Remakes, schremakes

I really liked "The Manchurian Candidate" - the original, with those incredibly great performances from Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and of course Angela Lansbury, and I was curious to see what Jonathan Demme and his team would do with the material. They've done a lot. In fact, as is generally the case with commercial remakes, they've done too much: they changed all the best stuff that made the original so powerful (most specifically, the solitaire trigger), and they managed to turn every single plot point into a cliche, throwing all subtlety out the door in the process.

In the original (which I saw again just last night, thanks to the release of the Special Edition dvd), a lot of the film's power comes from what is implied but not stated. In the remake, everything is stated, and stated. ..and stated. I think the only reason the remake is compelling at all is because Demme was smart enough to cast Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw - born just a few days apart from the great Laurence Harvey (different years, of course), Schreiber does bear an uncanny resemblance to him, from the back especially. And his best move was casting the always-compelling Denzel Washington in the Marco role - if you were in a room with Denzel, you would find SOMETHING to do with him, no question about it. And here, in this mind-bogglingly over-played scenario, he's still compelling, and you do get sucked in, or at least I did, even against my will (must have been that Queen of Diamonds in the lobby).

After leaving the theatre feeling oddly tarnished from my possible brain-washing experience, I decided that Hollywood should go all out and do some more sordid remakes. Here are some of my suggestions in that department: "The Ten Commandments" (with Ryan Phillippe as Moses), "Gone With The Wind" (starring Ashton Kutcher as Rhett and Ashley Judd as Scarlett), and of course "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (with Anthony Michael Hall in the Nicholson part and Ally Sheedy as Nurse Ratched). And while we're at it, how about "True Grit" remade as a Jackie Chan vehicle? There's no question Chan would look supremely dashing with the eye patch.