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Showing posts from February, 2014

Not Shot For Shot: Soderbergh's "Psychos" vs. Olenick's "Psycho 2000"

Steven Soderbergh , the Oscar-winning Director ( Traffic ) and recently-retired-from-theatrically-released-studio-films visual artist, has just released his Psychos , a mashup and appropriated retelling of Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho (1960) which uses a desaturated version of Gus Van Sant 's Psycho from 1998 and intercuts between the two films. Currently streaming on his Extension 765 website, Soderbergh claims to have created Psychos with "total affection, openness, and honey bought directly from a beekeeper.” Psychos runs at a feature length time and cleverly jumps from the modern version clips to the older version clips, in chronological narrative order. The best aspect of Psychos is how Soderbergh handles the climatic moments: He superimposes both the black & white Hitchcock images over the colorized Van Sant images. The effect is hypnotic. And its power comes in our built-in knowledge that Van Sant's version is a supposed "shot for shot"