By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Ranting and Raving
There was a lot of mail supporting Deep Impact on Monday, and I want to acknowledge it. A couple of things. One is that there is no roughcut mindset about any movie. There are a half a dozen people or so who review films for roughcut. (I’m not one of them.) I didn’t read Chris Brandon’s review before seeing the film. In fact, I still haven’t read it. The next thing is that I don’t consider it my job to tell you what movie to like, love or hate. I had Kundun as my top film of 1997, and I don’t think there are too many people who agree with me there. Unfortunately. My mixed feelings about Titanic, which many of you were not very happy about, were diametrically opposed by others at roughcut, including Andy Jones, who said it was worth $10 on a $7.50 scale. The point is, I want you to love any film that pushes your hot buttons. I have the bully pulpit and I do have a life’s education on film, but my opinion is still just my opinion. So, Spice World or Amadeus, if you love a movie I want to encourage you, and I want to let you know how things really work because in my mind’s eye, love deepens as insight deepens, whether the insight is positive or negative. So, I won’t be writing up a litany about all I saw wrong with Deep Impact. This is a fight I would rather not win.
That said, there are a whole big bunch of you who seem to want to tear Brian Grazer and Gus Van Sant new rectal cavities for daring to attempt a remake of Alfred Hitchcock‘s classic, Psycho. The letters started pouring in after casting reports (Julianne Moore, Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn) started hitting the media, and then the rumors — Van Sant would shoot the original script that Joe Stefano wrote from the Robert Bloch novel, Van Sant would shoot the movie matching every single shot, Van Sant would grow horns and preside over hell. Well, after calling Imagine and having the company, which is one of the most talkative companies in Hollywood, confirm yet again that they have a media ban on this project, I can come to one conclusion — we, in the media, are suckers. Imagine is going to let us rile everyone up for a year before the film is even ready, and then deliver, they hope, a great film that pulls the same trick as Titanic. What stories are real and which are fake? I don’t believe Gus Van Sant would be shooting the film shot-for-shot. If they had hired some hack to direct, I’d buy that rumor (which I still can’t find the original source on), but as it is, the screenplay thing rings true and the shot-for-shot stuff does not.
And here’s why I am not enraged by that. Psycho was made in 1959. Unlike other great films of that year, say Inherit The Wind or The Apartment, Psycho was not about words. I’m sure some of you can quote lines from Psycho, but most people can’t. Psycho was about subtext. Subtext that couldn’t full be exploited in 1960, even as hard as Hitchcock pushed the boundaries of that time. That’s where Van Sant has room to play. For better or for worse. As a former script doctor, I’m fascinated by the idea of working from an old screenplay. I wrote a script once which included Jesus as a character and I took all of his dialogue from the New Testament. It required discipline, but it also sharpened my work. You realize after a while that almost any script could be handed to a different producer, director and actors and emerge as a completely different film. Do we need a “different” Psycho? Well, do we need another Billy Crystal movie? I’d rather see Van Sant, who is a quality craftsman, but at heart a true artist, take a stab (so to speak) at Psycho. Hell, I’d love to see them make one with David Lynch and Scorcese too. How would they see this material? I’d love to know.
Yes, there is always the argument that Universal is just making a colorized version of a classic so they can exploit the library. But with Van Sant, it can be more than that. For my money, if they were remaking North By Northwest, then I’d be saying, what can they really do to add to it? Why? Because NXN is a more conventional film. Psycho is subversive. It is an emotional experience. It is art. And when art achieves iconic status, it is often the subject of other artists. That’s where I see this going. And if it sucks, we always will have the original. Just as we had the original after Psycho 2 turned out to be a decent flick, but a million miles away from a match to the original.
This doesn’t leave me very much time to talk about Spike Lee‘s use of the late, great Aaron Copeland’s music as the score to He Got Game. In many ways, I consider this even more endemic of the way things are going in this business. Recycling music that was meant for a completely different context with the creator too dead to say, “this was not how I would have matched this musical phrase to that image.” It’s kind of the equivalent to Fred Astaire and the Dust Devil or Marilyn Monroe for Chanel. It’s not a riff on the work, exploring for new meaning, as I think Psycho will be, but is it wrong? People use music from the classical composers and Shakespeare all the time. Is taking from the recently dead any worse? This is just the beginning of this kind of thing. I, for one, will reserve judgment. For a while.
CONTEST WINNER: Well, I’ve been backing off “must be in by” rules to encourage more people to play, but the four of you who sent in perfect guesses on Sunday afternoon and Monday will require that I put a clamp on that. (You don’t win!) We have out first second-time winner this week as Usman J. got the top three right (one of only six to legitimately do that) and added Les Miz and Titanic, albeit in reverse order. Usman beat out Brandon G (who wrote in from the same mail address as the evil and apparently pseudonymous Bertrand G.) by guessing higher ($26 million vs. $17.8 million) on Deep Impact. Runners up are Leslie Langdon, Pose, Eric Carr and Len Weinstein. Woo to you all.
READER OF THE DAY: Joey wrote: “I saw a sneak preview of Deep Impact last Tuesday, and the theater was filled to capacity. I actually did enjoy Deep Impact. The human drama was well-done, and the special effects were very convincing. Let’s be honest about it, if everyone’s looking forward to this lizard movie in two weeks by the ‘all style/no substance’ wonder twins who brought us Independence Day, you can’t bitch about people seeing Deep Impact.”
