Gus Van Sant has made some fine commercial films вЂ“ To Die For (1995) and Good Will Hunting (1997) and critically acclaimed hits like Milk (2008) вЂ“ but also balances these with films that are made with an eccentricity that seems to wilfully challenge an audienceвЂ™s patience вЂ“ the likes of My Own Private Idaho (1991) and the universally reviled Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993). Yet the irony of it is that the niche audience it is aimed at that I spoke to found the exercise slow-paced and tedious, they being too familiar with the modern psycho-thriller conventions that the original Psycho created to find much originality or novelty to it. It panders to a lowest common denominator in an audience вЂ“ the filmвЂ™s sole commercial hopes lay in the belief that modern 16-25 year old audiences are too lazy to watch a film that is made in black-and-white or without contemporary stars. Indeed, the more one looks at the thinking that has motivated the remake, the more there seems to be an overwhelming a sense of pointlessness to it.

Needless to say, Psycho 1998 earned itself a thorough hammering even before a single commentator had seen a frame of it for its daring to desecrate a classic вЂ“ some online film sites even called for a boycott. For what point can a film that admits the original cannot be bettered so much so that it can only copy it shot for shot possibly serve вЂ“ it is a work that has openly and loudly cheered the unsurpassable superiority of the original even before it has opened? Psycho 1998 seems constructed as a vanity exercise, a conceit вЂ“ the same way that commercials quote and parody scenes from films or people construct three-dimensional dioramas of classic works of art вЂ“ one that seems to have been made more to see if it could be done than to serve any real purpose. Psycho 1998 is surely the ultimate fin du siecle celebration of the view that all originality is dead and that all creativity is left with anymore is the endless quoting and reshuffling of the past. Even down to the use of the same script, the same musical score and the director making a cameo in exactly the same scene that Alfred Hitchcock did in the original. Over Gus Van SantвЂ™s remake of Alfred HitchcockвЂ™s Psycho (1960) there hangs, like a neon sign in the sky, the single question вЂњWhy?вЂќ It is the ultimate postmodern conceit вЂ“ the shot-for-shot remake of a classic film.

Movie psycho 1998 cast