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Drooling on the Pillow

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Cultural News from 2004 

If Sluggo is known for anything, it's for finding the cutting edge of the cultural wave and then waiting an average of six months to do anything about it. The wife persuaded me to watch the evisceration, er, remake of The Manchurian Candidate tonight On Demand. I'll be brief.

It's a shameful cartoon of remarkable movie. The original ran like clockwork, with a number of stunning performances. It was written tighter than a tick and directed cleanly, with a starkness that got creepier and colder as the story unwound. In this version there are some good performances (Jon Voigt is given the opportunity to embarrass himself and calmly declines) but in order to update the villains from Commies to global corporations they simply abandon plot and jump the action forward occasionally and just hope you don't notice. The original story was extravagant, but they connected all the dots. This one makes no sense whatsoever except as an in-kind contribution.

The frame is packed, stuffed with cultural memes from the left. A guy can't open a newspaper without a prominent story of Muslims being murdered by Yankee yahoos being displayed.

Similarly, the movie is full of big name actors in teeny-tiny parts. It's like a Hollywood "We're Sorry" convention. Everybody wanted in on this.

It would be foolish to think that it was an accident that this movie came out in 2004. Perhaps they felt they were striking a blow for the good guys.

What they did was give us $50 million worth of sophomoric foolishness with this plot: A son of privilege goes to war and comes back a hero. He's kind of a boring guy, but he keeps moving up. Eventually he runs for national office. Later there are questions concerning the legitimacy of his medals and where he was, exactly, at key moments of his wartime narrative. Turns out he's nuts.

Just a little ironic.
Posted by: Sluggo / 11:52 PM
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