Ok, so Demme remade "Charade" and now on to "The Manchurian Candidate". Why?
Quote from: EL__SCORCHOOk, so Demme remade "Charade" and now on to "The Manchurian Candidate". Why?
maybe he can't write original screenplays worth a damn -- i dont see how one can feel creatively satisfied re-making classics. whats next, sunset boulevard?
I think Demme is very much starting to reveal his own talent in these late years, or lack of. Remakes aren't necessarily the most evil thing, but with recent examples, they are worth a sigh. But opinion on Demme has never been really high anyways and only way he gets the talk he does here is because of PTA's admiration. I think opinion on Soderbergh for his reliance on previous material is starting to change for the worst as time goes on, which is more interesting and important.
~rougerum
Yeah, I don't really feel Demme is so amazing either, but I am curious about why he's doing remakes now.
Quote from: EL__SCORCHOYeah, I don't really feel Demme is so amazing either, but I am curious about why he's doing remakes now.
Although I love Silence, I just cant see what is so great about Demme, he is a good director, maybe above average, but not great. It always gets me wondering when I see PTA praising the fuck out of him.
Quote from: Duck SauceIt always gets me wondering when I see PTA praising the fuck out of him.
Watch "Melvin And Howard" since it was a huge influence on "Sydney."
And the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" is one of the best concert films ever.
Quote from: MacGuffinAnd the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" is one of the best concert films ever.
mos def.
he has good character pieces. something wild is a pretty cool flick.
i just watched the original and i thought although it was good, i thought it could use a well done remake. it was not a perfect film, and had some really great elements that if used right could make a film to stand up against the original. i didnt think that the brainwashing should've been revealed in the beginning, but maybe unraveled slowly throughout the story. by giving away exactly what was done to them, there was not enough tension just waiting for it to happen. i think one of the main problems with truth about charlie was the casting. mark wahlberg is the least charismatic performer, maybe ever, and putting him in cary grants shoes was the first mistake. there were tons of cool stylistic flourishes and altough the script had problems, it couldve been alot better with better leads. and since the manchurian candidate doesnt hinge on the chemistry between the two leads, perhaps this would be better suited. (although i havent heard anything in a while about it, so maybe its not on anymore?)
i say he remakes - PSYCHO
Remaked may be much easier projects for Demme to actually get made than projects he really wants to do. Maybe he needs to re-prove himself to the studios after Beloved. I'm not saying this is true, and I'm CERTAINLY not saying it's right, but it seems a plausible guess.
Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/themanchuriancandidateqt1.html)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fus.ent4.yimg.com%2Fmovies.yahoo.com%2Fimages%2Fhv%2Fphoto%2Fmovie_pix%2Fparamount_pictures%2Fthe_manchurian_candidate%2Fdenzel_washington%2Fnotebook.jpg&hash=9ec3317087b7cf98b18281d90f1b074212d9bc95)
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fus.ent4.yimg.com%2Fmovies.yahoo.com%2Fimages%2Fhv%2Fphoto%2Fmovie_pix%2Fparamount_pictures%2Fthe_manchurian_candidate%2F_group_photos%2Fdenzel_washington1.jpg&hash=bcb23fb9bc0216f66613e2798eb370637e0410a0)
Has no one remembered The Truth About Charlie?
Quote from: Chest RockwellHas no one remembered The Truth About Charlie?
EL__SCORCHO did.
Quote from: EL__SCORCHOOk, so Demme remade "Charade" and now on to "The Manchurian Candidate". Why?
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimagecache2.allposters.com%2Fimages%2F153%2F917061.jpg&hash=2d3eb3718a9e7fd15797276619f6015323a67e3f)
Jonathan Demme on The Manchurian Candidate
Source: Edward Douglas Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Paramount's new remake of Frank Sinatra's 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate allows director Jonathan Demme to once again revisit an old classic after turning the Audrey Hepburn movie Charade into 2002's The Truth About Charlie. Best known for critically lauded movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme once again works with an incredible cast starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Street, Liev Schreiber and John Voight for a movie about a Gulf War veteran (Washington) that gets caught up in political conspiracy when a large corporation tries to put a dummy vice president into the White House.
ComingSoon.net talked to the venerable director to get his take on some of the eerie subjects covered in his controversial new movie, things like mind control, corporations and politics. Oliver Stone would be proud of his answers.
CS!: Were you wary of doing a remake after your experience with The Truth About Charlie?
Demme: No. I read a great script that Denzel Washington was going to be a lead in, and it turned me on. I'm too old to worry about that kind of stuff. I love the book and the first movie, and by the time I got the script--Dan Pine was the author of the draft that I got-- I thought that he made an original new picture from that classic. I thought that he messed with so many of the cornerstones of the original that it was all suddenly up for grabs.
CS!: What was it like working with Denzel again?
Demme: He's a very exciting, challenging actor to work with. He's very non-verbal and keeps to himself during the shooting day, and then he's adorable after the wrap. In other words, he's Jekyll and Hyde.
CS!: Was it accidental that there were so many connections to real world politics? Some people have commented that the evil corporation in the movie might be an analogy for Halliburton.
Demme: The only way to hang onto the brand name "The Manchurian Candidate" was to name the multinational corporation that profits on war the Manchurian Global Corporation. Certainly, we learned a lot about organizations like that in our research and trying to have a fairly credible world threat.
CS!: Was there a concern at all about having this movie come out during an election year?
Demme: When Paramount realized that the picture was going to be finished sometime this year, the question was do you release a picture set against an election backdrop before the election when people are interested in elections? Or do you wait until the election is over and then release your election movie? It seemed like the path of wisdom to get it out beforehand, and then the next thought was better to try to get it out as well in advance as possible. If it came out in the fall, which I thought would be a good time for it, it could easily get lost in the shuffle, because no movie can compete with the high drama of what's really going on in the world today.
CS!: That said, the movie is rather vague about which political party Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber's characters are a part of. Was this intentional?
Demme: We decided that in terms of the political parties, it seemed like we would have to make a choice if only because on TV, when people are making speeches, it always puts their party affiliation. Early on, [screenwriter] Dan Pine and I spent a lot of time making choices about how to present this. Many people today really look slightly askance at the notion that we have a really legitimate two party system going on. There is nothing fresh about the idea so ultimately, what's the difference? Especially with certain parties, in which the politicians speak one set of beliefs and then they seem to vote a whole different way, if you look at their voting records. So is this still a functioning two party system? We decided to have fun that way by having a typical American political party, but not get bogged down in the partisan stuff. We didn't want to burden ourselves with all the disciplines that would come with that. In our movie we focus on the one party, but clearly, there is an off-camera other party that they're running against. The game that we hope people will play, and it's irresistible, is to try to guess which party it is. What I like about that is that it makes us think about both parties a bit.
CS!: Is it true that you recut some of Meryl Streep's scenes because her character was coming across too much like Hilary Clinton?Demme: No, that's something that came out in the newspapers, which I was happy to see because it sounds a little spicy, but no, there was nothing like that.
CS!: In your mind, is The Manchurian Candidate a science fiction movie?
Demme: It had aspirations to be science fiction, but then the more we researched what kind of experimentation and what the new frontiers are in scientific efforts today to alter personality and shape the way people behave either through implants, electronic impulses, genomic restructuring at the prenatal state, we discovered that it's either happening or they're out there trying to make it happen. A lot of it is government funded. The two doctors that are assisting our fabulous Dr Noyle in that procedure we show, they are neurosurgeons who do that operation all the time, not for the kind of devious goals that Dr. Noyle does but for other kinds of behavior modification. They're like benign, state of the art, quasi-lobotomies. This implant will short circuit depression impulses and implant a sense of positive memory to replace a traumatic memory.
CS!: Were you at all frightened by any of the things you learned while doing your research?
Demme: We read about how the government is spending a lot of money today working on chemical approaches and impulse reward mechanisms that can be implanted into fighter pilots and soldiers to keep them alert and on the game for days on end, the goal being to create an army that doesn't need to sleep for a week. Who can fight that army, the army that never gets tired? I don't think there's anything in our picture that is as creepy as that.
I don't know if you've ever come across this book called "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate". It's a book by John Marks that came out eight or nine years ago that consisted of the writer's interpretation of files and records of CIA mind-altering experiments on unsuspecting people throughout the late 60s and 70s. He got access through the Freedom of Information Act, and wrote this up, because the CIA was actively trying--and we still are I'm sure--trying to control minds. In sleep deprivation, drugs-they use a lot of LSD-all kinds of stuff. Scientists would get the grants to go into mental institutions and experiment on people who were under treatment in these places. I find that frightening, because you realize that there are no boundaries on what big modern science will attempt to achieve. There's always the upside and there's always the good reason, like what if you could take someone who was profoundly traumatized and remove that trauma from their mind and they can live happy productive lives? But the trouble is that the guy around the corner is going to want to do something evil with that technology and he's going to want to do it for power, money and whatever.
CS!: Isn't it a bit scary that there may be companies that might try to take advantage of this type of technology? That's what the movie seems to be implying.
Demme: This is a movie and a cautionary tale and it's a hot-blooded thriller, so we have fun with the notion that in their quest for total control and a total amassing of profits, these companies would go so far as to find the idea of a human being conditioned to never change their mind and to do exactly as they're told. That would be an asset to have in the White House.
CS!: Do you think that this type of mind control is really possible?
Demme: Let me just tell you that in the book, all these CIA efforts to try to gain total control of people, they all ultimately failed. They came to the mundane, exquisite realization that you could not achieve unlimited control over individuals to the extent that you could cause them to do things that they were deeply opposed to for sustained periods of time. There was a limit to the control you could exert.
CS!: Do you think that this movie might increase the paranoia?
Demme: We certainly hope that it won't relieve any of the paranoia. We've got a lot to be paranoid about today.
The Manchurian Candidate comes out everywhere on Friday. Look for interviews with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep later this week.
Quote from: themodernage02CS!: That said, the movie is rather vague about which political party Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber's characters are a part of. Was this intentional?
Demme: We decided that in terms of the political parties, it seemed like we would have to make a choice if only because on TV, when people are making speeches, it always puts their party affiliation. Early on, [screenwriter] Dan Pine and I spent a lot of time making choices about how to present this. Many people today really look slightly askance at the notion that we have a really legitimate two party system going on. There is nothing fresh about the idea so ultimately, what's the difference? Especially with certain parties, in which the politicians speak one set of beliefs and then they seem to vote a whole different way, if you look at their voting records. So is this still a functioning two party system? We decided to have fun that way by having a typical American political party, but not get bogged down in the partisan stuff. We didn't want to burden ourselves with all the disciplines that would come with that. In our movie we focus on the one party, but clearly, there is an off-camera other party that they're running against. The game that we hope people will play, and it's irresistible, is to try to guess which party it is. What I like about that is that it makes us think about both parties a bit.
That's a brilliant movie, I think. I caught a screening of this this evening, and the whole way home, I was trying to figure out which party the film was focusing on -- I was convinced that I had missed some line of dialogue in which it was mentioned, but I honestly couldn't figure it out -- they really do a good job of blending parties.
It's a really good movie -- hindered only by memories of an original that was probably not that much greater but still had the advantage of being the original (my memories of it are full of strong impressions, but slightly fuzzy regarding the details).
Before and after I watched it, I was listening to the Deomcratic Convention on NPR and going into the movie in that mindset hammered home the timeliness that, as Demme attests in the interview above, was certainly no accident.
Quote from: GhostboyQuote from: themodernage02CS!: That said, the movie is rather vague about which political party Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber's characters are a part of. Was this intentional?
...
That's a brilliant movie (move?), I think.
Freudian slips = fun.
True, true. That one's not nearly as bad as the one I made in the At Home At The End Of The World thread, though...
they showed the former vice president and said here he was from, and it was the last state that was left to be won by archer and shaw.
what state was it?
saw it last night. dug the demme
Haven't seen it yet, and rarely give a damn about denzel....But can't wait to see this. If the movie is anything like the previews...then this is the oscar that denzel actually deserves.
- if you've seen the previews, you already know too much.
- Demme has to control his look-o-rama fever.
- mostly too vague to be interesting
minor minor spoiler
- in the future, the news may be delivered through more split screens and text, but there's no way it will look like that.
TAKE FIVE WITH JONATHAN DEMME
Jonathan Demme's 'The Manchurian Candidate' isn't just a remake (of the 1962 political paranoia classic), says the celebrated director of 'The Silence of the Lambs' and 'Philadelphia': "I had hoped and wanted to do another Clarice Starling film, and that didn't come to pass, so I had this kind of unrequited desire to do another thriller when 'The Manchurian Candidate' came along, so the spirit of 'Lambs' hovered very, very strongly over this one." But 'Silence of the Lambs' wasn't the only movie Demme actively consulted when tackling his ambitious remake of John Frankenheimer's film. Read on to discover Demme's five strongest influences.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No Way Out
(1987, dir: Roger Donaldson; starring: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman)
'No Way Out' helps define for me the kind of picture that 'Manchurian Candidate' wants to be. 'No Way Out' has a guy in pursuit of the truth. His life is in peril, and the deeper he digs, the more vulnerable he makes himself, the more he puts himself in peril. As a moviegoer, I love that. So when I read 'The Manchurian Candidate,' I thought, "I love this genre." There are other great movies that function along the same lines. 'Night Has a Thousand Eyes' is about a reporter who can see tomorrow's headlines. He sees a headline predicting his own death, and he's going to work very hard to avert that headline, and as the story unfolds, we realize he's actually helping fulfill the prophecy. It's like their journey is preordained. In 'The Manchurian Candidate,' Denzel Washington plays a character who is deeply disturbed and may be insane. The more he tries to pursue proof of his sanity, the crazier he appears to everybody, even as he's unearthing evidence of a conspiracy that may be his ultimate paranoid fabrication. Or it may be the truth.
The Silence of the Lambs
(1991, dir: Jonathan Demme; starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins)
A huge influence on 'The Manchurian Candidate' is 'The Silence of the Lambs,' and that's the movie that I most actively referenced in my mind while making 'Manchurian Candidate.' [There are] a couple of obvious big similarities: Each film has a [character] who has set a deadly, impossible task for themselves and is forced to navigate through a world filled with treachery. Each film also has a completely unexpected relationship at its center. In 'Silence of the Lambs,' Clarice Starling, the force of good, has an extremely unlikely relationship with Doctor Lecter, and in this one, part of Marco's [Washington] journey involves getting deeper and deeper into a relationship with Raymond Shaw [Liev Schreiber]. In making 'Silence' and seeing how people reacted to it, I think I learned about that genre. Both films have similar aspirations: They both want to be extremely disturbing, and they both aspire to intense emotional involvement with the characters. When I read the script for the first time, I felt, "I know how to do this."
The Manchurian Candidate
(1962, dir: John Frankenheimer; starring: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey)
'The Manchurian Candidate' starring Frank Sinatra was a major resource, and in this regard, what I felt [screenwriter] Dan Pyne had achieved was a movement away from the old movie, an effort to try and reinvent the wheel. The 1962 version became an influence -- to try not to get sucked into recycling great moments from that movie. The image of the corporal being shot in the head and the blood splattering on the wall is one of the most vivid moments in American film as far as I'm concerned, so we were influenced by that film not to trade on that, and instead discover our own way of doing that. In the original movie, the only way we get to see what really happened is as part of Marco's dream. And the choice that Dan Pyne made, in an effort to get away from that, was to show the audience an abstract dream that doesn't make any sense until later. On Marco's journey of discovery, he will have an actual retrieved memory, and we will show the audience exactly what happened to him in Desert Storm.
The Conformist
(1970; dir: Bernardo Bertolucci; starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda)
One of the most horrifying killing scenes I've ever seen occurs in 'The Conformist,' where the professor and his daughter are caught in the woods, and there's a chase amongst the trees. It's done with such fantastic cinematic values, that crazy handheld camera that can't keep up with it. The moment in the lives of these people becomes so desperate and out of control that even the camera's out of control. I wanted to try to take advantage of that feeling for the death scene of an older man and a younger woman in our movie. In the original 'Manchurian,' the deaths are so perfect and so unique to themselves, with the milk coming out of the [bullet hole], there's no way that we would dare recycle that and imagine that it would be fresh. What Dan Pyne did that I think was marvelous was, in removing another great key moment from the original, he referenced the line where the guy says, "Why don't you go jump in the lake?" So Dan chose to have Raymond enter a body of water in order to commit the murders.
All the President's Men
(1950; dir: Alan J. Pakula; starring: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford)
'All the President's Men' was another picture that we watched very, very closely as a possible reference point for how we might light our picture to make it feel as realistic as possible. There was a point in the evolution of the style when my impulse was to make everything in this movie horrifyingly believable, to give it an almost docudrama feel. Basically, 'All the President's Men' has a very invisible style, which wasn't particularly pertinent to us because we wound up wanting to invent an aggressively off-kilter visual style. But when we watched the movie, it was very interesting for us [that] you never really got to see or spend time with the villains. There had been endless discussions at script level asking, "Don't we need to get to know these guys better in order for Manchurian Global to have the proper weight as the force of darkness in this movie?" And yet 'All the President's Men' was always with the good guys or the witnesses, and that gave us confidence in resisting the impulse to spend a lot of time with the guys from Manchurian Global.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
haha, he listed his own movie as an influence. haha.
I enjoyed it. It's not as good as the original, but it's much better than most remakes. I enjoyed the pacing, I'm curious to hear the views of people who haven't seen the original. There wasn't as much tension for me while watching this one since I knew what, for the most part, was going to happen.
I really liked it. Strong performances, Demme has tons of signature shots and a solid if almost satirical take on the story. I'm gonna watch the original tonight.
this was pretty solid i thought. not terrific, no, but it's great to see demme make a good movie again. i haven't liked a movie of his since cousin bobby. or philadelphia. whichever one came last.
DVD Release
Source: www.davisdvd.com
Release Date: December 7.
how many more release dates are left...
Only a couple.
Should I mark my calendar?
Sure, if you want.
Quote from: MacGuffinShould I mark my calendar?
NO!
Demme talks U.S. politics at Venice fest
VENICE -- With a strong American presence at this year's Venice International Film Festival, it didn't take long for U.S. politics to rear its controversial head.
On just the second day of the 11-day festival, director Jonathan Demme -- in town with a remake of the political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" -- spoke at a news conference here Thursday and took aim at the current state of U.S. politics.
"As an American, I really feel my country is in a lot of trouble," Demme said without mentioning the Bush administration by name. "I think our leaders have taken us in a really bad direction on so many levels."
At the conference, Demme was pressed by several journalists to make a connection between his film and the current geopolitical situation. "I feel that our leaders really want to own the world for two reasons," he said. "One, there are endless profits from owning the entire world, and because if you own and control the world, there is a relief from fear."
The director went on to lament the current entanglement of money and politics. "That is the big struggle of the moment, and it is coming to a head in a couple of months," he said. "We have untold millions who want to return to a richer sense of democracy."
Demme was joined at the conference by the film's stars, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber.
Streep was repeatedly queried about the supposed influences on her character -- from Margaret Thatcher to Hillary Clinton -- but she diplomatically sidestepped the question and by and large steered clear of making her political leanings known.
"People have grown very weary of messages being buried in art, or so-called documentaries," she said. "We all have our political opinions that we could sit around and talk about all day."
Demme had previously noted that politics were "never talked about" during the making of his film and said it was meant as a political thriller. "I feel 'The Manchurian Candidate' is, first and foremost, a political thriller, and I wanted to shape it like 'Silence of the Lambs' and essentially make a very strong movie emotional experience," he said.
Washington played it low-key, giving only minimal answers to questions.
In an earlier press conference, Scarlett Johansson and John Travolta were on hand to plug their film "A Love Song for Bobby Long," directed by Shainee Gabel.
In serving double duty as a jury member and actress, Johansson is emerging as this year's de facto Hollywood star on the Lido.
When a swooning Chilean journalist professed his love to her and asked what film she would choose for them to co-star in, the actress named "Single White Female."