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07/27/2004 Archived Entry: "Conspiracy Leery"

Posted by steve @ 01:59 AM EST [Link]

SURE, SURE: I don't know which is more offensive: the fact that they remade The Manchurian Candidate or the fact that everyone involved is swearing up and down that it isn't a liberal movie.

When questioned at a recent junket about the participation in the film of leftist activists such as Al Franken and Wyclef Jean, Demme, with a peace pin on his lapel, said, "We hope that this picture is as offensive to all the parties as it is to any in particular." Asked about the hawkish views of Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, the film's villain, who uses the fears of "another cataclysm, probably nuclear, on our soil" to get her military son on the presidential ticket, Meryl Streep responded, "That's strategizing. It's generic. Politicians talk that way." And as if reading from a political script, Denzel Washington, whose character is a shell-shocked Gulf War veteran, said, "[The film] reminds me to not lose sight of the fact that these kids are coming home and we all need to embrace them."

The film itself takes pains to avoid naming any political party. A corporation, the Parallax-like Manchurian Global, replaces the original's conjoined menaces of Communism and McCarthyism. But if you look past the watered-down politics and muddled coda, TV-news crawls and background radio broadcasts convey a more direct criticism of corporate influence in the current White House. As a senator played by Jon Voight warns, the country could be threatened with the "first privately owned and controlled vice president of the United States."

This from the same industry that called Fahrenheit 9/11 a documentary when even the filmmaker copped to the fact that it was an editorial.

Read on.