I saw
The Manchurian Candidate on Sunday—a nice bit of mainstream Hollywood fare well worth the 50-minute wait for the bus (as the woman waiting with me said, “I defend Metro to all my friends, and then …”). Meryl Streep is amazingly, brilliantly, wickedly fabulous. (Though why everyone’s comparing her character to Hillary Clinton, just because they’re both white, fiftysomething, female senators who were married to powerful but disappointing men before they were elected to the upper chamber, I just can’t fathom. All the reviews that make this parallel cite similar hairstyles as evidence for the claim. Streep had the same hair-do in
The Hours; critics, if you’re going to make the comparison, at least have the guts to do it for the right reasons!)
As you may have heard, the queen of diamonds is absent from this version of the movie, replaced by a trigger phrase. At school, my friends and I were obsessed with developing a secret word that would—how to put this tactfully, or at least without grossing out every single reader that wanders over here—act as a laxative. We all claimed we wanted to achieve this trick in order to solve the terrible problem of constipation, but we knew it really was so we could whisper said word when one of us was called to the front of the class to solve a math problem.
Perhaps the oddest part of the movie was the echo between the implausible whiff of incest between Streep’s Sen. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw and her son, vice-presidential nominee Rep. Raymond Shaw, and the very odd (though, I’m sure, quite innocent) opening line of Vanessa Kerry’s
speech to the Democratic Convention last Thursday: “As someone who knows all 6 foot 4 inches of my dad best …”
