesis.”  But, more important than that (if you’re a high school girl), is that Tommy Ross (Ansel Elgort) asked her to the prom!  Sure, he asked her at the behest of his girlfriend, Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde), because they felt sorry for Carrie.  But Carrie still has a problem: Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday).  Chris is the head of the bully girls that pick on Carrie, and she resents Carrie because picking on her got her punished and banned from the prom.  And that’s just good logic right there.  Chris devises a plan with her boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) to make Carrie pay for the punishment that she brought on herself.

I should do remakes more often!  I just got to copy and paste that whole thing from my other review!  Now, my midterm essay is supposed to be more about the differences between the two movies, so this won’t be my typical review.  But I’ll still get the review in there somewhere.  Let’s start with the story.  The story was almost exactly the same.  This movie claims that it stuck closer to the original novel than the original movie, and that just makes me think I wouldn’t like the novel.  I don’t particularly care about either story.  But the differences that I noticed actually made me like the story a little bit more.  The fact that Carrie’s mom had a job didn’t make that much sense to me.  It seems like it’d be hard to keep a job with that level of crazy going on.  I thought the ending of the original movie was much more effective, but this one was apparently more like the novel (at least according to Wikipedia).  The scene afterwards worked much better as well.  First of all, the sequence happened in a dream, so Carrie might not actually have decided to come back from the dead.  But if she did, it just makes much more sense that she could maybe have survived bringing the house down on her head instead of bringing the house down on her head, being dug out, prepared for burial, buried, and then coming back to life as it seemed the remake was implying by having Carrie’s gravestone start cracking.

The look of the movie would obviously have improved over time just because of advances in technology (not to mention the extra $28.2 million the remake had to work with).  Most everything in the movie just looked a lot better.  I like that they kept the fact that Carrie starts and ends the movie covered in blood, but they did it differently.  The original started with the shower scene which this movie still had, but this one started with Carrie being born.  I guess that makes it more symbolic that not only the movie but Carrie’s life started and ended covered in blood.  I thought the prom scene in this movie was much better too, even before it gets to the “bloody prom” part.  They still have the scene where Carrie and Tommy dance in this movie, but thankfully Peirce didn’t make the strange choice to film the two of them dancing in a centrifuge as De Palma did.  But I liked it much better when it got into the “bloody prom” part.  It was much more brutal as I imagine it should have been in the original.  The original movie had Carrie attacking people with a fire hose.  In the remake, Carrie crushes people with bleachers, throws heavy decorations at people, electrocutes them, and lights them on fire.  The ensuing car crash was also done much better.  It made more sense that they would have tried to run Carrie down because she kept them from leaving town.  In the original, they just kind of show up and the movie doesn’t really bother trying to tell us their motivation for running her down.  Then it was also graphically better when she slams the car to a stop.  I did think it didn’t make sense because the speedometer made it seem that they had gotten up to about 100 mph trying to run her down but they didn’t fly through the windshield until Carrie slammed the car into the gas pump.  I think going from 100 mph to 0 so instantly would have sent them both out of the car.

One thing that came up in class was the fact that De Palma filmed some of the scenes in a very perverted fashion that really didn’t seem to fit the movie.  Things like the shower scene and the detention exercises seemed more like they were out of Porky’s than out of a horror movie.  There was a little bit of that in this movie, but I only noticed it in the beginning when they were playing volleyball in the pool and they were filming all of the “high school students” underwater and below the belt.  I guess it helps that this movie was directed by a woman instead of a man.

There were a lot of differences in the performances in this movie.  Chloë Moretz did a decent enough job, but I didn’t feel she could really touch the quality of work Sissy Spacek put out in the original.  Spacek’s Carrie was afraid of her powers for most of the movie.  Moretz relished them almost immediately.  I thought it was a bit of a stretch for this movie to want me to believe that this girl would lose her mind when she got her first period but think it was cool that she has telekinesis.  She apparently has pyrokinesis as well because she can weld locks with her mind, and she also has some amazing baby gender-detecting ability.  I guess she did get a lot more practice with her powers in this movie than Spacek did, which I also thought was weird.  Seeing her practice with her powers made this feel more like I was watching a prequel to X-Men.  The strength of her powers also varied as needed by the movie.  At one point she’s lifting a car, but minutes later she can’t push her mom off of her?  On the other hand, I thought Julianne Moore did a much better job than Piper Laurie.  Moore played it a lot more real and Laurie played it almost cartoonishly over the top.  It makes sense since after I read that Laurie thought the movie was a satire of horror movies after she read the script, but the character works much better if she doesn’t cause the audience to laugh at some of the things she does.  It made me think that my dream team would’ve been Spacek as Carrie and Moore as the mom, if that would’ve been age appropriate.  Maybe with some clever editing…

I also thought they made some strange changes in the other girls of Carrie’s school.  I thought the role reversal was weird between Sue and Chris.  The Chris of the original (Nancy Allen) was a hot blond, and Sue (Amy Irving) was the cute brunette.  In the remake, Sue was the tall, hot blond (Gabriella Wilde) and Chris was the cute brunette (Portia Doubleday).  I guess anyone can be a bully, but typically the tall, gorgeous blond is the mean one, having been spoiled by being able to get her way her whole life with her looks.  I also thought that the bullies weren’t as cartoonishly mean to Carrie as they were in the original.  When Carrie sucks at volleyball, Chris makes a joke about it but is generally encouraging.  Carrie didn’t get hit in the face with a baseball cap because of it.  And when Carrie was freaking out in the showers, the girls thought it was strange that she didn’t know what a period was, but they seemed to be genuinely offering her tampons until she kept freaking out about it.  Chris did start to become much more unlikeable when she filmed it and put it on the internet, and even more unlikeable when she didn’t delete the video from her phone before going into the principal’s office.  No one likes a stupid person.   I also thought it was interesting that the roles were reversed between Chris and her boyfriend Billy, who I thought was The Situation for a good part of the movie.  Chris was the manipulator in the original movie, and Billy was in this one.

The Carrie remake was scarcely different from the original.  In some ways it was improved, such as in the look and in the greater majority of the performances.  The only performance I liked in the original movie was Sissy Spacek, and the only performance that was not improved on for the remake was the very same role.  The story was basically the same.  If you were forced to make a choice between the two of them, I guess I would recommend this one, while still saying that Spacek is worth checking out in the first movie.  But if you don’t need to choose, then I’d say you can get by skipping both of them.  Carrie gets “You know the devil never dies, keeps coming back.  But you gotta keep killing him” out of “There are other people out there like me who can do what I can do.”

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Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

The War Between the Sexes is Over.  Men Won the Second Women Started Doing Pole Dancing for Exercise

I felt like it was necessary to follow my reviews of the Rocky franchise with something entirely not-Rocky.  This, of course, led to me renting Warrior from RedBox.  But we’ll get to that in a couple of days.  After a bit of a near death experience I had today, I felt like I needed something life affirming.  And, after my roommate Richard yelled at me for suffering through my crippling pain in silence and driving myself to the ER without telling him even though I had to walk past his room to get to my car, he was able to suggest just the right movie for me.  And it was one that came out within the last 50 years, unlike most of the movies he watches.  Let’s see if this movie affirmed my life in my review of Crazy, Stupid, Love, written by Dan Fogelman, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Jonah Bobo, Analeigh Tipton, Joey King, Beth Littleford, John Carroll Lynch, Marisa Tomei, and Kevin Bacon.

Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) sits down to dinner with his wife Emily (Julianne Moore).  He orders the salad and she orders a divorce.  Emily confesses that she cheated on him with a coworker of hers, David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon) because she was unhappy with their marriage.  Cal does not take it well.  He starts frequenting a bar, getting drunk and talking loudly about his divorce.  Eventually, this catches the attention of Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling), who decides to make Cal his pet project, turning call into a womanizer just like him.  Under Jacob’s tutelage, Cal’s first conquest is a teacher named Kate (Marisa Tomei), which will more than likely never come back to haunt him.  But Cal’s is not the only love story that’s not going well.  Cal’s 13-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bob) has fallen in love with his babysitter, 17-year-old Jessica Riley (Analeigh Tipton).  Jessica is having none of the younger Robbie, much preferring the much older Cal, who is in turn having nothing to do with that jailbait.  Jacob also begins to have feelings for a girl named Hannah (Emma Stone).

This is a flawed movie, to be sure, but it’s one I found genuinely likeable.  There were parts to the story I took issue with, but there were also plenty occasions in this movie that caused me to burst into laughter, something most movies don’t have the ability to do (intentionally, at least).  And it did indeed have a happy, life affirming ending.  It didn’t go for the silly convention of tying everything up in a pretty little bow and giving us the happily ever after, but it was close enough and better for it.  Let’s talk about the story first.  I appreciated it for being a really good and deep look at a crumbling marriage and how it affects those around it.  The alcoholism, the depression, the denial, all of these things came into the picture.  In comes the guy that seems to give the character what he really wants with a bunch of strange tail, but all he actually wants is his wife.  It seems to lead you down the path of believing that love is a lie and there’s no such thing as soulmates, but it flips the script on you for the end.  And the part right before the ending was a fantastic and hilarious way to smash together all of the different storylines, but it will require a ::SPOILER ALERT::  Near the end is when it’s revealed that Hannah, who is dating Jacob, is the first child of Cal and Emily.  Cal was casually flippant about the idea that Jacob was settling down with a girl before he knew that this girl was his daughter.  And he had seen too much of Jacob’s sluttier behavior to let that go down.  Of course the rest of the family would like to know how Cal came to know Jacob, but that would cast a negative light on Cal.  The “love triangle” between Cal, his son Robbie, and the babysitter Jessica comes to a head when Jessica’s parents finds that she’s taken nude photos of herself with the intent to give them to Cal.  Jessica’s parents show up and attack Cal as they’re all still working with the Jacob and Hannah situation, and this reveals Robbie’s love for Jessica and Jessica’s love for Cal, which causes more problems.  And then top it all off with David Lindhagen walking in to return Emily’s scarf to her, and shit just goes down.  This was definitely the emotional climax of the movie, and it felt like it should’ve been wrapped up with a good bit of dialogue immediately after this.  That’s not the way they went with it.  They went back to depressing for a bit before bringing us back to a happy ending.  It took a little longer, but it was still satisfying.  But it also was one of the best examples of a big problem I had with the story, but this does not require spoilers so ::END SPOILERS::  I’ve noticed a dangerous trend recently that is at least partially upheld by this movie.  It seems that, in the opinion of the masses, men are stupid and bad and women can do no wrong.  It felt like Cal was getting blamed for everything that was going wrong in this movie.  Yes, I grant that he may have been emotionally disconnected in the relationship, but that’s hardly an excuse to cheat on him.  Then, when it comes out that Cal slept with 9 women after their separation, Emily gets all mad at him.  First of all, we’re separated right now, so it’s none of your gundamned business.  Second, have you forgotten that you also had sex with someone else, but didn’t have the good sense to wait until we were separated?  This kind of stuff got on my nerves, but the movie still managed to be really good and really funny.  Any movie that makes a joke about how shitty Twilight is will be considered alright in my book.

I cannot think of any performance in this movie that I didn’t love.  It’s a star-studded cast and I expected no less from them.  They didn’t disappoint.  Steve Carell has shown us his comedic side and his dramatic side plenty of times before, and he pulls of both here fantastically.  I also like seeing him play drunk, because it’s usually really funny.  Ryan Gosling is probably the reason women would want to see this movie, and he gets his shirt off and shows the world that I am his body double.  Julianne Moore is Carell’s opposite in that she’s known for being a fantastic dramatic actress, but has done some good with comedy as well.  Emma Stone is great times to look at, and does a great deal of comedy as well.  I tend to always find her very charming.  Analeigh Tipton had unconventional good looks in this movie, but is still very attractive.  I kept thinking she looks like a younger, brunette Riki Lindhome, and that’s alright by me.  She also gives a very real performance in this movie.  I think Marisa Tomei tended to steal the show every time she was on camera.  She wasn’t in the movie that often, but when she was she was pretty hilarious as she completely flipped out over thinking Steve Carell had lied to her to get her in the sack, although I’m fairly sure he didn’t.

This movie borders on being a bit of a chick flick, but I found it to be a really good movie nonetheless.  It was well-written though it does seem to hate men, it was incredibly funny in parts, and the performances were all fantastic.  I definitely recommend this movie to you, as a watch, rental, or purchase.  I’ll probably purchase it myself at some point.  Crazy, Stupid, Love gets “Seriously?!  It’s like you’re Photoshopped!” out of “The perfect combination of sexy and cute.”

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The Lost World – Jurassic Park (1997)

Taking Dinosaurs Off This Island is the Worst Idea in the Long, Sad History of Bad Ideas

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the trilogy I’m currently reviewing is about to take a turn for the worse. We drop down from yesterday’s 89% to today’s 52%, and tomorrow to something apparently even worse. But, being a completionist, I journey onward into the sequel. Going into the movie, I really don’t remember what I originally thought of it. I know I loved the first movie, but I only remember the basic story of the two sequels and not what I think about it. We’ll find out together in my review of The Lost World – Jurassic Park, written by David Koepp, directed by Steven Spielberg, and starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vanessa Lee Chester, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Vince Vaughn, Richard Schiff, Richard Attenborough, Peter Stormare, Harvey Jason, Thomas F. Duffy, Joseph Mazzello, and Ariana Richards.

Four years after the first movie, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) has fallen on some harsh times, having broken his contractual obligation to not talk about what happened on Jurassic Park. Talking about it got him in trouble and discredited as everyone didn’t really believe his tales of dinosaurs on an island. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has not fared much better, having lost control of InGen in the wake of the disaster, having his douche nozzle of a nephew, Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), take over. Hammond summons Malcolm and asks that he join a team to document the dinosaurs living on a second island, Isla Sorna, in order to get it named a nature preserve and kept from the exploitative hands of man. Malcolm is not down…until he finds out that Hammond recruited Malcolm’s girlfriend, Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), and that she is already on the island. Malcolm agrees to go, but only to get his girlfriend to leave. He joins up with engineer Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff) and documentary producer Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and heads to Isla Sorna. Soon after they meet up with Sarah, they find out that Ludlow has sent a big crew to the island, not to watch, but to capture the dinosaurs because, even though Hammond showed that this idea wouldn’t work, they’re different and will totally make it work and there’s nothing that could go wrong ever. They bring hunters Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite) and Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare). Also, it turns out that Dr. Malcolm’s daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), has stowed away and is now on the island with them.

Rotten Tomatoes was pretty on the money with this movie. I wouldn’t say the movie was bad, but it was mediocre. And when you make a sequel to a fantastic movie and it turns out mediocre, that tends to make people pretty resentful. The story was okay, but sometimes didn’t really make sense. Some of the graphics take a step forward, but some of them also take a big step back. I can kind of get on board with people going back to the islands because no one believed Malcolm in the first place. And most people could believe the rich corporation trying to take another shot at trying to make money off of the dinosaurs. But when Goldblum says “You’re not making the same old mistakes, you’re making brand new ones,” I feel like most of us were probably thinking the same thing. I love Julianne Moore too, but if she chose to go to that island of her own free will, then fuck her. She’ll either come back or she won’t, but my hands are clean. When early on, Kelly is talking with her dad about the gymnastics competition, it’s inserted into the conversation and movie so fluidly that we just know that this wasn’t just setting up something retarded later on in the movie. And then, when some conveniently placed bars allow Kelly to gymnasticize over to a Velociraptor and kick him through a window, you think to yourself “This was in no way stupid and retarded and predictable and unlikely.” It was, in fact, brilliant. Or I’m very facetious. I also found it a little strange that Sarah – a character who was mostly portrayed as intelligent – took the greater majority of the movie to figure out that the Tyrannosaurus – a creature she at one point explained had the largest Olfactory glands and thus the best sense of smell of any animal – may have been following the team because it could smell the blood of it’s child on her shirt from when she had to fix it’s broken leg. Of course, dumber than her is the Paleontologist that Ludlow brings along. He’s so dumb that, while a number of them are trapped with their backs against the wall in a cave, separated from a Tyrannosaurus by only a waterfall, the fact that he gets a harmless coral snake down his shirt makes him spaz out enough to get his arm grabbed by the T-Rex. That shit could be a King Cobra down my shirt, but I’ll take my chances with him over getting any closer to a T-Rex. I imagine that decision is only stronger had I the education of a Paleontologist. The biggest problem I had was towards the end of the movie, when they have a Tyrannosaurus in the cargo hold of a ship heading towards California, how the hell did that big ass T-Rex kill everyone on the ship when he was trapped in the cargo hold? That doesn’t make any sense. But what makes less sense is the fact that the T-Rex is running around San Diego, with cops all around, and not a single person shot at it. I know cops have guns, and I’m sure regular home owners have a few. I don’t expect the thing to go down with one bullet, but enough of them will probably do the trick.

The dialogue in the movie is pretty much what you’d expect. Not too much of it was very clever, but there were a couple of good lines dropped in situations that I felt they probably should have been too afraid to come up with a good zing. My favorite example happened when Goldblum, Moore, and Vaughn were in the RV that was dangling off a cliff. Richard Schiff is up top yelling down to see if they need anything and they ask him for rope. He then asks if they need anything else and Goldblum says, “Yeah, three double cheeseburgers with everything,” then Vaughn says, “No onions on mine,” and Moore tops it off with, “And an apple turnover.” I grant that, in their current predicament, they probably would have other things going through their mind than clever things to say, so it doesn’t feel realistic that they’d come up with one, but that interaction made me laugh. Graphically, I found the movie to be hit and miss. The animatronic dinosaurs really seemed to work well again. Most of the dinosaurs had a lot of personality to them and allowed you to kind of figure out what they were probably thinking, but some of the computer generated ones sucked out loud. Right before that fantastic gymnastics scene, the Velociraptor was really not convincing. It was the kind of CG that was inexplicably well lit for being in the middle of a completely dark environment and really stuck out as bad. Back to the part with the RV, I did like the part where the three people were on the rope and the RV fell down around them. I also liked the door on the vehicle that Stormare was in that extended out so that he could shoot a dinosaur before reeling him back in. Another thing that occurred to me graphically was that they really overused the water rippling effect that was made famous in the first film. It was almost like they thought, “People loved this in the first movie, so let’s do it every single time a T-Rex is coming!”

The performances were pretty good, but some of the characters didn’t work for me. Jeff Goldblum plays this in much the same way he’s played every role I’ve ever seen him in. Julianne Moore was a pretty likeable character, but they wrote her in a confusing way. I think she was just supposed to be a documentary film person with a lot of experience living around predators, but she inexplicably knew how to set a Tyrannosaurus bone for the baby T-Rex. Medical training does not necessarily come with the territory of a documentarian. What actually goes against it is the fact that she pets a baby Stegosaurus after hearing her talk about how you have to observe and not interact with these things. Vaughn’s character was pretty likeable and had a couple of funny moments. Pete Postlethwaite’s hunter character was pretty great. He just wanted to hunt a T-Rex throughout the movie and seems like a bit of an asshole, but kind of a badass as well. After catching a T-Rex, he sets himself apart from the overly douchey Ludlow by resenting the fact that his associate didn’t make it. Also, I found Vanessa Lee Chester to be a pretty annoying and unnecessary addition to the cast.

This movie, if it stood alone, would probably be considered a pretty decent, but not great, movie. It’s story is fine, but doesn’t make sense sometimes. Some of the dialogue is good, and most of the graphics are amazing, but some of the graphics are just bad. The performances are even pretty good. The thing that hurts this movie most of all is the fact that Jurassic Park is in the title. Were it not for being so far inferior to it’s much better predecessor, this movie could have been ranked in the 70’s. It’s okay and worth seeing at least once, but only really worth owning because it usually comes with the first movie. The Lost World – Jurassic Park gets “I just found the parts they didn’t like” out of “Violence and technology: not good bedfellows.”

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Psycho (1998)

12 Cabins, 12 Vacancies

I feel like I’ve made a mistake that I can’t rectify now. I probably should have watched the original of this movie before watching the remake, but I didn’t and I doubt I’ll be able to by the time this review comes out. Today’s movie is a remake of a classic Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I’ve never seen a Hitchcock movie before. Calm down, everybody! It wasn’t like I refused to watch them, it just never came up. And once I had started today’s movie, I started realizing that I should’ve watched the original first. But, in my defense, this movie could potentially have been hurt by everybody comparing it to the original, and I’m going in unbiased. Yeah, that’s a good excuse. I win. … The movie is Psycho, this version written by Joseph Stefano, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Haney, James Remar, Rita Wilson, James LeGros, Flea, and Robert Forster.

Marion Crane (Anne Heche) has a fantastic boyfriend named Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen), who is married and in debt. What makes him fantastic? He is Viggo! You are like the buzzing of flies to him! Psst. I WILL make that joke for every Viggo Mortensen performance I review. You’ve been warned. Anyways, Marion works at some job that I never really figured out. Realty, I think? Anyways, she steals $400,000 from a guy who came in to talk with her boss and pay for something in cash. She takes it to get her boyfriend out of debt. She starts driving to California to see him. A cop wakes her up as she sleeps on the side of the road in her car and her skittish demeanor makes him suspicious, so he follows her. She trades her car in for a new one to lose him (even though she knows he’s parked across the street), and even though he comes up, sees her take the new car, and probably talks with the salesperson about her paying in cash, he does not follow. … Whatever, we just need her to get to the Motel, right? She gets caught in a rainstorm and pulls off at the Bates Motel. She meets Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), who owns the place. He has plenty of rooms because no one ever comes by. He apparently lives there with his mother, who is crazy. He seems nice enough until she suggests putting his mother in an institution, and he gets very upset. She goes to her room, where she decides to return the money the next day, and then goes to take a shower. Do I really haveta tell you how that shower ends?

I didn’t really like this movie, and that proves to me that I also won’t like the original. I HAVE SPOKEN! Even though I’ve never seen the original, I feel like I pretty much know it by heart because of parodies and just seeing scenes from it everywhere. I know the whole mother surprise, I know the shower scene, I know Norman looking through the hole in the wall, I don’t remember him masturbating as he did it, and I’ve actually been to the damned Motel on the Universal lot. That being the case, I feel like this movie stuck so close to the original (or at least what I know about it) that there really wasn’t any reason to make it. The only difference is that it’s in color and stars people I know. And if you aren’t going to add to it (but may potentially subtract from it) there’s no reason to do it. I did not, however, know there was a second half of this movie. I don’t know how I thought this movie worked out, being an entire movie leading up to a murder in a shower and cross-dressing revealed in the last 5 minutes, but I did. So it was interesting to find out what happened in the second half. I wish I had ever figured out what time this movie was supposed to take place in though. I thought they replicated this movie so much that they even set it in the 60s, especially when William H. Macy showed up. Macy acted like a pretty typical 60s cop, and then Julianne Moore walks in wearing a Walkman, for no apparent reason other than to say “PSYCH … O!” There were a bunch of things that didn’t work in this movie, the biggest of which was the music. I know it was a nod to Hitchcock, but I found it kind of tedious and adding to tension that wasn’t there. They would have really tense driving music when Heche was driving in her car. COME ON! She WAS getting herself all worried by having a really annoying interior monologue of people talking about her and figuring out what she’d done, but SHE was worried, not me. I was bored. You don’t need to lay everything flat on the table for the audience, we can figure some things out. But they do that again at the very end of the movie, where the psychologist that talks to Norman lays out exactly what he did and why he did it for about 5 minutes and I was thinking “Yeah, I know. I figured it out when I saw him in the wig.”

The performances were fine in this movie. Not spectacular, but mostly not horrible. Vince Vaughn was kind of like other Vince Vaughn characters, but more creepy, shy, and nervous. Anne Heche looked, and acted, pretty good in this. Her performance in the shower scene seemed a little off, but I think she was trying to do a remake of the performance from the original. Otherwise her reaction to being stabbed was perhaps a bit strange. I had no idea that Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, or William H. Macy were even in this, but I was happy to see they got a pretty descent cast for a movie that didn’t need to happen. I thought Macy’s performance was strange when I started to figure out that this was supposed to be happening in the 80s, but it wasn’t off-putting. The thing that WAS off-putting was how bad his death was. It wasn’t his fault, but I forgot to put it in the last paragraph and I ain’t goin all the way up there to add it. He “falls” down the stairs, but it’s fairly obvious that the “down the stairs” part is green screen and he’s just standing in front of it flailing.

Based on what I know, this seems like a shot for shot remake of a movie regarded as a classic, but I found it to be very boring. Judging by the other reviews for the two movies, my guess is they did a poor job trying to remake the original, which probably didn’t need to be remade. The performances were mostly okay, but the movie didn’t really need to be made. We’ll see if neither movie needed to be made if I ever get around to the original. In the meantime, you don’t really need to watch this one. The remake of Psycho gets “We all go a little mad sometimes” out of “A son is a poor substitute for a lover”.

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The Big Lebowski (1998)

With my roommate back in town, the decision was made to rewatch The Big Lebowski, recently released in Blu-Ray. This movie has quite the star studded cast, including Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and many many more. It’s also a Coen Brothers movie and, at least so far as I’ve seen, they can do no wrong, so let’s dive right in.

The Big Lebowski is the story of the Dude (Jeff Bridges) who is a laid-back bowler on a bowling team with Goodman (a crazed, Jewish, Vietnam vet) and Buscemi (Shut the fuck up, Donny). The Dude gets confused for another Lebowski and is subsequently assaulted, threatened, and – worst of all – has his rug defiled. And that rug REALLY tied the room together. The Dude goes to the other Lebowski to get his rug replaced and kinda does. Then the other Lebowski’s wife (Tara Reid) gets “kidnapped” and the remainder of the movie is the situation getting more and more crazy around the Dude. But it’s okay, ’cause the dude abides, man.

This movie can be a little hard to follow at times, trying to figure out who’s doing what and why, but that’s really not the point, is it? This is a comedy, it’s purpose is to be funny, and it is. It should come as no surprise that I liked this movie as I’ve already said that, as far as I’ve seen, the Coen Brothers can do no wrong. Jeff Bridges portrayal of the Dude (though admittedly similar to ALMOST all of his other performances I’ve seen him in) is fantastic. He’s somewhat dimwitted, pretty clever, very comical, and totally laid-back. I like this dude Dude. I say it’s similar to his other performance only because I’ve only seen him in like 5 movies, and two of them are Tron. No one can say Rooster Cogburn had anything in common with the Dude beyond being awesome. John Goodman is awesome in this movie as well. He’s a crazy asshole Jewish Vietnam Vet. I could totally see hanging out with this guy even though he’d drive me nuts, especially because whenever he gets involved he makes things worse and doesn’t seem to realize it. Julianne Moore and Buscemi were also quite enjoyable, but of the lesser cast, I think Turturro stands out as Jesus. He would just pop in occasionally as an over the top antagonist stereotype, but was funny every time.

So I’m keeping it short here because I really don’t have much to say about a movie most people already know and love. Check it out if you haven’t already.