Conspiracy Redux - Remake of Manchurian Candidate 7-30 Release

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5457032/site/newsweek

Just a minute ago we were talking about "The Manchurian Candidate," her political thriller coming out next week, but somehow Meryl Streep has veered off on her own little "Rock the Vote" tour. "Something like 35 percent of the population who can vote, doesn't," she says. "Now, if you told those people what clothes they had to put on, they'd be mad. If you told them what kind of car they had to drive—or what they had to eat for dinner—they wouldn't stand for it. But somebody is deciding what they eat and what they breathe and all that stuff..." Pause. "I'm on a rant, aren't I?" A little. Maybe we could get back to the "thriller" part. "Well, the movie has something to say, but it's mostly interested in scaring the bejesus out of you."

In the wake of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," this revamp of the 1962 classic starring Frank Sinatra feels more chilling than it would have just two months ago. Denzel Washington stars as Capt. Ben Marco, a veteran of the first gulf war plagued by nightmares of torture and murder, and haunted by the sense that his memory has been altered. While in the gulf, a member of his patrol, Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), had apparently saved the entire troop from enemy attack—and won the Medal of Honor for it—but did he really? When Shaw, with the help of his senator mother (Streep), becomes the vice presidential nominee, Marco begins to suspect that a shadowy multinational corporation, Manchurian Global, is pulling the strings and is about to put its war-hero puppet in the Oval Office. "I don't think there's anything more farfetched about this than what we're reading in newspapers today," says director Jonathan Demme, who terrified the country 13 years ago with "The Silence of the Lambs." "Whether it's the latest article about Halliburton or Bechtel or the Carlyle Group, there's a lot of dubious activity going on. Billions of dollars are being made and, yes, lives are being lost. But what's most disturbing about the intersection of big business, big science and big government is that we absorb all this information and go, 'Oh, gosh, that's spooky!' And we don't seem to do anything about it."

I'm looking forward to this one - just saw the 62 classic and it does chill the blood.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

1. At first I was horrified that they'd remake such a classic

but now that I know it's a huge swipe at our corporatist administration, I'm all for it! :D