Word: manchurian
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...usual, the year’s end is rich with prestige films that studios will cast out as juicy Oscar bait. One of my most cherished films, The Manchurian Candidate, is being remade with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep on board. Though remakes of classic films are only occasionally successful, this pedigree will guarantee at least a vastly entertaining mess (I can hear those Gus Van Sant Psycho violins...
Like you, I love The Manchurian Candidate, and, like you, I’m apprehensive about the remake; I don’t think that Jonathan Demme’s flair can compensate for a script written by a guy whose past credits include The Sum of All Fears and Doc Hollywood. On the other hand, I don’t think that remakes are necessarily bad, especially with the right cachet; I was fine with paying top dollar to see the Psycho remake, for example, because I couldn’t pass up the chance to see William...
...Bunch movies--and the network courted it with I Love the 70s and I Love the 80s, limited-run series in which moderately famous actors, comics and musicians riffed on mass-culture icons from Kojak to Kajagoogoo. The series riveted twenty-and thirtysomething channel surfers, as though tripping a Manchurian Candidate--like synapse. In just over a year, VH1's ratings jumped more than 100% among 18-to-49-year-old viewers. (Also, of course, recycling culture is faster--and often cheaper--than creating original entertainment...
Forget China's astronauts. The country's most famous intergalactic traveler lives in the last house on his lane at the edge of a Siberian forest. Meng Zhaoguo's odyssey began at the Red Flag logging camp in the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang, when he saw a metallic glint thrown off nearby Mount Phoenix. Thinking a helicopter had crashed, he set out to scavenge for scrap. The 36-year-old lumberjack stood gazing at the wreck from across a valley when "Foom! Something hit me square in the forehead and knocked...
...culture's postwar flirtation with infidelity and angst in his Broadway farce The Seven Year Itch. The film version, with Marilyn Monroe, brought him to Hollywood, where he wrote the scripts for Bus Stop, Breakfast at Tiffany's and that classic spiked cocktail of melodrama, satire and treason, The Manchurian Candidate. His two films as writer-director, Lord Love a Duck and The Secret Life of an American Wife, are revered by comedy cultists...