Monday, September 06, 2004
The kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful movie review I've ever written...
So last night I held a screening at my place of one of my favorite movies, The Manchurian Candidate. That's right, the original John Frankenheimer classic with Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, and Janet Leigh. It was intended to be a get-together for some friends, but apparently no one was interested, so it was just me watching this great movie and thinking about all the little details that I had never noticed before: the titles of books lying around Cpt. Marco's (Sinatra) apartment, the weird dialogue between Marco and Eugenie/Rosie (Leigh) on the train, the heavyhanded use of Lincoln imagery to foreshadow the film's finale, that sort of thing.
After watching the film, I suddenly wondered about parallels and changes in the film's recently released remake. Although I had sworn to myself that I would not put one dollar into Hollywood's pocket by watching some modernized update of an already classic film, it was a Friday night, I was bored, and watching both in one evening would at least lend an interesting perspective.
A warning here that there are slight spoilers from this point on, so if you don't want to know, maybe you should go do something else. (Read a book or something...)
The new Manchurian Candidate begins like the original, with a scene showing the members of a military unit relaxing near the front. In the original, it was in a brothel/bar, in the new one, it's a poker game inside the confines of a tank. (Amazing how many soldiers can fit inside one piece of armor, there must have been about 8 people in the game.) In both cases, the revelry is interrupted by Sgt. Raymond Shaw. Sgt. Shaw in the original movie is a stuck up, arrogant misanthropist who declares himself to be eminently unlovable. In this new version, he's not a stuck-up prick so much as a shy loner with poor social skills. In both versions, he is disliked by the rest of the group, which is forced to go on a mission into enemy territory along a route that everyone acknowledges is a dangerous one likely to be attacked.
And around here things start to differ.
We flash to the present day and rather than establishing Shaw’s relationship with his family, cue instead to Ben Marco (played by Denzel Washington) who is giving a talk on the Congressional Medal of Honor to a Boy Scout Troop. Everything seems fine until another member of the platoon confronts him and asks if he’s been having bad dreams. Marco says no, but we learn later this may not be the case. Not that his dreams are in any way memorable or interesting. They reminded me of Wolverine’s dreams in the X-Men movies. Full of implied terror and scary noises, but ultimately unmemorable. Remember, the greatness of the garden party dream scenes in the original? Well, those are gone.
Anyhow, through Marco we learn a little more about Shaw, who instead of being eminently unlikable is in point of fact very popular with the public. He’s a representative in Congress no less, the latest in a proud political dynasty which also includes his mother, Sen. Eleanor Shaw (played by Meryl Streep.) So Sen. Iselin and all the political humor he entailed in the original...that’s gone. Instead Sgt. Shaw is aiming for the White House (or at least the Naval Observatory) as Vice President.
Marco’s bad dreams again prompt him to seek out help from his bosses (who think he’s nuts), Sgt. Shaw (ditto), and from the mysterious Eugenie who we first see selling Shaw instant soup mix and apparently stalks him onto a train and into New York City. (In one of a handful of throwaway references, Eugenie gives Marco the same phone number as in the original, complete with the El Dorado prefix.) Marco crashes at Eugenie’s and checks in with a nameless Albanian friend...I kid you not...to see what would explain his nightmares. And the answer?
Tracking bug under the skin...of course!
So, after digging it out with a knife and losing it down the drain, Marco goes to chat with Shaw about their confusion, and bite him on the neck to retrieve Shaw’s implant. Now everyone thinks he’s crazy, especially the audience! But no, there it is, large as life and twice as natural...proof that Marco and Shaw are part of a conspiracy run by the (wait for it) Manchurian Global Corporation, whose minions looks surprisingly like holograms from the future that only Scott Bakula can see. And thanks to that zany Albanian fellow I mentioned earlier, we can restart Marco’s brain so that he can remember what happened to him.
Ok, so neither the original or the new one is meant to be scientifically accurate, but things like this just seemed like a stretch to me. Especially when they took out one of the film’s classic images, the queen of diamonds, which as far as I can tell is nowhere to be seen unless you count some of the doodles based on Marco’s dreams.
Of course, the film still has its twists, as it is revealed that Raymond isn’t the only one who is conditioned and oh yes, just as Ebert suspected, there is more to Rosie than meets the eye. And Denzel and Meryl do their best to live up to the original, but Jon Voight is wasted as Senator Jordan and Liev Schrieber is a Raymond Shaw who alternates between overly sympathetic and overly cruel...no nuance at all to his character.
Long story short: See the original. Rent the new one when it comes out on video...or better yet, borrow it from a library. No more money needs to be spent on remakes like this.
So last night I held a screening at my place of one of my favorite movies, The Manchurian Candidate. That's right, the original John Frankenheimer classic with Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, and Janet Leigh. It was intended to be a get-together for some friends, but apparently no one was interested, so it was just me watching this great movie and thinking about all the little details that I had never noticed before: the titles of books lying around Cpt. Marco's (Sinatra) apartment, the weird dialogue between Marco and Eugenie/Rosie (Leigh) on the train, the heavyhanded use of Lincoln imagery to foreshadow the film's finale, that sort of thing.
After watching the film, I suddenly wondered about parallels and changes in the film's recently released remake. Although I had sworn to myself that I would not put one dollar into Hollywood's pocket by watching some modernized update of an already classic film, it was a Friday night, I was bored, and watching both in one evening would at least lend an interesting perspective.
A warning here that there are slight spoilers from this point on, so if you don't want to know, maybe you should go do something else. (Read a book or something...)
The new Manchurian Candidate begins like the original, with a scene showing the members of a military unit relaxing near the front. In the original, it was in a brothel/bar, in the new one, it's a poker game inside the confines of a tank. (Amazing how many soldiers can fit inside one piece of armor, there must have been about 8 people in the game.) In both cases, the revelry is interrupted by Sgt. Raymond Shaw. Sgt. Shaw in the original movie is a stuck up, arrogant misanthropist who declares himself to be eminently unlovable. In this new version, he's not a stuck-up prick so much as a shy loner with poor social skills. In both versions, he is disliked by the rest of the group, which is forced to go on a mission into enemy territory along a route that everyone acknowledges is a dangerous one likely to be attacked.
And around here things start to differ.
We flash to the present day and rather than establishing Shaw’s relationship with his family, cue instead to Ben Marco (played by Denzel Washington) who is giving a talk on the Congressional Medal of Honor to a Boy Scout Troop. Everything seems fine until another member of the platoon confronts him and asks if he’s been having bad dreams. Marco says no, but we learn later this may not be the case. Not that his dreams are in any way memorable or interesting. They reminded me of Wolverine’s dreams in the X-Men movies. Full of implied terror and scary noises, but ultimately unmemorable. Remember, the greatness of the garden party dream scenes in the original? Well, those are gone.
Anyhow, through Marco we learn a little more about Shaw, who instead of being eminently unlikable is in point of fact very popular with the public. He’s a representative in Congress no less, the latest in a proud political dynasty which also includes his mother, Sen. Eleanor Shaw (played by Meryl Streep.) So Sen. Iselin and all the political humor he entailed in the original...that’s gone. Instead Sgt. Shaw is aiming for the White House (or at least the Naval Observatory) as Vice President.
Marco’s bad dreams again prompt him to seek out help from his bosses (who think he’s nuts), Sgt. Shaw (ditto), and from the mysterious Eugenie who we first see selling Shaw instant soup mix and apparently stalks him onto a train and into New York City. (In one of a handful of throwaway references, Eugenie gives Marco the same phone number as in the original, complete with the El Dorado prefix.) Marco crashes at Eugenie’s and checks in with a nameless Albanian friend...I kid you not...to see what would explain his nightmares. And the answer?
Tracking bug under the skin...of course!
So, after digging it out with a knife and losing it down the drain, Marco goes to chat with Shaw about their confusion, and bite him on the neck to retrieve Shaw’s implant. Now everyone thinks he’s crazy, especially the audience! But no, there it is, large as life and twice as natural...proof that Marco and Shaw are part of a conspiracy run by the (wait for it) Manchurian Global Corporation, whose minions looks surprisingly like holograms from the future that only Scott Bakula can see. And thanks to that zany Albanian fellow I mentioned earlier, we can restart Marco’s brain so that he can remember what happened to him.
Ok, so neither the original or the new one is meant to be scientifically accurate, but things like this just seemed like a stretch to me. Especially when they took out one of the film’s classic images, the queen of diamonds, which as far as I can tell is nowhere to be seen unless you count some of the doodles based on Marco’s dreams.
Of course, the film still has its twists, as it is revealed that Raymond isn’t the only one who is conditioned and oh yes, just as Ebert suspected, there is more to Rosie than meets the eye. And Denzel and Meryl do their best to live up to the original, but Jon Voight is wasted as Senator Jordan and Liev Schrieber is a Raymond Shaw who alternates between overly sympathetic and overly cruel...no nuance at all to his character.
Long story short: See the original. Rent the new one when it comes out on video...or better yet, borrow it from a library. No more money needs to be spent on remakes like this.
