Watching Gus van Sant’s remake of the Hitchcock classic, I was reminded of a perfectly-timed observation my sister once made when we were watching the original one lazy Sunday afternoon. She suggested that when Marion Crane undresses to have her fateful shower, Hitchcock should have cut to a shot of her removing pink puffy rabbit-shaped slippers before slipping under the cold, murderous water courtesy of the Bates Motel and its sweet attendant, Norman. It was such a hilariously random observation that I remember bursting into hysterics with her as we imagined those pink rabbity slippers being thrashed to shreds and soaked to bursting point in their owner’s blood. Indeed, I still wonder to this day what my mother must have thought when she came into the living-room to discover her two eldest children laughing and pointing hysterically at the onscreen death of a poor, unfortunate Hollywood heart-throb. “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?” Gus van Sant’s remake is like a pink puffy rabbit-shaped slipper clinging desperately to the sweat and excess blood of the chilling original: he should have considered that not even Hitchcock can remake Hitchcock. His almost shot-for-shot colour rendition has so many inconsistencies and bizarre details that it is very hard to take Gus van Sant’s efforts seriously. I strongly doubt if that were even his intention For a start, the casting is spectacularly wrong. Van Sant uses capable actors in roles that they either seem too uncomfortable or too mismatched (or simply too bored) to take to interesting levels. Why cast an actor as strange and versatile as Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis in a role that, to be fair, requires about as much acting as a piece of wet wood? In the original, John Gavin played Marion’s dim boyfriend as solid but also as thick as oak: here, Mortensen acts like the singing bush in The Three Amigos! He is strange, quivering, drawls Cowboy slang and has a rather irritating habit of raising his voice at the end of sentences, as if it will break into high-pitched song-and-dance at the most unexpected moments. Anne Heche seems bored and irritable as Marion Crane, who played by Janet Leigh seemed so sweet, self-effacing and genuinely nice (except when she was stealing money from her boss’s rich clients, who it must be said clearly seemed to deserve it). In her scenes, Heche exudes about as much sympathy as a smiling shark to a baby seal. This might have been an interesting trajectory for van Sant to pursue, since Heche’s Marion seems more ruthless and self-motivated than her black-and-white counterpart, and would therefore seem more likely to steal the $40k just for the sheer fun of it, rather than for ulterior motives. Yet since van Sant so doggedly pursues the structure of the Hitchcock original, which was purposefully built to induce our sympathy for guilt-ridden Marion Crane, Anne Heche is unable to develop her character in convincing ways. Her irritability and sharpness seems out-of-synch with the rest of the picture. I feel that if Julianne Moore (as Marion’s sister Lila) had swapped roles with Heche, perhaps the film could have improved. Likewise, if Mortensen had traded places with Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, perhaps some credible chemistry could have arisen between these performers. Even the smaller roles are miscast, although I would say that van Sant achieves some kind of closeness to the original through the casting of James Remar, who makes an excellent highway patrolman. Even if the casting were perfect however, the film’s production design is a very odd mix from start to finish. In such details as Marion’s fluorescent-green underwear, Sam Loomis’ 10-gallon hat and the overly-bright motel surroundings, van Sant demonstrates a profound lack of understatement that made the original so compelling. Even in the beginning when Hitchcock cuts to a shot of Marion’s cheese sandwiches drying in the Arizona heat, there is a gritty and sexually charged atmosphere (to the scene, not the sandwiches!) that recalls the tense social realist films of the late 1950s. Working on a shoe-string budget with his TV crew, Hitchcock created a cramped intimacy and claustrophobia to the early scenes in Psycho that really made Marion and Sam’s afternoon tryst seem urgent and desperate. In the remake however, unsubtle close-ups of buzzing flies and garish wallpaper disrupt the tone, and we are reminded that this film is not about real people, but about actors pretending to be actors pretending to be real people. Like an A-Level student drama production, every aspect of the production—from Danny Elfman’s insistence of setting each moment before a scare with Bernard Hermann’s infamously screeching violins to Amy Duddleston’s editing, which inserts odd shots of thunderstorms and cows in fields at crucial moments in the film—seem to be competing for the spotlight, for the odd audience member to shout out, “Wow! Isn’t that fantastic!” or “He used a 40k lamp there! Genius!” And at the ready of this doomed expedition we have Gus van Sant, a talented filmmaker whose comfort zone until 1998 seemed to be in films dealing with disenfranchised drug addicts and guilt-ridden hipsters on the road to nowhere in particular. Van Sant is very much an actor’s director, and does not usually seem too bothered with the pyrotechnics of his camera, unlike Hitchcock, who was meticulous to the point of being obsessive. It is therefore more shocking that he fails in areas where he might have succeeded, and instead opts for a through-the-motions remake with the occasional bizarre, affected touch or detail that, whilst funny or inventive for the first few minutes, cannot carry the entire film. As van Sant shows Norman Bates masturbating to Marion Crane through his peephole, I could not help thinking that in that one moment I could not see Gus van Sant doing likewise to the original, but ultimately never succeeding to impress, excite… or entertain.

I sat down with pen and paper to make notes on Melvin van Peebles’ milestone film for the first time: I had heard it mentioned in numerous film history books, including Mark Cousins’ very entertaining The Story of Film, and approached it with a feeling of academic solemnity. This was to be a serious film viewing. But 3 minutes in pen and paper had dropped onto the floor at my feet and I was scrambling for the fridge to arm myself with a can of fire water and a packet of crisps, the wind of this joyous flatulence of a film cutting pleasurably across my face. This is a film so wacky, horrifying, hilarious and fiercely political all at the same time that it defies all notions of academic stuffiness I had come to expect. Then again, I might have known from the title that there had certainly been no other film of this kind to have been made before. Made in 1971 whilst the Vietnam War was raging across the screens and student protestors’ blood was being painted on the white walls of Washington, Sweet Sweetback is an assault on the senses even today with Peebles’ varied use of jump cuts, split screen, freeze frames, filters, zooms, superimpositions, etc. Such techniques had been used in film before, but never with so much in-your-face brashness as here. A work like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song proves what Peter Greenaway meant when he once remarked that “continuity is boring.” A curious statement to make, yet what it highlights is the sheer freedom of expression that film allows, and I suppose that what Greenaway meant by this was that too little films—including some of his own, by the way—seemed to have forgotten that film making is, at its core, fun. In breaking the conventional protocol enforced for years that we call the Classical Hollywood filmmaking and by actually experimenting with the filmmaking and editing processes, Peebles treats his viewer to an all-night (well, 1 hour and 37 minutes to be precise) free-for-all visual buffet. If only more films had that level of energy and joy for the craft with the sheer goofiness to pull it off. Indeed, I must say that it felt like I was watching a home movie at times, but the best kind of home movie where the person filming dreams of making films in the future. The kind of home movie where they will play, cut, move to another place and play, cut, then move again. The kind that will infuriate relatives and probably eavesdrop on family-shattering conversations by accident, but at least the video would have been worth watching. The film also has a devout and healthy hatred of the corrupt enforcers of the law: the eponymous hero skewers them with pool cues, beats them with knuckle busters and sets them on fire, all to jaunty Ramsey Lewis Trio style music. Peebles treats his characters with the subtlety of a road runner cartoon, with Sweetback as Roadrunner and the police as Wile E. Coyote. Sweetback is somewhat justified for this to say the least when some policemen break into a flat, supposedly looking for him, and then beat the innocent occupant until he is practically blinded with his own blood. After this is done, one of them concludes: “That’s not Sweetback.” The other replies “So what?” Sweetback does however skin police dogs, which was a shade too sadistic for my taste. All in all, it would be unfair of me to describe all of the details of this film, but I will say that Terry Southern’s very funny book Blue Movie—supposedly written for Stanley Kubrick after the success of Dr Strangelove—about a dedicated filmmaker trying to make the most artistic and socially redeeming pornographic film ever made. Necrophile producers, neurotic actors and clueless cameramen and eventually the Vatican and the pope invade its pages, but Melvin van Peebles baadasssss song is what jumps to mind in reflecting Southern’s anarchic spirit for the brawny and the bawdy. Not Kubrick. ���]�I

One wonders what the world has done to deserve George Lucas. He is the Lady Macbeth of the Movie Brat filmmakers, an initially independent film maker whose mind once spawned of the greatest and most beloved films of our time, and then spent the rest of his life and career trying to destroy. I am of course talking about Howard the Duck, a masterpiece in every conceivable sense but the word. Produced by George “Moneybags” Lucas and directed by Willard Huyck, who co-wrote the screenplay of the original Star Wars, another of Lucas’ celluloid children that he has ever since tried to butcher with a cruelty matched only by King Herod and PE teachers. Howard is an underrated and sadly overlooked classic of dreadful film-making, a film so utterly bizarre that it achieves a kind of grandeur in its ability to unintentionally out-do most other films in terms of sheer incompetence. It has the usual Lucas-dressed hamburger salad of oak-wooden acting (especially from Howard himself, who is about as convincing a duck as Hannibal Lecter is a vegetarian), unnecessarily convoluted storylines and subtle-as-concrete dialogue. On the other hand, the film’s hero Howard throws some fascinating light on Lucas’ other trigger-happy heroes, Han Solo and Ronald Reagan: he vents all of his frustrations on a friendly janitor Phil played by Tim Robbins, who is very good at talking to feathered animals and does so here at great length. Howard also finds time during his time in Cleveland to hiss obscenities at the kind-hearted girl who takes pity on him and sadistically bite a receptionist on the behind whilst dressed as a French tourist, complete with beret, sunglasses and surly demeanour. Whilst allegedly based on the Marvel comic book, this is very much Lucas’ alter ego, a highly intelligent and capricious mass of feathered malevolence intent on wreaking havoc and causing heart-break to the very people that try to help him the most: his fans. In a cast that includes Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins and Richard Edson, Lea Thompson works the hardest—and incidentally does a good job— as Beverley, a young, lonely guitarist eager to find a new friend, but who upon offering the space-travel-lagged duckling a place to stay is cruelly berated and insulted. It is as if poor Miss Thompson were waiting for a friendly alien to come into her life and instead found… Howard. Still, she bravely soldiers on to help him return home and even develops a sexual attraction towards him over the course of their adventures. Enter Jeffrey Jones and Tim Robbins, who view Howard’s landing on Earth as a scientific breakthrough and join a party that evolves into a medley of cross-country chases, aerial acrobatics, glam-rock concerts and fistfights with deranged duck-hungry diners. A typical night in Cleveland this may be, yet if anything the film’s sudden shift from a potentially erotic thriller between Beverley and Howard into a Blues Brothers-style chase movie seem like an attempt by the film makers to bury the blossoming relationship between Howard and Thompson beneath a rubble of explosive but ultimately stale thrills. Indeed, Lucas and Huyck seem to have realised that they do not want to pursue the Michael Douglas/Sharon Stone trajectory between the lady and the duck, so the film ultimately fails to maintain the subversive edge and erotic drive of those early scenes in the final ninety-nine minutes of its running time. As if to punish Beverley for her misplaced affections, her encounters with other male human beings in the film constantly result in violence against her. She is attacked in the street, cat-called and tied down by various men throughout the film; the filmmakers even find it necessary for a fence to be erected between herself and the predominantly male crowd in the club scenes. Given such a representation of male human beings in Howard the Duck, it seems little wonder that she develops sexual feelings towards a talking duck and his…feathers. Still, there is much to enjoy in Howard the Duck, not least the cheerfully inept special effects and the violent intricacies of Quack-Fu. And as for Howard himself, not even James Bond can claim to have slugged three bystanders armed only with a cigar, an ice pick and a knuckle-hard wingspan. Good on you, Howard. That’s something to tell all the ducks back home. By Chris Middlehurst