Anodyne
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
 
The New Yorker's David Denby recalls what was good about John Frankenheimer's Manchurian Candidate, in order to work over Jonathan Demme's sad mess of a remake of same:

"The movie’s style—authoritative voice-over narration at the beginning, sombre black-and-white cinematography—was at times uncannily reminiscent of the public-spirited features produced during the Second World War and immediately after. Yet all this sobriety was undermined by some of the strangest scenes and words ever to appear in a mainstream Hollywood movie: a brainwashing episode in which American soldiers were convinced by their Chinese and Russian captors that they were being addressed by floral-hatted members of a New Jersey garden club; bits of unaccountable neo-Dada dialogue like “Are you Arabic? Let me put it another way. Are you married?” It was as if Lenny Bruce had mated with the Office of War Information. "

- posted by cjb @ 8:50 AM


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