Another Manchurian Candidate note; Streep "Steals the Movie," according to the Times.

"As a conservative politician whose ambition for her son knows no bounds — not even those of paranoid science fiction — she looks like Senator Clinton but behaves like Madame Mao. Her character doesn't suffer at all (except at the end); she barrels through meetings, smacks down the opposition, cracks her ice, gets done what must be done. In the process, Ms. Streep unhesitatingly steals the movie. It's hard to remember that the story is about an evil multinational corporation implanting a mind-control chip in a vice-presidential candidate, not about that candidate's mother.

"But you see in my mind I am the main figure in the movie!" she said, meaning her character. "And so many questions are interesting about a woman like that, a woman in power and how she's regarded. I'm fascinated by people like Liddy Dole and Margaret Thatcher and Madeleine Albright. I just looked at all those people, the ones who make things happen. Karen Hughes and Peggy Noonan. Their certainty. Unshakable. Ann Coulter! People like that work all their lives to achieve these positions where they can move world events — and then they can't control them. That's my character. They get into a place where they control nothing. Because they never learn that the tangent is the thing that really controls events."