I’m backlogged on writing about the movies I’ve seen recently, in theaters and on DVD. So I’m going to catch up here with summaries of seven movies on DVD that I saw for the first time in August. (There were nine, but the Alice Adams and The Manchurian Candidate reviews were so long that I moved them to their own entries.)
It’s a little sad to see that I only went to a movie theater once, for The Manchurian Candidate. I had sinus hell for two consecutive weekends in August, and then I was home resting after the medical thing for another weekend (and couldn’t wear glasses for that long). But there weren’t that many enticing movies in theaters so I also felt relatively unmotivated. I feel satisfied enough that I saw nine new movies in the past month, even if they weren’t in theaters.
Month: September 2004
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
The Manchurian Candidate: 2004, dir. Jonathan Demme. Seen at Barton Creek/Cinemark (August 27).
The remake of The Manchurian Candidate is one of those movies that I liked while I was watching, and then afterwards I kept thinking of a million different plot holes and implausibilities. I did buy the initial premise of the movie, but I think I bought it because I bought it in the last movie. In other words, I believed that this stuff was true because it had been true for the last movie. Also, I hadn’t seen a Jonathan Demme movie in maybe 10 years, and noticing all the familiar directorial touches and the usual cameos (I caught Charles Napier but totally didn’t recognize Roger Corman or Tracey Walter) might have helped me believe the general premise of the movie.