I don't mean the Demme is "better" in terms of being wittier or more inventive than its black-and-white forebear. Frankenheimer didn't have a huge budget to shoot with, and was forced to rely on ideas, style and verve, which of course paid off in spades. Demme had a different handicap. He had to make his film play on its own terms.

There's no equal in this new CANDIDATE to Frankenheimer's audacious and innovative brain-washing sequence (i.e., cutting back and forth between the Manchurian reality and the implanted fantasy of a squad of "conditioned" soldiers sitting in front of an audience of elderly women in the lobby of an Atlantic City hotel).

And there's a lot less in terms of general quirkiness and personality (nobody jumps into a lake in Central Park in the dead of winter).

And Rachel Portman's score isn't in the same realm as David Amram's, which has always been one of the catchiest things about the original.

But if the Frankenheimer was mostly a dialogue-driven thing -- men talking in this and that room about clues and indications -- the Demme, no less smart or canny on its own terms, is a psycho trip....a mindbender. It's darker and creepier than the original, and a lot more unhinged.

If you're going to do a remake, this is the way to go. Show respect, adhere to the original bones, update as intelligently as possible, but at the same time cut loose and put on your freak hat. Demme's film is its own bird, but also tethered to the nightmares and goblins of our time as fully as Frankenheimer's was to the currents of the Kennedy era.

Ruthless, devious Communists were the big bugaboos of the mid 1950s, when Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" novel was written, and their rep was still potent in the early '60s.

Today, of course, the all-purpose ogre is the multi-national corporation, and that's what we've got here -- a big-time medical technology company called Manchurian Global with cozy relations with big-time politicians worldwide, and particularly in Washington, D.C., and, of course, the usual willingness to do anything to protect the bottom line.

If there's a problem with Pyne's plot it may be that it's not far-fetched enough. With the implications in FARENHEIT 9/11 about the influence of the Carlyle Group and the anti-corporate slant of docs like THE CORPORATION and ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE, what happens in Demme's film seems only slightly outlandish.

Frankenheimer's film was partly (you could argue mostly) a black political comedy, but Demme's is, for the most part, too wrapped up in the agitated hallucinatory twitchiness of Denzel Washington's Cpt. Bennett Marco -- a veteran of the Gulf War this time, and not the Korean conflict -- to allow for quite as many wisecracks.

Marco has no Defense Department p.r. job this time, which means no lines telling the Defense Secretary to treat a U.S. Senator with respect "even if he is an idiot."

What humor there is in this version comes from the flamboyant, hard-edged, incredibly-evil-mother-of-Raymond-Shaw character, played and enjoyed to the hilt by Meryl Streep. She's not married to a Joseph McCarthy-like U.S. Senator this time -- she is one herself. Does she seem to be playing Hilary Clinton, as a NEW YORK POST story suggested a while back? I didn't spot anything very specific, but I'm not much of a Hilary watcher.

Streep's Eleanor Shaw is a lot of fun but not on an arch parody level. She sounds like she believes her own malarkey, and she's got a pair of steel balls besides. I wish Demme and Pyne had given her more screen time. She definitely gives Angela Lansbury's portrayal a run for the money, and yes, there's still a hint of sexuality in her relationship with her son.

Most of you know the plot of the '62 film, and I've mentioned the Gulf War element and the Streep changes. The other mentionable differences here (I want to be careful about spoiling) are...

(a) Congressional Medal of Honor hero Raymond Shaw (Liev Shreiber) is no longer a research assistant to a magazine editor but a Congressman and a Vice-Presidential candidate in the national election;

(b) Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight) is still a liberal U.S. Senator with a daughter named Jocelyn (Vera Farmiga) who had a love affair with Raymond two or three years back, but their affair is only alluded to and completely undramatized. (I don't want to be cruel, but Farmiga has weirdly intense features....she looks a bit like Sara Jessica Parker...and is definitely no match for Laurence Harvey's Jocelyn, who was played by Leslie Parrish);

(c) Shaw and Marco don't get drunk together or meet each other at Jilly's, or anything else in this vein. Relations between them are fairly chilly this time, although there's a bonding moment at the finale;

(d) The Rosie character, Marco's romantic interest who had nothing to do with the plot in the '62 version when she was played by Janet Leigh, now has something to do with the plot, and is played by Kimberly Elise.

Of all the performers, I was impressed the least by Liev Schreiber. He seems indistinct and not really there. Harvey's Shaw was an elitist prick; Schreiber's is kind of a vacant dweeb.

It'll be difficult for some to absorb the complex plot turns of this film without constantly thinking back to the Frankenheimer. I can imagine some people hating this echo effect and dimissing it altogether.

But my 16 year-old son Jett saw the Demme with me on Wednesday, so I showed him the '62 version to get a reaction, and after 45 minutes he said he wanted to watch something else. But he said he liked the Demme version just fine. My other son, 14 year-old Dylan, felt the same way.

I like and respect the new version because, in my view, Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto have essentially made their own peculiar movie on top of the plot, which they were more or less stuck with when they agreed to do this thing for producers Scott Rudin and Tina Sinatra.

They've done this (along with editors Carol Littleton and Craig McKay) by going with a visual style that feels infected with psychological toxins. Everything looks and feels schizy and strange. There's no assurance of any kind in this film. There's not even a hero, really. It doesn't comfort or placate or try to wrap anything up.

The other big plus is the way Pyne's script portrays Washington's Marco character as a much more unstable and confused guy than Frank Sinatra ever was in the original, and in the way Washington throws off any semblance of star posturing in portraying him. It was our Denzel, of course, but I bought his nutter behavior. I didn't feel an actor turning on the tricks.

As dark-toned, politically paranoid thrillers go, this is easily one of the best....right up there with Alan Pakula's paranoid trilogy -- KLUTE, THE PARALLAX VIEW, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. And I must say I was a bit surprised to find this, having read and written about a June '03 version of Daniel Pyne's script, which I felt was fairly good but that's all.

The story that unfolds in Demme's film is a lot more complex (and at the same plainer and easier to follow) than what I read last summer. So hooray for the rewrite process. Demme or Rudin or both got down and said to Pyne, "This isn't good enough. We can upgrade this. Back to work!"

Demme, whom I still regard as a first-rate auteur despite BELOVED and THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, had to be uncomfortable with simply remaking a classic thriller for a paycheck and almost certainly said to Fujimoto, "It'll be futile and we're too esteemed anyway to try and beat Frankenheimer at his own game, so let's dig in, rev up and take this thing in our own direction."

And that's what they did.

Moustache Guy

I had two laugh-out-loud moments with ANCHORMAN (DreamWorks, opening today), neither having to do with anything Will Ferrell, the star, had said or done.

The first involved guest star Jack Black and a little dog; the second was a bit involving guest star Luke Wilson. One was about death, the other dismemberment. Thank God for rage, cruelty and the deliberate application of pain.

Okay, I laughed once or twice besides this. A bit involving guest star Ben Stiller playing a local Hispanic newsman is pretty amusing. Vince Vaughan, another guest star, is good here and there. But otherwise I sat there like a corpse.

Ferrell is the the co-writer (along with SNL alumnus Adam McKay, who directed), but I swear to God he's not funny, and neither is most of the film. And nobody cares what I think is funny or not funny in this thing because I'm cranky and I don't get it.

ANCHORMAN made a lot of people laugh at the screening I attended, but if it weren't for the degeneration of culture and civilization and the public's rollicking embrace of this, and the complete assurance on the part of DreamWorks executives that none of this matters and we're all on a Grim Slide into the swamp, I wouldn't be writing about it right now.

There's a lot of material in ANCHORMAN, but only two basic jokes. One is that Ferrell's lead character, a San Diego TV news anchorman named Ron Burgundy, is a sexist fool. There are somewhere between 175 and 200 bits in the film that convey this. The other big joke is that Ron's male colleagues in the newsroom are women-fearing dolts.

Does anyone remember the idiotic anchorman character Ted Knight played on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the '70s? Oh, I'm sorry...that's too far back. I was going to make a point. Forget it.

Did anyone ever see Jim Brooks' BROADCAST NEWS? Wait, hold on...too clever and sophisticated. It was about TV news people and funny in a good way, but it's not fair to bring it up alongside ANCHORMAN. Sorry.

Will Ferrell has a couple of shirtless scenes here (like he did in OLD SCHOOL), and I think it's time he agrees to something. Either he never takes his shirt off in a movie again, or he agrees to go to an electrolysis guy and have that black squiggly stuff taken off his chest and stomach. I guess it's hair, but it looks like a skin fungus. An actor's chest hair should look like Sean Connery's....or he should keep it buttoned.

Steve Carell plays a bespectacled bone-head weatherman with an IQ of 48. The idiocy levels are so extreme that his lines are off in another realm. I laughed at first, but it's the same bit over and over. The spirit rebels.

Christina Applegate is the best of the bunch. She plays Ron's nemesis, a newswoman named Veronica Corningstone who's fighting glass-ceiling sexism, blah blah, and you can tell right off she's brighter than the other guys. But then she sleeps with Ron and that's the end of it. I kept thinking of her pressing up against that flabby belly of his, and other much-worse things.

I hate to admit it, but my favorite scene is a street rumble between rival news teams in the city a la GANGS OF NEW YORK. Tim Robbins shows up as a PBS-style newsman, smoking a pipe and acting...you know, effete.

Burgundy's dog was my favorite character. He handles a climactic scene with a bear in a zoo like a champ. Ferrell/McKay/Apatow should given him more lines and more to do. I would much rather see a film about this guy than another ANCHORMAN-type thing.

Dissent

My son Jett, 16, had a pretty good time with ANCHORMAN. Since his feelings about it were strong and unambiguous, and since he disagreed with my views, he asked for some column space. What the hell....sure.

1. Ferrell: If it weren't for the star of ANCHORMAN, the movie would have no soul. Ferrell gives off a vibe like no other. He alone provided an enjoyable, solid comedy about a dumb, hopeless anchorman.

2. Comic Style: Nothing in this film proved unneeded in any way; the jokes and pranks all felt necessary. I especially liked the silly, wacky style of the humor. It reminded me of my own way of joking and fooling around and using quick, predictable insults like "whore, bitch, skank."

3. The Crew: It's the other guys in the newsroom who hold it together. Take Steve Carell, for instance. I enjoyed watching this nattily-dressed retard crack unwitting jokes based on his plain stupidity. He was the pride and joy of the team. Lines like "I ate a big red candle" are choice, but it was also the first visual impression of the guy. A nice, civil-looking man with glasses, then all of a sudden he proves to be a moron.

4. Ferrell's Jelly Belly: His body and structure of humor is what makes him so funny. He's so "unfunny" that he's really funny. Jokes you would never laugh at if told by some other person are made weirdly, curiously funny out of the mouth of Ferrell.

5. News rumble: The best part of this sequence was a shot of guys on horses carrying a trap-net to capture men in on the ground -- a steal from PLANET OF THE APES. The weapons and the warrior attitude on each of the newsmen's faces brought such insanity to the scene. Silly, courageous, hilarious.

Fanatical

Chris Gore's new film-buff TV game show, "Ultimate Film Fanatic," preems tonight on the IFC Channel at 10:30 pm. I've seen two episodes' worth. It's smart, fast, amusing. Gore throws movie-trivia questions at contestants, and then presides over 20-second debates. (20 seconds? Why not 10?) Then he gets them to haul out their stashes of movie memorabilia.

The show will run for eight episodes, and then everyone will consider the numbers.

I spoke to Gore a couple of days ago. He was calling from a Manhattan hotel where he was doing a press junket. I asked him if journalists like me are excluded from becoming contestants, and he said nope....but friends and ex-colleagues are. He then invited me to take part in a special promotion for the show at the San Diego Comicon on Friday, July 23rd, in room 6A and 6B. Winners will get I-Pods.

How are the "Film Fanatic" contestants screened? "We do castings in seven areas of the country," said Gore. "First they have to get by a written test. They're basically seeking people who are extremely opinionated and can back this up." I'm a little queasy about film buffs who keep all kinds of movie junk in their closets. It's a little dweeby. I'm not sure I relate, but I guess it takes all sorts.

Before taping the pilot, Gore was sent to a "game-show boot camp" where he played the game with mock contestants and learned the ropes. "You have to build up the tension moments, keep watch of the score," he says. "I got the hang of it pretty quickly."

"Ultimate Film Fanatic" is a production of Mindless Entertainment, the outfit behind "The Surreal Life" and "Extreme Dodgeball."

Missing

This has nothing to do with anything, but I have to throw it in. I tried C2, the new Coca Cola formula (half the carbs, half the sugar, etc.) a couple of weeks ago and though it was great. No more Diet Coke, I decided -- this is the thing from here on. But every market I've visited over the last week or so isn't carrying it. Most of the employees I've spoken to haven't even heard of the stuff.

This is totally typical. When Lemon Diet Coke came out a couple of years ago, it was always in short supply....if available at all. Lime Diet Coke has been pretty scarce also. Maybe someone who knows about the inner workings of the Coca Cola company or soft-drink distribution patterns will write in and explain the problem. C2 is great stuff. Not as good as Arrowhead or Perrier, but a close third.

Collateral

"I attended a research screening of Michael Mann's COLLATERAL a couple of weeks ago, and I can tell you that it's by far the best looking DV movie ever shot.

"There were several times throughout the movie that my friend and I kept looking at each other saying, "This is DV?" The movie was even projected via video on the screen but it looked and felt like it was film. It doesn't look nearly as cool as HEAT but it definitely has a Mann-style visual thing going on.

"Mann also uses the small size of the DV camera to his advantage by crafting shots in some pretty unusual and clever places.

"I can't extend the same raves about the movie itself. This is the worst script Mann has ever had, and even his genius can't save it in the end. The first half is actually quite good but after a key turning point (which I won't reveal here) the movie goes downhill fast and turns into a standard, highly cliched action pic.

"Tom Cruise is decent as the bad guy, but Jamie Foxx is pretty much wasted and Jada Pinkett-Smith sucks the air out of the room in every scene she's in. The ending is particularly absurd; I was actually shocked that Mann would allow such an ending to be in his movie." -- Steve Chipman, Hermosa Beach, CA.

Ice Battle

"You wrote in your KING ARTHUR piece, quoting VARIETY's Todd McCarthy, that the ice-lake battle sequence 'reportedly derives' from an early draft of GLADIATOR, which KING ARTHUR David Fanzoni wrote but never saw produced.

"This eerie, suspenseful battle on the ice was the best part of a disappointing movie. And for good reason, considering. Warfare on a frozen lake worked quite well as the climax Sergei Eisenstein's ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938). Who can blame Franzoni for trying to make it happen again, this time with seamless visual and sound effects?" -- Justine Elias, journalist, New York City.

Logic Nazi

"Going by his recent letter-critique, I don't think Charles S. Lewis III should have gone to a movie like SPIDER-MAN 2 in the first place. Here's a movie about a man dressed up in a red and blue spider outfit, flying around New York City battling an octopus-like bad guy on the sides of buildings, and Lewis wants to know why nobody took Spider-Man's picture on the elevated train? Or how his Spider-Man mask was returned?

"It's a movie, and a comic book one at that. I would hate for the film to suddenly divert to a story where Spider-Man's pictures compete for tabloid front pages with Britney Spears's recent engagement. Would Sony pay $200 million-plus for that film? Wait, don't answer that.

"But let's spell this out for Lewis: Parker lost his powers because mentally he couldn't commit to being a superhero anymore. It's a lot like sex for men. You lose your nerve, and goodbye erection! Once Parker accepted his calling as a hero, his powers returned because he was comfortable with them again.

"Lewis wants a scientific answer, but there isn't one. I believe the intellectuals call it 'drama.' For Lewis to say that this material isn't explained is a little odd. The WHOLE MOVIE is about this internal struggle within Parker/Spider-Man." -- Brian Orndorf, Filmjerk.com.