It's The Makeup, Stupid

Here are some of my thoughts on why it is very possible that Daniel Day Lewis will be nominated for an Oscar for Lincoln, whereas Anthony Hopkins, also delivering a flawless performance in Hitchcock, may not.
Enjoy!

Hitchcock

Or a sunny fairy tale about the genesis of Psycho, of all things. This enjoyable morsel by Sacha Gervasi (ANVIL! The Story of Anvil), improbably turns the story of how one of the greatest artists in the history of film made of one of the scariest movies of all time into a sweet little fable with a happy ending. If it wasn't for the two gigantic actors who portray Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, it could have bordered on the ludicrous. But it is a joy to watch Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren deliver the goods, separately and as a long lasting couple. Hopkins doesn't look anything like Hitchcock, and his cumbersome make up still doesn't make him look anything like Hitchcock, except for the girth. But his characterization is dead on. He is as hilarious as Hitchcock was in his eccentric "master of suspense" persona. For Alfred Hitchcock was a brand. He was as much of a genius in the creation of his own marketing as he was as a film director. Hopkins delivers the quicksilver wit, with extensive pauses between words and a full beat before striking the punch line, just like the original. He is a hoot. His Hitchcock is at once grand caricature and something smaller, more vulnerable, more complicated. A very controlling man, a huge child with enormous, but being British, equally repressed appetites (which explain the rounded figure), a famous director who found himself wielding enormous power, particularly over his female actresses. I don't know if its a trick of camera and makeup or if it is Anthony Hopkins who achieves a chilling distance in his gaze, but this aloofness, this feeling that Hitchcock was always an alien in Hollywood, makes the portrayal rise above caricature.
There is a lot that could be really hokey in the movie, like the sequences where Hitchcock imagines conversations with Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the real life serial killer on whom the book "Psycho" was based. But Gervasi sustains a lighthearted tone, immeasurably helped by pretty solid casting. He gingerly mentions the dark aspects of Hitchcock's personality without really investigating them, but they are there, more as discomfiting quirks than as truly sinister traits: Hitchcock's obsession with his actresses (the mistreatment of Tippi Hedren in The Birds was yet to come); his emotional blackmail of Vera Miles (Jessica Biel); the way he supposedly got Janet Leigh (a good Scarlett Johansson) to scream her heart out in the legendary shower scene.
But the movie also belongs to the unsung hero in Hitchcock's life, Alma, his wife and creative collaborator, who apparently was in no small part responsible for some of her husband's most brilliant artistic choices, like insisting on using Bernard Herrmann's score over the shower scene, or suggesting he kill off the leading lady before page 30, a first in the history of film. Always toiling in the shadows, but a known secret inside the industry, Alma was a woman of her time, making herself and her talents disappear in favor of the big man. We are reminded that she was once his boss; by this stage, they had been making movies for about 40 years. They were old fashioned in their mores, yet adventurous and visionary as artists. There is a very poignant turn in Alma's story as she is seduced by a colleague (Danny Huston), only to discover that, like Hitch, he is only using her for her brilliance. Mirren then has a controlled, beautiful meltdown where she finally reads Hitch the riot act that almost elicited cheers from the audience. It is a beautiful speech, writerly wishful thinking, and she nails it with such force, grace and skill, it's a cri de coeur for all unsung females who support and even improve their partners' celebrated achievements, with little recognition. Or for all those average, yet valuable women who are eclipsed by more gorgeous ones.
Hitchcock is also, and most enjoyably, about making an independent movie. A famed director, at the peak of his career, finds himself trying to get a movie made that no one will touch with a ten foot pole. Even Hitchcock, who was at the time the most famous film director in the world, could not get financing for what was seen as schlocky material, anathema to casting megawatt stars like a Cary Grant or a Grace Kelly.
At the peak of his career, fascinated by the horrid Ed Gein story, Hitchcock decided to make a B-movie, with second tier stars, for a very low budget, which he financed himself. This was the genesis of Psycho, one of the most revolutionary films of all time. In the few scenes involving Ed Gein and his sleazy serial killer grotesquerie, it implies the genius of Hitchcock in turning a seedy story into an elegant, black and white masterpiece of horror.  I wish this film explored more what made Hitchcock a great artist. I applaud that it gives Alma Reville her due, but it cheats Hitchcock of his own genius. We never really see him exercise the elegance of his creative thought, or his masterful craftsmanship.
I can't decide if Gervasi's lighthearted choice is cool or ridiculous, but it is great fun. Hitchcock is a triumphant comedy about a persevering artist, and a lot of the joy in it comes from relishing in hindsight the happy outcome of the story. We are all thrilled by Psycho, by the fact that Bernard Herrmann's music and that shower scene are now universal icons, by how Alfred Hitchcock, a prolific artist, continued making fresh masterpieces in his old age (The Birds, Frenzy), almost as if Psycho had given him a second wind.

The 50 Greatest Films of All Time

Sight and Sound Magazine just released its list of 50 greatest films of all time. The big surprise is that Hitchcock's Vertigo dethroned Citizen Kane for the first time in 50 years. Now, is Vertigo the greatest film of all time? It is a great film, but the greatest of all time? Will it be able to last 50 years on top like Kane did? That is the problem with best film lists. They are by definition myopic.
Every time someone asks me to name my favorite film of all time, or even my 10 best, I groan. I find it impossible to say. I can tell you 25, 50, but to narrow it down to less than 25 is a futile exercise.
The Sight and Sound list is a venerable canon, a solid, sensible list. It's a great primer on the history of cinema. It includes films that changed other films forever. I'm thrilled it puts Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 6th place. I'm relieved it does not include Star Wars. It does not overtly celebrate greatly influential movies, for better or for worse, like Spielberg's Jaws, nor does it celebrate insufferable pains in the ass like R.W. Fassbinder. It is an august list. It includes most of the usual suspects (Dreyer, Godard, Tarkovksy, Ozu, Kurosawa). A great many movies in the list hail from the distant past. We need that much hindsight to select great films, that we can't think of anything newer than David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Wong War Kai's In The Mood For Love, which are more than 10 years old.
But then half the fun of these canonic lists is you get to quibble with them.  This one includes a few essential comedies, Keaton, Chaplin, Wilder, Singing in The Rain, but in general it skews towards the solemn. It includes some stuff that I find unbearably pretentious, even if it might be essential viewing. I loathe mid and late Godard, and so while I agree with the inclusion of Breathless, and have no choice but grump at the inclusion of Contempt, I can't abide Pierrot Le Fou, which is like watching a French brat throw a tantrum for two interminable hours. I sat through eight hours of Bela Tarr's long, mesmerizing and sometimes soporific Satantango. It is a great work of art, but is it one of the 50 best films of all time? If sheer arty length is a criterion, then I think The Clock by Christian Marclay should be a worthy contender, even if he did not shoot one foot of film himself. Do we really need three Tarkovsky movies in the mix? (Not in my book. I find him very tough going). Why not three Billy Wilder's? Or Chaplin? Polanski's Knife in The Water? Why not The Shining? Fargo? Dog Day Afternoon? Still, if you want to explore the essentials of world cinema, this list is a great place to start arguing.

Classics: Psycho

What better way to spend Halloween than in the distinguished company of Norman Bates, his poor dessicated mother and the pointy bras of Janet Leigh?
I've seen Psycho many times. The first time, I saw it on TV in Mexico when I was 14 years old. My parents told me this movie was so scary that when they saw it on a double date, as they were driving to dinner after the screening, my Dad put his hand on the shoulder of my aunt Evelyn to ask her if she wanted to go for tacos, and she jumped and screamed.
So my parents sit with me watching the film on TV until the famous shower scene and they decide to go to bed and leave me watching on my own. I ask my Dad if anything horrible is going to happen after that and he says, Nah.
This movie scared the living daylights out of me.
I go back to my room in the dead of night, repeating the mantra "it's only a movie", and I close the door and I take off my clothes and I start scratching my shoulder and I use my other hand to scratch the rest of my back and the tips of my fingers touch and I scream bloody murder. The next day, my Dad, who otherwise might wake me up by storming into my room while singing the international socialist anthem, opens my door a crack and starts wrapping his hands around it, making his fingers writhe and squirm like evil creatures and making me laugh and scream at the same time. I couldn't shut my eyes as I washed my hair because I was afraid Norman Bates would come and get me with a knife.
Well, this time around the actual scares lost some of their potency (and looked slightly cheesy), but the film is still deeply, gorgeously creepy and disturbing. And the suspense is unbearable.
I think Hitchcock's genius manifests itself all over the movie but particularly in the casting of Anthony Perkins. Norman Bates is so cute and vulnerable and creepy sexy, a grown man that behaves almost like an innocent child, a solitary nerd with an unusual hobby. He does not seem at all evil at the beginning. This is very scary. It means that you can't really tell what horrors people harbor in their psyches. (In a parallel way, the same goes for Marion Crane. Who would have thunk that such a respectable looking woman would be shtupping a married man and stealing money?).
More importantly, at the time Perkins was a closeted gay man, and there are plenty of instances in the movie that hint at Norman's homosexuality. He sashays up the stairs and hides his mother in the fruit cellar! In those days there was that myth that possessive mothers tended to emasculate their male offspring and breed flaming queens. So Hitchcock exploited that quality he saw in Perkins whether he consciously knew he was gay or not. Which is why there can be nothing more egregiously wrong than casting a snarky Alpha male like Vince Vaughn in that role (except for having the audacity to think that you can make a shot by shot remake of Psycho). 
Norman's confused sexuality is very scary. He has a terribly unhealthy attachment to his mom, to say the least. There is horrible sexual panic (I blame it on the pointy bra), because supposedly it is the mother who doesn't want to share Norman with any other women. The psychology 101 is a little iffy but the fear is real. In short, parent/child incest: one of our deepest, most abiding and terrifying fear-taboos. Scarier than Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Michelle Bachman and our new Congress combined.
No wonder Norman Bates is a household name in pop culture. And poor Tony Perkins never was called to play almost anything but psychos.
Psycho has been paid homage (see Fargo), sequeled, ripped off and copied to death. But in its day it was a very daring film, both thematically and artistically. It's sexual frankness was unheard of at the time. And Hitch was doing unbelievably creative work with camera and editing, as in that classic shower sequence. The choice of using black and white and super expressive cinematography, the amazing title sequence by Saul Bass, who also worked as visual consultant in the film, the iconic music by Bernard Herrmann, the fantastic Hitchcockian black humor. It still holds up. A fantastic film.