Review: Argo

Last week I came to the conclusion that I was putting off seeing certain movies for too long, and decided to sit and actually watch some of the ones that were making major headlines.  I had other blog posts prepared, but will have to adapt them accordingly for the rest of the week because one of the movies I just watched had the nerve to go and win Best Picture last night.  I mean seriously, off all the nerve.

So, here it is, my review of the movie Argo.

Now, we all know I love period pieces, those stories of a particular headline or moment in history plucked free from the river of time and placed in front of us with a spotlight on it.  Argo is certainly one of these movies, to a certain extent, but not a documentary since it's been well-established that certain parts of the story were "enhanced," since six people simply getting on a plane and leaving Iran with no troubles makes for a pretty boring movie.

Now, if I look at Argo for what it is, a "based on a story" movie, I can appreciate it much more than if it was being portrayed as an actual documentary.  There's another movie that was nominated, Zero Dark Thirty, which seemed to be trying to follow the same lines as Argo but, at least to me, came across as much more "documentarian" than Argo was in the ads and in the stories about it.

Of course, it's also hard to picture Ben Affleck directing an actual documentary, as opposed to Kathryn Bigelow.  He makes great dramas, but there's just something more "gritty" about her work.

Acting-wise, everybody in Argo gets the job done, some people better than others.  I was willing to accept Ben Affleck in the lead role, but the two people who shined most for me were John Goodman and Alan Arikin as the Hollywood crew he brings in on his mission.  There's a moment in the movie when a character exclaims "This is the part where we're supposed to say it's so crazy it just might work?"  Goodman and Arkin reached the same conclusion much earlier in the film, but know that, crazy or not, it really is the only chance the hostages have, so they go all out, having fun as they go.

Watching them, however, you pick up on a certain pleasant resentment (if such a thing is possible) towards the very industry they're part of.  They know all of the loopholes to get around problems in Hollywood, and while they aren't key players anymore, they have the connections to pull strings.  Both characters have seen it all and are long since disillusioned with the magic of Hollywood, but neither would ever dream of abandoning it.

As the joke about the actor shoveling elephant dung at the circus ends, "What, and leave show business?"

The scenes in Iran are tense, even though we know going in what happens to the six hostages.  To be honest, what I found most compelling were the looks at the people around the six hostages, seeing a country and culture so incensed at the United States that, not only does the hatred continue to this day (if the media is to be believed), but that they would be willing to blame every individual American for what happened.

Try as I might to imagine it, I don't think I could ever hate an entire country of people so much that I'd want to see every man, woman, and child die.  I didn't blame Iraq for the actions of Saddam, I didn't blame Afghanistan for the actions of Osama Bin-Ladin.  I don't blame Muslims as a whole for anything, nor do I blame all Christians for the extremists on their side.  But to see it happening, to see riots in the streets where you know that if anybody ever announced "I'm American!" there was no doubt they'd be dead in minutes...it's haunting, and I think that's the mental image that will last with me the longest.

I can see why the movie won Best Picture, with its relevance to today's political landscape and the job the team making it achieved.  I'll still take a small private thrill that Life of Pi won the most awards, but I'm willing to accept that Argo was a better picture than it.

However, I will pay solid American money to have someone make the actual movie Argo that was laid out in the film.  It would probably be better and a bigger hit than Jon Carter...though, that's not really hard, I guess.