the manchurian candidate denzel washington

It turns out that the only member of Marco’s company who might be deemed “fortunate” is Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber). As the opening credits come under Wyclef’s rueful cover of John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” the initial battleground ambush becomes a more broadly conceived trap. Much like any current political operative, the bad guys here work the news cycles with skill and cunning. Opening in theaters as the Democratic National Convention closes and the full-on effort to unseat the Bush Administration commences, the film hardly disguises its sense of what’s at stake in any mediated politics. This “terrain” is visible throughout The Manchurian Candidate. But it’s only in the last couple of years that this terrain is making its way into magazines and newspapers” (Sharon Waxman, “A Hollywood ‘Candidate’ for the Political Season,” 28 July 2004). As Demme tells the New York Times, “I am haunted by notions of things like the military-industrial complex. In this fictionalization, the Gulf War becomes part of a covert corporate plot that also makes use of 9/11’s political fallout.

With burning oil wells and night-visioned battling only partly visible, the film posits that the war that supposedly reclaimed the U.S.’s ostensibly righteous reputation after Vietnam, might not have been an unqualified victory. Specifically, it begins during the confusion of 1991’s Gulf War, as Army Sergeant Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) inadvertently leads his men into an ambush in the Kuwaiti desert. Like the original, the new film begins with a war, a seemingly defining national moment that turns out not to be what it seems. Now, however, the villains are not Communist, but corporate. political landscape isn’t transparent or democratic, but instead, corrupted by the individuals who manage it. Now, Jonathan Demme’s movie reasserts that the fabled U.S. politicians determined to contain them, who would stop at nothing - including political maneuvering and assassination - to maintain control over their patch of planet. And the commies were not nearly so invidious or so cruel as the U.S. Then, in 1962, the film laid out John Frankenheimer and George Axelrod’s brilliant breakdown of Cold War paranoia.

It also makes up the subject matter of The Manchurian Candidate, then and now.

Military operations, media promotions, corporate finagling, presidential politics.

The manchurian candidate denzel washington