July 21, 2004

I love The Manchurian Candidate… the best film of all time… better than the first film.. better than sex… better than large sums of cash…better than… better th… bett…

What was that?!?!? It's a good thing that anvil fell on my head. Thanks, Roadrunner!

There are three flavors of serious, adult, action dramas from major studios coming in the next three weekends. The Bourne Supremacy is full of fast cars, fighting and cats & mouse games. Collateral is the darkest of the trio, a hit man methodically out to murder five men before daylight and the kind cabbie that is drawn into his world. And somewhere in between is The Manchurian Candidate.

I remember the Frankenheimer version of the Richard Condon novel fondly, as almost every film critic does. But what does it have to do with this film… other than as a curiosity? Nothin'.

Jonathan Demme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris have delivered a solid thriller that is timeless in a way the original was not and much more modern in terms of the behaviors of men and women. Women can be strong and men can be weak. The corruption of power is the expected, not the surprise. And most unexpectedly, Demme does not do a color-by-ideology on his characters. Meryl Streep's queen of diamonds is clearly a Democrat, but that doesn't mean she's a good guy.

There are hundreds and hundreds of really good choices in this film (as there are in all films, but this film is dense with them) by Demme, but one of my favorites was the decision to keep the current President and the running mate of vice presidential candidate Raymond Prentiss Shaw as non-descript ciphers, placeholders for the political roles they held. This is a very political subject, but by making it not about the any real election, Demme & Co. keep it a human story about some very human characters. And the speculation that Meryl Streep was playing a Hilary Clinton character was lazy and way off the mark. Like Mrs. Clinton or not, while she may have and may play with a lot of power, she is not the show-off that Streep's character is here. Streep is more like a mafia kingpin here.

In fact, the films of Scorsese and Coppola leapt to mind more than once while watching The Manchurian Candidate. Denzel Washington's Ben Marco is the guy who's infiltrated the mob… he has become loyal to the "bad guys," but can't quite figure out which side he's supposed to be on because something just isn't right. Streep is the confident don, who wants her son to succeed and surpass her. Liev Schreiber is the reluctant son, a la Michael Corleone, who isn't as tough as his brother Sonny, but still gets drawn in. Even Jon Voight's character has a certain Hyman Roth thing going.

The genius of Coppola's mafia saga was that it was a Shakespearian epic about a family first and a story about the mob second. The same is true here. It is the complexity of each of these characters… and each major character is given at least two faces to show… that is what makes this movie unique. They all have distinct motivations. No one is quite what they seem, yet everyone is exactly what they seem.

There are some mistakes in the film too. For me, the choice to take the hyper graphics of Fox News Channel and others and to push them even farther was bothersome. And the ending… oh that ending… I wish I could see what they had before they tested. My guess is that it was quite different. And the only truly awful shot in the film seems to have been an in-studio re-shoot of a location re-shoot.

But what really works about the film is that it keeps the viewer a bit off balance, even in a film whose story many of us have seen before. Demme has a lot of weird stuff, but he doesn't overload us. It's as though he measured out just enough for the audience to stay with him and his characters. Near cameos by Jon Voight, Jeffrey Wright, Bruno Ganz and Simon McBurney are just about right… leaving the audience wanting more but finding other ways to handle their hunger.

Meanwhile, Demme puts probably the best cranial surgery since Marathon Man on camera. He manages some surreal, but believable surprises. He brings back his great team of actors (Charles Napier, Tracey Walters, Roger Corman, Ted "The Lotion" Levine), including the late great Kenny Utt, who actually gets an acting credit in the film for being seen in a series of photographs.

Denzel continues to push beyond his stardom to be an interesting actor, here in his second against-type performance of the year after Man on Fire. He is really the second lead here, behind Liev Schreiber and a bit ahead of Streep. But he serves the movie more than himself over and over again.

As for Streep, she is great. But while her performance is, in my opinion, equal to or better than Angela Lansbury's, it is not the great surprise that Lansbury's was. Also, Streep has been doing some great work lately and this performance is not nearly as interesting - from a pure acting standpoint - as the work in Adaptation, where she played tense and sexy, or Angels in America in which she played a lot of roles.

There is no one to whom I would not recommend The Manchurian Candidate. It is a solid political thriller with lots of really strong work to enjoy and some real quirks to appreciate.

READER OF THE DAY: J-SAP writes: "You don't know what you're talking about re: Industry Hums About "Real M:I3 Director" Tom Cruise. I take it you've seen almost none of ALIAS. I take it you haven't seen Abrams LOST pilot. Sure M:I3 would be his feature debut, but I can think of few directors on the planet less likely to be successfully pushed around by Cruise than Abrams. Abrams is a titan - you don't run groundbreaking shows by rolling over and toeing the company line. Sell the typical crap if you must, but don't forget there's a reason Cruise works with distinctive visionaries almost every time out. If he *wanted* to manhandle his directors, he wouldn't be working with people like PTA, Kubrick, Scorsese, Zwick, Mann, De Palma, Spielberg, Jordan or Stone. I mean, duh."

NOT DREAMWORKS writes: " JJ Abrams? JJ Fucking Abrams?!? As if the sting from the donkey punch made with the loss of Carnahan wasn't enough.

If we were gonna go from left field with this choice why didn't Cruise make it a truly bizarre albeit delicious choice. Here's my five that should have been given a shot. 1. Christopher McQuarrie. I don't care if he's trying to make the Manhattan Project or Gladiator the Musical, the man showed in Way of the Gun that he can shoot an action scene.(And would somebody please give the composer on that flick, Joe Kraemer, a shot at something better than Lifetime Mysteries (even my wife calls Lifetime Movies: Flicks for Bitches), goddamn hire the motherfucker already!) McQ would give the flick (granted with a short quick rewrite and addition on the set) Good back and forth, dialogue with depth & crisp, taut, playful action. He should have been the first person called after Carny split. 2. The Hughes Bros. I watched Dead Presidents on HBO the other day and given the chance I think they could knock MI3 outta the goddamned park. 3. The Wachowski Brothers. Don't tell me that they couldn't use a slam dunk nor give this thing a flair that would have us begging for a fourth installment. 4. George Clooney. I know he's shooting the DOZEN over in Europe, but could you imagine the poster? Only time in history the director would demand the same size head shot as the star on the one sheet. 5. Guillermo Del Toro. The man is ready to take the leap to the BIGTIME, granted Hellboy, Blade 2 wasn't no walk in the indie park but Del Toro could lift this thing above the banality I'm predicting with the Abrams/Cruise duo.

Honorable Mention: Ben Stiller. Don't tell me that they could ad lib a hilarious MI3, with Stiller playing Ethan Hunt's long lost twin, imagine the chuckles if Stiller and Cruise go back and forth for a few minutes and then the camera cuts to Ving Rhames, "Both ya'll look-alike honkies crazy!"

A modern day Sanford and Son meets Dodgeball meets Lost in Translation. Scarlet Johansson's in this right?"

LEGAL BEAGLE writes: "I can deal with only so much on a daily basis, but slamming Supes and Cyke (ABBREVATIONS RULE and pretty much most comic fans call them this) within the SAME SENTENCE! Has to be the most ridiculous thing I have ever read.

Calling Superman boring plays right into this whole bullshit analogy that a guy with the POWER OF A GOD has no ambiguous issues about his character, his role on earth, and what HE HAS to do against what HE SHOULD DO. There are all sorts of interesting stories to tell with Supes since unlike Batman he actually has POWER! He has the power to make 6 billion people bow before him, but he doesnt. On what planet is that not interesting?

Then you go talking smack about Cyclops based off the movies possibly, but thats where those movies get it all wrong. Without Cyke, the X-Men do not function. He leads them, not Wolvie, and they are sort of screwed if he ever walks away. Heck. Joss Whedon figured this out, and in his X-book Cyke clearly leads and is the star. He's the man, and in the future they might want to get this right in an X movie. Yeah, Wolvie has an interesting history, but he doesnt keep the team together. He doesnt lead, and he doesnt sacrifice. X3 better give Cyke more of a due or it will continue to be a misrepresentation of a character who gets more just in comics then on screen.

And if anyone out there could direct X3 it should be David Fincher. The story material alone seems like something he would want to gravitate too. Especially the dark Phoenix saga which should encompass most of the X3 film. If not, then, they will probably just hire some dude like Tim Story, and let us all hope it works out fine on both counts.

Have a nice day..."

HAM & RYAN writes: "You write quite a bit about the responsibilities of journalists, both in and out of entertainment reportage, to provide context and frame issues in the most honest way possible.

I was, therefore, distressed to see you run the e-mail from Oh Very Young without providing any context. That brand of "greedy deviant Jews run Hollywood" crap that
Oh Very Young was spewing is not, in my experience, representative of conservative thought or opinion (no matter how much some liberals may wish to think it is).

All online columnists that touch on politics are going to receive feedback that runs the spectrum of political thought. There's an old trick that some of those columnists engage in to tar those on the opposite side of the spectrum to themselves, which is to pick out some of the small percentage of extreme e-mails and run them without providing any context as to how prevalent that sort of feedback is. You generally seem to try to be fair to those you disagree with politically, and I'd hate to think that you engage in this tactic.

Now, if you receive lots of those types of e-mails, then by all means say so and run them. But if most of your feedback from conservatives is reasonable and thoughtful, and that type of e-mail is atypical, then I think it's incumbent upon you to provide some context if you're going to run such an e-mail."

E ME: I had no intention to tar anyone… just letting a thought hit the sunlight.