Ass kissing at its finest.

But why would a director like Demme do it? Remakes like this should go to the director of Torque or something.

Yeah, Joe Kahn would have made the flashback scenes HYPER-REAL.

Just saw the trailor, looks fantastic. It's going to be an expensive summer for me, but this is the first summer in awhile I've been excited about the slate.

I'm in as equal a furor as Pants apparently is. Frankenheimer crafted a completely gonzo and brilliant film, a film that had a humor, a razor sharp edge, and a cracked surreal sensibility that makes it a landmark in American movies. A landmark. You don't remake a landmark film!

There is no way anyone could recapture that first conversation between Janet Leigh and Frank Sinatra:

Leigh — "Maryland's a beautiful state."

Sinatra — "This is Delaware"

Leigh — "I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter."

I've been tolerant of remakes. I know how this shit is run and recycling is the moneymaker now. But man, The Manchurian Candidate? That's baffling. All I can expect from a remake of such a film in this day and age is plain vanilla, and the trailer doesn't assuage my fears.

Instead of going to see this why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

I don't understand all the anger swelling around this film. It hasn't even been released yet, and you're already calling it a piece of sh*t. I thought the trailer was pretty good, and I will be seeing The Manchurian Candidate this summer, as it looks better than most of the crap coming out. Sure, Jonathan Demme hasn't made a film worth seeing since The Silence of the Lambs, but the actors are a big pull. Maybe this WILL suck, but maybe it won't.

Just because you hate remakes in general, doesn't mean this can't be a good movie. I know a lot of people will go into this hating it from the start, and walk out having convinced themselves that it sucks simply because the original was better.

I haven't seen the original, but I plan to. That doesn't make me a bad person, nor does it invalidate my opinion.

. . .

One (one?) reason this particular remake makes me angry is that it's cashing in explicitly on the original. Even storywise, the '62 version is firmly rooted historically and culturally in that time frame and the ensuing brilliance is its continuing contemporary relevance. It's an artifact, you're not going to come close to touching on its issues by remaking it.

Sure, in some Bizarro Hollywood there's a director that might remake The Manchurian Candidate but do it in a way that compliments (or contradicts) the original, builds on its foundations, and has something new to say. I can't imagine how it could be conceived, but I believe it could be done. But that film would be extremely outside of the marketable mainstream.

What I imagine from the real Hollywood is a tepid corporate thriller, stylish in some aspects (however empty), a few winks to the original, and hell, why not a surprise ending? The real Hollywood has yet to let me down in those aspects.

So yes, my mind is made up after seeing the trailer. I will not like this film. Not because the story is so altered, but because the original is near perfect. If Demme and company wanted it to stand on its own they wouldn't be clinging to the notoriety of the original.

*Quenn of Hearts appears*

Sundog, I want you to kill any producer that thinks about remaking a film that shouldn't be remade in the first place.

That's my big complaint - the original was very much of its time, capturing perfectly the sense of impending danger from a different set of "evildoers" than the world faces now. Even the very title has pretty much lost its meaning in today's world.

I see a lot of people bashing Demme here, don't get me wrong, I'm the last person to talk good about someone who does remake after remake but I have to admit - if they're done well (and I'm not talking about all of his work, mainly the candidate here) then I'm all for it.

At the same time, just like watching movies in the context of their time; try applying the same principle here, whether it's done exactly like the original or not.

From the trailer I saw, looks like this one is quite a bit different. Same general idea, but some big plot changes.

I still haven't seen the original, but from what I hear (and from the replys in this thread) It won't be much different. I think I'm gonna wait for the remake to hit theaters, watch the original first, then go see the remake the next day.

It would have to be. If you've seen the original the first thing I mentioned would stand out the most.

Gotcha

Those changes sound like the tail wagging the dog.

I saw the original a while back, but from what the trailer of the remake shows, I was not impressed.

The WIZ.

But ya'll didn't get it.

I thought Red Dragon was better than Manhunter; I'm not sure if it's considered a remake, but I liked Evil Dead II more than Evil Dead.

Damn, it sounds like the original Candidate was damn near flawless???

Jeffrey Wells liked it - seriously.

WARNING - BE WARY OF POSSIBLE MINUTE SPOILERS

Manchurian Twist

The vast majority of the paying audience for Jonathan Demme's THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (Paramount, July 30th) will like it or not based on what it is, and not how it measures up to John Frankenheimer's 1962 film of the same name -- a political satire-cum-thriller that anyone who knows anything about film loves or at least admires. And for very good reasons. And yet comparisons are inevitable.

I'm about to become a heretic. I saw Demme's film on Wednesday morning, and I have to say it's a better, fiercer, more jolting thing than the Frankenheimer. I have beefs with it (the big finale isn't as exciting as the original's, the final scene doesn't quite get it, and there's some awkward and ill-timed exposition here and there), but this just means the grade is a B-plus instead of an A.

I know, I know...it wasn't supposed to be this. The idea of a new CANDIDATE has been scorned for a long while. Angela Lansbury, who gave a legendary performance in the '62 film as the evil mother of Laurence Harvey, said a couple of weeks ago that remaking the "perfect" original offended her. A year and a half ago a couple of Texas film freaks, Joe Leydon and Harry Knowles, bitched about the same thing. I groaned about it myself in this space last year.

I don't mean the Demme is "better" in terms of being wittier or more inventive than its black-and-white forebear. Frankenheimer didn't have a huge budget to shoot with, and was forced to rely on ideas, style and verve, which of course paid off in spades. Demme had a different handicap. He had to make his film play on its own terms.

There's no equal in this new CANDIDATE to Frankenheimer's audacious and innovative brain-washing sequence (i.e., cutting back and forth between the Manchurian reality and the implanted fantasy of a squad of "conditioned" soldiers sitting in front of an audience of elderly women in the lobby of an Atlantic City hotel).

And there's a lot less in terms of general quirkiness and personality (nobody jumps into a lake in Central Park in the dead of winter).

And Rachel Portman's score isn't in the same realm as David Amjac's, which has always been one of the catchiest things about the original.

But if the Frankenheimer was mostly a dialogue-driven thing -- men talking in this and that room about clues and indications -- the Demme, no less smart or canny on its own terms, is a psycho trip....a mindbender. It's darker and creepier than the original, and a lot more unhinged.

If you're going to do a remake, this is the way to go. Show respect, adhere to the original bones, update as intelligently as possible, but at the same time cut loose and put on your freak hat. Demme's film is its own bird, but also tethered to the nightmares and goblins of our time as fully as Frankenheimer's was to the currents of the Kennedy era.

Ruthless, devious Communists were the big bugaboos of the mid 1950s, when Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" novel was written, and their rep was still potent in the early '60s.

Today, of course, the all-purpose ogre is the multi-national corporation, and that's what we've got here -- a big-time medical technology company called Manchurian Global with cozy relations with big-time politicians worldwide, and particularly in Washington, D.C., and, of course, the usual willingness to do anything to protect the bottom line.

If there's a problem with Pyne's plot it may be that it's not far-fetched enough. With the implications in FARENHEIT 9/11 about the influence of the Carlyle Group and the anti-corporate slant of docs like THE CORPORATION and ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE, what happens in Demme's film seems only slightly outlandish.

Frankenheimer's film was partly (you could argue mostly) a black political comedy, but Demme's is, for the most part, too wrapped up in the agitated hallucinatory twitchiness of Denzel Washington's Cpt. Bennett Marco -- a veteran of the Gulf War this time, and not the Korean conflict -- to allow for quite as many wisecracks.

Marco has no Defense Department p.r. job this time, which means no lines telling the Defense Secretary to treat a U.S. Senator with respect "even if he is an idiot."

What humor there is in this version comes from the flamboyant, hard-edged, incredibly-evil-mother-of-Raymond-Shaw character, played and enjoyed to the hilt by Meryl Streep. She's not married to a Joseph McCarthy-like U.S. Senator this time -- she is one herself. Does she seem to be playing Hilary Clinton, as a NEW YORK POST story suggested a while back? I didn't spot anything very specific, but I'm not much of a Hilary watcher.

Streep's Eleanor Shaw is a lot of fun but not on an arch parody level. She sounds like she believes her own malarkey, and she's got a pair of steel balls besides. I wish Demme and Pyne had given her more screen time. She definitely gives Angela Lansbury's portrayal a run for the money, and yes, there's still a hint of sexuality in her relationship with her son.

Most of you know the plot of the '62 film, and I've mentioned the Gulf War element and the Streep changes. The other mentionable differences here (I want to be careful about spoiling) are...

(a) Congressional Medal of Honor hero Raymond Shaw (Liev Shreiber) is no longer a research assistant to a magazine editor but a Congressman and a Vice-Presidential candidate in the national election;

(b) Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight) is still a liberal U.S. Senator with a daughter named Jocelyn (Vera Farmiga) who had a love affair with Raymond two or three years back, but their affair is only alluded to and completely undramatized. (I don't want to be cruel, but Farmiga has weirdly intense features....she looks a bit like Sara Jessica Parker...and is definitely no match for Laurence Harvey's Jocelyn, who was played by Leslie Parrish);

(c) Shaw and Marco don't get drunk together or meet each other at Jilly's, or anything else in this vein. Relations between them are fairly chilly this time, although there's a bonding moment at the finale;

(d) The Rosie character, Marco's romantic interest who had nothing to do with the plot in the '62 version when she was played by Janet Leigh, now has something to do with the plot, and is played by Kimberly Elise.

Of all the performers, I was impressed the least by Liev Schreiber. He seems indistinct and not really there. Harvey's Shaw was an elitist prick; Schreiber's is kind of a vacant dweeb.

It'll be difficult for some to absorb the complex plot turns of this film without constantly thinking back to the Frankenheimer. I can imagine some people hating this echo effect and dimissing it altogether.

But my 16 year-old son Jett saw the Demme with me on Wednesday, so I showed him the '62 version to get a reaction, and after 45 minutes he said he wanted to watch something else. But he said he liked the Demme version just fine. My other son, 14 year-old Dylan, felt the same way.

I like and respect the new version because, in my view, Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto have essentially made their own peculiar movie on top of the plot, which they were more or less stuck with when they agreed to do this thing for producers Scott Rudin and Tina Sinatra.

They've done this (along with editors Carol Littleton and Craig McKay) by going with a visual style that feels infected with psychological toxins. Everything looks and feels schizy and strange. There's no assurance of any kind in this film. There's not even a hero, really. It doesn't comfort or placate or try to wrap anything up.

The other big plus is the way Pyne's script portrays Washington's Marco character as a much more unstable and confused guy than Frank Sinatra ever was in the original, and in the way Washington throws off any semblance of star posturing in portraying him. It was our Denzel, of course, but I bought his nutter behavior. I didn't feel an actor turning on the tricks.

As dark-toned, politically paranoid thrillers go, this is easily one of the best....right up there with Alan Pakula's paranoid trilogy -- KLUTE, THE PARALLAX VIEW, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. And I must say I was a bit surprised to find this, having read and written about a June '03 version of Daniel Pyne's script, which I felt was fairly good but that's all.

The story that unfolds in Demme's film is a lot more complex (and at the same plainer and easier to follow) than what I read last summer. So hooray for the rewrite process. Demme or Rudin or both got down and said to Pyne, "This isn't good enough. We can upgrade this. Back to work!"

Demme, whom I still regard as a first-rate auteur despite BELOVED and THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, had to be uncomfortable with simply remaking a classic thriller for a paycheck and almost certainly said to Fujimoto, "It'll be futile and we're too esteemed anyway to try and beat Frankenheimer at his own game, so let's dig in, rev up and take this thing in our own direction."

And that's what they did.

http://www.moviepoopshoot.com/elsewhere/index.html

Hooray, this is more encouragement to see the new version.

Not that I think it'll be better than the original, which I finally saw and found it to be one of the greatest films I've ever seen!

When's the release date of the new ('62 Frankenheimer) Manchurian Candidate: Special Edition release with a re-mastered 16:9 transfer as indicated by http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=11391

All of my searches for this dvd turn up the old non-anamorphic version.

nevermind. It's coming out TODAY, JULY 13th. Now I've just got to find it somewhere at a good price... any helpers?