June 15, 2004

The Manchurian Hillary/Streep.

Fly on the Wall reports:
Paramount Pictures is worried that Meryl Streep's edgy, chilling performance as a U.S. Senator in The Manchurian Candidate, which opens at the end of next month, is too close to the real Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a pal inside the studio tells me.

As a result, studio honchos have asked director Jonathan Demme to make little recuts and trims here and there to remove some of the more Hillaryesque gestures and expressions in the flick.

Hillary Clinton is a politician. Meryl Streep is one of the greatest actors in this history of cinema. This is the way Streep conceived the role, and Streep should prevail.

At first, I thought this was a publicity stunt: stir up some phoney controversy and make people think about your movie or even feel they need to see for themselves. But there is a whole unseemly political angle. Fly's source says, "Meryl has the Hillary hand gestures totally down pat ... I don't know whether this is something she picked up subconsciously or an idea Jonathan gave her, but she's totally dead on. You feel like you're watching Hillary Clinton conspire to take over the world. The Republican Hillary-haters should totally eat this up."

Why didn't someone stop her before she did the performance this way? I say, once she's done it, you can't cut it for political reasons. It's Meryl Streep! Art over politics!

Hmmm... "Liev Schreiber plays the villainous veep"--doesn't Schreiber look a bit like Al Gore?

No comments: