Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ELIOT HOUSE DINING HALL, Hitchcock's Psycho...
...catalogue description." But the author usually has the steadiness to know when enough-already is enough. The only serious objection to her portrait is that she characterizes Camilla as an honors graduate in English, and then has the girl refer to "the passive tense." Tense is what psycho-maternity patients are, and voice is what passive is. A healthy, full-term first little novel anyway...
...contrast to the more obvious cases, Sisters is an imitation come long after its wave has passed. As a result, Brian De Palma's film can hide its imitation of both Psycho and the exploiters of Psycho behind the more artistically acceptable term homage. De Palma thinks of his film in terms of homage, so Sisters is far more discouraging than a typical bandwagon exploiter. It deceives even the film maker -- a potentially good film maker at that. De Palma tries hard to lose his style amidst Hitchcock's. Fortunately, he doesn't succeed: his film still includes sections that...
...murder in Psycho, for example, has an emotional impact to it that nothing in Sisters comes close to, because Hitchcock gives some importance to his characters. In Psycho, though it is not one of Hitchcock's very best, we see people on the screen, not just figures whose talk punctuates the violence. The first murder in Sisters occurs after the film is well underway, but this murder would have had the same impact on the audience if the film had started with the immediately preceding shot. To achieve this impact, the film draws only on our reactions to the visual...
...film centers around murder committed by a schizoid, as does Psycho. De Palma tries to go Hitchcock one better by making his murderer the ultimate split personality: one member of a pair of Siamese twin sisters separated at the end of their adolescence. The way De Palma handles it, it's a clever idea, and it allows him to include a clever documentary film within the film which he made with the assistance of Jay Cocks, the young film critic for Time. Unfortunately, De Palma never treats the psychological facet of the girls' unusual predicament with any more depth than...