Manchurian Candidate & Seconds

I posted this stuff a couple of weeks ago on FB - MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is the ultimate mind trip thriller... and deals with planting ideas in people's minds, much like INCEPTION.



I love how everyone has the same dream, but all of the dreams are individualized and different. When they get to James Edwards (the Black guy)'s version of the dream - it's exactly the same, but every character's race is flipped. The old white ladies in the garden club become old Black ladies, and the Black servant becomes a white servant. It has a great sense of sly humor (probably due to the tone of the source novel written by the clever Richard Condon) and has great suspense. The remake got some basic stuff wrong... Um, the reason why it's a game of solitaire is because no one ever asks you if you want to play solitaire, so it is the perfect "trigger phrase". Here's the opening scene - the first dream - watch how the dream changes without a cut. It's the garden club... then it's Chinese brainwashing with the help of the Koreans. Hey, that's Reggie Nadler in the audience! Voice over is by the great Paul Frees, a radio actor who had a very distinctive voice.



The film was directed by John Frankenheimer, who also directed this great film...



SECONDS is a thriller about getting a second chance at life and realizing you take all of your emotional problems with you.



You see echoes of this film in ROBOCOP and other movies about people who realize they can not go back to their old lives ever aagin. Rock Hudson gives the preformance of a lifetime - he was a light comedy pretty boy actor before this film... and here he does dark, deep, drama. Based on a novel by David Ely (who wrote some great TWILIGHT ZONE type science fiction novels). Story hits the ground running with middle aged man John Randolph getting a phone call from his dead friend. WTF? This is a slow burn story, but like MANCHURIAN, deals with constant paranoia. It is *always* creepy. Where MANCHURIAN deals with the idea that you may not be in control of your own life (mind control), SECONDS deals with having to constantly pretend to be someone you are not... and the fear that people may discover who you really are.

- Bill

The Novels:













IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: The One Page Synopsis - and how to master it.
Dinner: Togos again.
Pages: Some blog stuff you will see in the future.
Bicycle: Just around the corner - doesn't really count.