"No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why." - Mignon McLaughlin

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I watched Psycho at a free screening outside the National Museum yesterday. For all that it is lauded, watching it you can see how much movie making has progressed in 47 years. Meanwhile the story isn't even that fantastic, at least if you don't dig up the nuggets the director threw in to make people go "Ooh, he's so smart!", as in films like The Matrix, so I am curious as to why it is so hyped.

There were many moments where the movie went silent, so I accepted it as our getting what we paid for. What was unforgivable was that they cut two scenes: where Arbogast is pushed down the stairs and slashed, and one where I read that there was a shot of the mother's corpse. Fortunately, the former is on YouTube (the version I watched last night cut off at about the 10 second mark).

I'm guessing that going by similar criteria, the shower scene should've been cut too, except that it's too famous and everyone would complain.

Gah gah gah

***

An amusing consequence of making a film ripe for meaning mining is people come up with rubbish such as:

"The uptight proprietor meticulously shows Marion where everything is, pausing on the word "mattress" [a word remarkably similar to the word matricide]"

"He... banters away... challenging ('baiting') him to confess"

"His body convulses and spasms (orgasmically?)"

Even some of the other stuff, like the butcher's knife being phallic, seems questionable (sometimes a butcher's knife is just a butcher's knife).