The Return of Mad Men

The hit television series Mad Man returns for a fifth series.

I cannot say that I am enthused. I watched most of the first four series of the show and found my interest in it steadily dropping. My friends enjoyed it and I enjoyed discussing the show with them. I felt that from the beginning the style and aesthetic held the show up as an exemplary piece of television.

The more I watched it the less convinced I was. The problem for me is that the whole affair is inescapably shallow. The characters are all shallow and unlikeable, the references to historical events are laughable tangents and the plot-lines utterly contrived. All of this, you could say, is the theme of the advertisement industry. Of course a show about Madison Avenue men would be of this ilk.

Not for, say, Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a striking film from the 50s about a case of mistaken identity, implicating a Madison Avenue man in a plot of murder, intrigue and espionage. This character had depth, had something we could cling to, while the plot was engaging and unpredictable.

Mad Men might be more post-modern but it is certainly not as fun and certainly not as provocative.

-The English Student

Psycho: Almost 50 Years Later

With this years Oscars on the horizon we should take this opportunity to look back on past greats.

Christmas seems to come earlier each year, games and albums are pirated at a higher pace and the college year flies by at increasingly high speeds. With this in mind, I have no problem jumping the gun on everyone and offering a fifty year retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho forty-nine years after it was released. Many people have made wide reaching statements about the film but I believe that it is summed up by its own subtitle: "A new and altogether different screen excitement."

A modern audience may find Psycho to be quite dated in places. The special effects are hardly special anymore and the relatively censored murder scenes bring a smile to the viewer who is used to the 'ultra-violence' of contemporary horror. But if you are turned off by these aspects then you have missed the point. The ability of Hitchcock to use simple imagery to create iconic and memorable scenes is sublime. With its simple black and white cinematography, exquisite music and believable character development Psycho achieves what films with ten times it budget consistently fail at: genuine tension.

More than this, Hitchcock has created a psycho-analytical thriller before the genre even existed. We are drawn into the minds of every character in the film and become both a victim on the murderer and an accomplice. The many levels of the psyche that this film deals with is quite staggering and the sociological issues of equality and isolation are still very relevant today. Hitchcock really did set the groundwork for the psychological thriller and as such shares some of the credit for the truly great films we have seen from that genre. He does not, however, share some of the guilt for the truly awful ones we have endured from that genre. 

If your thriller is underwhelming then you need to re-watch the forty-nine year old Psycho, for it is a masterclass on the art of cinema.

-The English Student