The original Psycho is one of the best films of all-time, regardless of genre, but the remake feels completely pointless. Such a classic film really didn't need to be remade.
This is probably the most faithful remake ever made, as the vast majority of shots and scenes are taken from the original. It's worth seeing once just because it's so unique, although its uniqueness paradoxically comes from trying to slavishly copy another film.
It's directed by Gus van Sant and I like some of his other films like Elephant, Milk, and Goodwill Hunting. But this is definitely not one of his better films and I'm sure I'll never watch it again. Gus van Sant was quoted as saying he remade Psycho so "no one else had to", which is a perplexing justification to the say the least. Also, Vince Vaughn is nowhere close to as good as Anthony Perkins. And I didn't need to see him pleasuring himself in one of the few scenes that are different from the 1960 version. William H. Macy and Anne Heche are decent, but nothing special. The movie was a box office bomb, making only 37 million dollars worldwide and it's easy to see why. No one was asking for this, and 38 years after the original, many younger people probably don't even know about the Hitchcock film. I'm not sure who this was for. As far as I'm aware, no one has tried to do a shot for shot remake like this since then (besides Haneke remaking his own Funny Games), and that's probably for the best.
Unfortunately, the live-action adaptation of the Ghost in the Shell manga and anime is disappointing and a huge missed opportunity. The movie, directed by Rupert Sanders (who also made the mediocre at best Snow White and the Hunstman) looks great and presents a cool futuristic world filled with giant holograms and neon lights. This only keeps you entertained for about 30 minutes and the neat visuals can't carry the movie on their own or make up for the many glaring flaws.
The 2017 version is not nearly as deep and philosophical as the original anime from 1995, which was comparatively subtle when put next to the heavy-handed remake. There's plenty of clumsy expository dialogue including on-the-nose bits like "You have no idea how alone that makes me feel" from the main character. Equally clunky is the introductory text at the very beginning that could have easily been left out.
Even the action scenes are only passable and are never that memorable or anything we haven't seen before.
There are some solid actors in the cast including Scarlett Johansson, Juliette Binoche, and Takeshi Kitano, and while none of them are bad, they don't have much to work with and seem to be phoning it in.
For a movie about soul, it has little.
I'm a bit worried that this may become a thing like video game adaptations where live action versions of anime can never quite hit the mark as both are difficult mediums to adapt into big-budget Hollywood movies.
The first big experimental or avant-garde film of the 1930s was L'Age d'Or, or The Golden Age, released in 1930. It was directed by Luis Buñuel and written by him and one of the most famous painters of all-time, surrealist Salvador Dalí. However, the two were not getting along by the time production began and Buñuel supposedly ran Dalí off the set while brandishing a hammer.
They were fresh off making a landmark in avant-garde cinema, the shocking Un Chien Andalou. That was a short film, but L'Age d'Or was closer to feature length at 63 minutes. Like Un Chien Andalou, there is no clear plot and events that take place appear to be random. Surrealism is an obvious influence and well-known Surrealist artist Max Ernst appears as an actor.
Buñuel was Spanish, but this was made in France and in the French language and premiered in Paris in 1930. The film caused an uproar as a conservative group called the League of Patriots tried to stop a screening by hurling ink at the screen and assaulting audience members. It was only a couple weeks before Paris banned any screenings of L'Age d'Or.
The controversy was so strong that it wasn't publicly shown in the United States until 1979. This was because of the sexual content as well as content that was considered blasphemous towards the Catholic Church and one of the producers was even threatened with excommunication. It's not surprising that the church found it sacrilegious as the film featured lots of religious iconography such as bishops and crucifixes.
There's even a reference to the infamous 18th-century novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade with an intertitle that states "120 Days of Depraved Acts".
L'Age d'Or was easily one of the two most significant films on this list, what I'd consider to be the "essentials."
The other was made that same year when Jean Cocteau directed The Blood of a Poet. He began his career writing poetry, plays, and novels and became well known in the 1910s and 1920s. Cocteau made films from 1925 up until just a few years before his death in 1963, including a 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast.
The Blood of a Poet was the first part of Cocteau's Orphic trilogy, which had a second installment in 1950 with Orphée, and concluded in 1960 with Testament of Orpheus.
The Blood of a Poet contains a lot of odd imagery like a talking statue and a man jumping through a mirror. Like L'Age d'Or, there isn't an obvious plot or story. These factors lead many to call this is a Surrealist work, and they aren't entirely wrong. However, Cocteau himself said "surrealism did not exist when I first thought of [the film]" and that "The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols."
This film was quite controversial and wasn't allowed to be screened until 1932, with its first showing at a gala evening in Paris. This was partly because The Blood of a Poet was perceived as anti-Christian, another similarity it shared with L'Age d'Or.
A famous American photographer named Lee Miller appeared, and this would be the only time she'd ever be in a movie.
Cocteau's 55-minute long film also has some very impressive special effects and visual tricks for its time and is worth watching for this reason alone. The Blood of a Poet is clearly up there with L'Age d'Or as one of the must-see experimental movies of the decade.
If you're interested, you can first read Part 1 covering the 1990s or Part 2 about 2000 to 2004, or watch the video version of this article.
In the first half of the decade, things were looking up for video game movies, as there were huge hits like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil.
However, from 2005 to 2009 game adaptations were mostly underwhelming, with none making over $100 million at the box office. They performed especially poorly with critics as all of them scored below 35% on Rotten Tomatoes and five of them got below 10%, which is an awful score.
On that note, we start with one of the worst movies I've ever seen, Alone in the Dark, based on the survival horror series from Infogrames. The franchise began in 1992 on the PC and has somewhat died out recently, as it has only seen two entries since 2002.
The film adaptation was directed by infamous German filmmaker Uwe Boll, who is notorious for making exceptionally awful movies, many of them inspired by video games. He had already made the terrible game adaptation House of the Dead in 2003, and he'll come up in this article four more times.
Alone in the Dark has an astonishingly bad Rotten Tomatoes score of 1% and it currently has an IMDB user rating of 2.3, making it the 43rd lowest rated movie on the site.
Pretty much everything about the film is embarrassingly bad, starting with the acting from B-list stars like Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff.
There's also some very fake-looking CGI used to portray the monsters.
Peter Hartlaub gave a particularly scathing review for the San Francisco Chronicle, writing "It fails so miserably as both an action and horror picture that it succeeds as a comedy. It's a film so mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality." Alone in the Dark was released in January of 2005 and made a paltry $10 million on a $20 million budget.
Surrealism was an art movement based on dreams, unconscious thought and defying conventional logic. It grew out of the earlier avant-garde movement called Dada in the 1920s.
Dada was about chaos and rejecting logic and rationality, and was also referred to as anti-art. Just like Surrealism, it often featured bizarre imagery that didn't make sense.
Famous surrealist artists include Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Frida Kahlo (although she rejected the label).
Dali's "The Persistence of Memory", one of the most famous surrealist paintings
Painting and sculpture are what gave Surrealism its fame, but it was also important in literature, music, and of course film. Some of the most well-known Surrealist artists even directed some movies.
The first film I'll mention is Rhythmus 21. It was directed by a German artist named Hans Richter, who was influenced by cubism and was part of the Dada movement.
Punch-Out!! is one of Nintendo's smaller video game franchises, but it still has a soft spot in the hearts of many gamers. Most people know the cartoony boxing series for its games on Nintendo's home consoles, but it actually started out in the arcades.
The first game in the series, simply called Punch-Out!! was released in Japanese arcades in 1983 and it came to the western world in 1984.
The single player game was produced by Genyo Takeda, who had been working for Nintendo since 1972. In 1975, he made their first ever arcade title, called EVR Race (assuming you don't count Laser Clay Shooting System).
The VHS format was massively popular and influential and it changed the way people watch movies. VHS's successor, the DVD, was not quite as much of a game changer, but it still had a huge impact on the home video market.
DVD came on the scene in the late 1990s, but the story actually begins in the early 1960s. In 1961, optical recording technology was patented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell. It wasn't until the 70s that progress was seen on this front and in 1978 the Laserdisc format was released. Laserdisc was the major predecessor to DVDs, but it never really gained widespread popularity, due to its numerous drawbacks. The discs were massive and you couldn't even fit a whole movie on one side of a disc. Laserdisc never challenged the dominance of VHS.
In 1986, Warner Home Video started saying that a new format should be developed where movies were stored on a five-inch optical disc like a Compact Disc used for music. The next year in 1987, another precursor to the DVD came out, the CD Video format. This was a sort of amalgamation of CD and Laserdisc technology. It didn't go over well (partially because of very small storage size) and was basically gone by 1991.
However, a similarly titled Video CD format was released in 1993. It was a bit more popular than CD Video, especially in Southeast Asia, but it still never really caught on. A major problem with the format was that there was no way of stopping people from making illegal copies.
As the Video CD was coming out, a group of companies that included Warner, Pioneer, JVC, Toshiba and others was working out a new home video format they were calling the Super Density Disc.
The only problem was that the Philips corporation had the rights to some very important patents regarding optical discs that could be useful. Warner, Toshiba, and the others reached out to Philips to get them to collaborate on the project.
However, Philips had other ideas and they started working on their own project with Sony called the Multimedia Compact Disc. The stage was set for another format war just like VHS versus Betamax.
