Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998)

I had just seen an episode of Homicide in which Wallace Shawn played an arthouse theater owner who poisoned an obnoxious patron who kept shouting spoilers to old movies. He shouted out the ending to Casablanca and alerted people to the shower scene in Psycho. They said he was ruining the movies for everyone, like people who go to those things didn't already know every plot twist. There was a theater that showed Citizen Kane and offered a prize to anyone who could correctly guess what "Rosebud" was. Of course, every single person got it.

So doing a scene-for-scene remake of Psycho in 1998 wasn't going to transform the old, outdated Hitchcock movie into something fresh and new. 

But, obviously, Gus Van Sant did this as an experiment.

Hitchcock himself made Psycho as an experiment to see if he could make a movie using the crew from his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was a low budget movie, but Van Sant remade it with a large budget. Even if the remake had been good, what would it prove?

In fairness, though, is any movie really necessary?

Some parts weren't as bad as I thought they'd be, but I kept comparing it to the original. I don't know what I would have thought if I had never seen the original, but it wasn't an improvement.

Norman Bates was bigger than Marion Crane's boyfriend in this one, and Marion's sister actually gives him a hand when he's fighting with Norman at the end, didn't just stand there like Vera Miles.

I might have paid to see it in a theater if I'd known Chad Everett and Rance Howard were in it.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Blood Harvest (1987)

A slasher movie. A young woman returns home from college to her parents' home in farm country. She's s dismayed that the famers are targeting her parents for abuse because her father works for the bank that was foreclosing on farms at the time. There's a slasher killing people, hanging them upside down and cutting their throats, 

I remember the left supporting farmers during the foreclosure crisis. I don't know if this was misguided since it was recently pointed out that farmers tend to be millionaires which was why they supported Trump. Not that we should have sided with the banks.

I clicked on this movie because Tiny Tim was in it playing a bit of a simpleton who goes through most of the movie dressed as a clown. The first I ever heard of him must have been in 1969, A kid in my preschool saw him on Laugh-In the night before and said there was a hippie who played a tiny guitar and sang like a girl. I don't remember my reaction, whether I was intrigued or uninterested. He sang a little in the film. He got top billing and was sort of the hero at the end.

It wasn't that upsetting for a slasher film. Some nudity. There were shots of a dead pig. With Peter Krause from such shows as Sports Nught and Six Feet Under. His first acting credit on IMDb.

Free on Tubi.

Maps to the Stars (2014) David Cronenberg

This was the first movie Canadian director David Cronenberg filmed (partially) in Los Angeles. All his earlier movies were shot in Canada and the UK. Maps to the Stars comes across as an attack on Hollywood but I don't know if it really was since the people in it had issues you can't blame on the movie industry. There was  middle-aged actress Havana (Julianne Moore). She had been sexually abused by her mother, a great movie star who died fairly young. Havana wants to star in a remake of a movie her mother had gotten an Oscar nomination for, and now she's having hallucinations. She sees her mother in a bathtub saying terrible things to her. 

And there was Benji (Evan Bird), an exceptionally bratty 13-year-old star. He has a dangerously mentally ill sister who had just been released from a sanitarium. His parents didn't know that their marriage was incestuous until it was too late. The poor kid's a recovering drug addict and is starting to hallucinate himself. 

We see Benji hanging around in clubs with other tween celebrities, the girls referring to an actress in her early 20's as "menopausal" and a teen idol who tells about his sewage being stolen by the teamster charged with maintaining his trailer and sold to a deranged fan.

Evan Bird was great in this movie, but he hasn't appeared in anything since. Maybe it turned him off to show business. The scene in this that stood out to me was Benji hanging around at his friend's house. He unloads the family revolver and starts playing with it. He puts it to his head a couple of times and pulls the trigger. We saw him unload it, but you know nothing good can come of this.

With Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattison and John Cusack.

Available on The Criterion Channel, or you can pay a few bucks to see it on Prime, Apple TV or Fandango.

Gotti (2018) John Travolta, Spencer LoFranco

I probably held it to a different standard since I saw it on TV, but that's the only way anyone's going to see it. I didn't think it was terrible, just a straight telling of what a monster John Gotti was. I don't know what people wanted from it. We see him in prison still browbeating his family. We see him murder people. Nothing glaringly wrong with the movie but I can see why people didn't go for it.

I watched it because one of the stars, Spencer LoFranco who played Gotti's son, just died at 33, poor devil. Gotti was his last movie. I don't know if its failure sent him spiraling into drug addiction. He was pulling himself back together when he died. He had face tattoos removed and was going to take another stab at acting.

Free on Prime, Pluto, Tubi, Roku Channel, and Fawesome.

Timothee Chalamet, Adam Sandler

Timothee Chalamet is dating a Kardashian and now he says that Adam Sandler is “ONE OF THE BEST FUCKING ACTORS OF ALL TIME!" I guess it's all subjective. I don't really watch anything with Adam Sandler, so I may have misjudged him and I've seen Chalamet in a few things and never saw what the big deal was. I understand why people like him, but why do they like him so much?  If you're going to state an opinion that will make you look stupid, don't use the word "fucking". He's pushing 30.

Flying Disk Man From Mars (1950)

It sounded interesting, an early UFO movie, but it turned out to be a serial. Had bad fist fights that drag on and on in every episode. Some of the cars looked beautiful, but they had these chases with guys driving while shooting at each other. Communists from Mars are out to dominate the Earth. Criminals use this as a front for their smuggling operation. The picture quality was really good.

Free on Tubi.

Rust (2024) Alec Baldwin, Patrick Scott McDermott,

I was curious about the movie. I wanted to see it, but I didn't want to spend $6 to watch it on Roku. How did I get so cheap? I looked it up online. $6 today is equal to $2 in 1985, and in 1985 I'd have cheerfully spent two bucks to see it on lousy quality VHS.  

If what I read in one review is correct, Halyna Hutchin's son will only receive compensation for his mother's death when the movie turns a profit. Assuming she was an employee and not an "independent contractor", the family would get something from Workman's Comp and the kid would get Social Security survivor benefits, but, according to critic Susan Granger: 

In 2022, Halyna’s widower Matthew settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the film’s producers, who were protected by an LLC listing only one thing of value: the movie. That resulted in his billing as one of the executive producers, and their son Andros will receive profits from the film. But inevitably, ‘creative’ bookkeeping will determine how much that is.

So I paid to see it on Amazon Prime.

Far better than I expected. It was over two hours but didn't seem overlong. It looked beautiful and it was infinitely better than other recent low budget westerns I've seen. It was violent enough and it proves that there's nothing wrong with digital muzzle flashes and smoke instead of firing blanks. It's a shame they didn't do that in the first place. 

Rust himself was kind of a jerk. He pistol whips his tween grandson and carries him out of the jail instead of just telling him he was there to save him from being hanged. 

People keep comparing it to spaghetti westerns but I didn't see the similarity. I didn't know how I'd feel about Alec Baldwin in a western, but he was fine, the kid, Patrick Scott McDermott, was good. The beginning of the movie with the two orphaned boys struggling to survive on a primitive farm was depressing enough that accidentally killing a man, being sentenced to death and fleeing into the countryside was really the best thing for that poor kid.

In this age of streaming video, it was very clever giving the movie such a short title, only four letters that were all next to each other in the alphabet. Searching for it on Roku was almost effortless.

There's a scene in a town where there's a sign that says "Joe Souza Trading Post". The movie was directed by Joel Souza. Maybe he shouldn't have done that.

I didn't find the two brawling hog farming brothers funny, but they didn't annoy me the way they did some critics.