I STRONGLY RECOMEND THIS FILM

together with THE TERMINAL -tom hanks(a true story about a guy who lived in CDG AIRPORT FOR 15 YRS ! well heard the guy is still living there

Remaking a great thriller sounds crazy? See 'The Manchurian Candidate.' An exclusive look at summer's dark surprise.




Ken Regan
Schreiber's character saved his patrol and won the Medal of Honor ... or did he?


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Read Newsweek's review of 'The Manchurian Candidate'


In the decade that followed, Tina set the project up at Warner Bros., but it went nowhere. It was clear, though, that the Reds couldn't be the bad guys. "The plan was always to develop the enemy within our own borders," she says. "It seemed more frightening and conspiratorialé*?nd the WorldCom and Enron scandals hadn't even happened yet." Nor had September 11. While it came close to killing the film for good, Tina, Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing and producer Scott Rudin ultimately decided that it was not the worst time to make "Manchurian," but the best. "We talked a lot about those ' 70s paranoid thrillers like 'The Parallax View' and '3 Days of the Condor'," Rudin says. "We felt if we could achieve what those movies had, and do it with contemporary politics, we'd have something very special."

The script by Daniel Pyne ("The Sum of All Fears") and Dean Georgaris adds sev-eral major twists and updates the role of Raymond Shaw's mother. In the original, Angela Lansbury played the domineering wife of a McCarthyesque senator. This time Eleanor Shaw is a senator in her own right, a terrifying embodiment of unchecked ambition and maternal affection. It's a hell of a role, and Streep plays the hell out of it. "She's just amazing," says Washington. "As soon as I read the script I was like, that's the best part. I want to be her." So did a lot of people, but it's hard to compete with Streep. "It's a great thrill when a brilliant person gets to play a brilliant person," Demme says. "Eleanor Shaw is the smartest person in the room wherever she goes, and I think that's probably true of Meryl, too." In fact, says Rudin, "I think this character is the closest Meryl's ever played to herself." Is that a compliment? Must be. "Actually," Streep says, "it's the closest to Scott Rudin that I've ever played." In truth, she did have some models for the role. Just don't ask her who they were. "Never mind," she says, laughing. "Fox News would love if I were doing Hillary, but that's so off the mark."








Ken Regan
Spooked out: Denzel is plagued by nightmares in the remake[font=Geneva,Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif][size=2][color=#c0c0c0 noShade]The film, surprisingly, isn't overtly partisan. "It's a movie," says Washington. "Are we going to change the way people vote? Is Michael Moore? I don't know." As it happens, the words "Democrat" and "Republican" aren't even used in the film. "Is there really an enormous difference between the two?" Demme asks. "I view our major parties as corporate entities desperate to please stockholders, putting out the products they think most people will buy." Demme says that they rushed postproduction on "Manchurian Candidate" to get it into theaters before the election. It's not that they wanted to rock the vote涌K, maybe Meryl didå‚*ut that they wanted to rock the box office, and feared the public would be exhausted by politics come late fall. Besides, if they'd waited, they would have run a still greater risk: that truth would get even stranger than their fiction.