Argo (2012)

I’ve been on record as saying that Ben Affleck is a better director than an actor (the former often helping the latter), and with Argo Affleck three-peats with another suspenseful thriller that, despite a true-story foregone conclusion, ratchets up the anxiety.

In addition to working behind the camera, Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, the CIA’s top exfiltration agent.  Since he specializes in getting people out of hot spots, Mendez is called to consult on the case of six Americans in Iran who escaped the 1979 embassy hostage crisis but are holed up in the Canadian ambassador’s home.  To do so, he forms a fake movie company with the support of a prosthetics designer (John Goodman) and a once-was director (Alan Arkin).  Thus armed with “the best bad idea we’ve got,” Mendez flies to Iran to establish cover stories to disguise the refugee embassy workers as a film crew.

Surprisingly for the man who starred in such trainwrecks as Gigli and Daredevil, Ben Affleck is shaping up to be one of this generation’s better directors.  With Gone Baby Gone, Affleck established a cinematic style for himself that relied on tension and suspicion, while in The Town Affleck added himself in front of the camera, demonstrating both directorial consistency and better acting than he’d done in years.  Argo, then, completes the hat trick with another taut thriller in a nail-biting setting.

Affleck uses claustrophobia to great effect here, giving the sense that the walls are closing in.  Absent are the spacious CIA interiors we’ve come to expect since Homeland or the James Bond flicks; instead we get an intelligence office where the ceiling is too low, the lighting dim, and the tempers high.  Similarly, Iran is a place swarming with bodies, physically and ideologically oppressive.  All of this is captured in the film’s visual language, which builds an effective sense of discomfort even though we know that the ending is going to be a happy one.

But the film isn’t all gloom and doom.  In the best film tradition, the film defuses weighty subject matter with a talented cast of lighthearted characters, where the humor isn’t always dark.  As a CIA head honcho, Bryan Cranston continues his inter/post-Breaking Bad career revival by popping tense moments with an expertly timed one-liner (the result, no doubt, of his comedic training).  Also fun to watch are Goodman and Arkin, the film’s ostensible Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who manage to balance patriotism with pathos, solemnity with comedy; true, they play the same characters they’ve always played – the gregarious goliath and the cantankerous old man – but they play it well, their star power and recognizability even helping their performances as Hollywood power brokers.

Conversely, Affleck wisely casts relatively unfamiliar character actors as the escaped hostages.  You’ll probably recognize them in passing, in a “Where have I seen her” kind of way, but it won’t distract; rather, it underscores the universality of the story Affleck is telling.  Likewise, familiar face Victor Garber hides under a wig and thick glasses to portray the Canadian ambassador as a paternalistic shepherd.  The cast clearly has chemistry among themselves – the refugee hostages in particular – but they’re also quite good at subtle glances to indicate internal stress or some emotional backstory.

While it isn’t enough to put him in the same strata as Scorsese or Nolan, Argo does demonstrate that Ben Affleck’s recent string of successes has not been a fluke.  Rather, I’d say we’re looking at a contender once the Oscars roll around.


Argo is rated R “for language and some violent images.”  The F-word is dropped several times in the film, often as part of a hilarious catchphrase, and the film’s depiction of Islamic fundamentalists may be disturbing or frightening for some, though the film is mostly bloodless.

Come back on Wednesday for The Cinema King’s review of Looper – stay tuned!

Monday at the Movies - June 11, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Two of “Monday at the Movies,” in which the Cinema King revisits some of his childhood favorites.

Dick Tracy (1990) – Of the two films under consideration this week, Dick Tracy is the one that has not had the same effect on me in the twenty years since I first saw it.  If nothing else, Dick Tracy is as close as film came to translating comics (before Sin City came along, at least).  Its colors are vibrant and its morals are downright Manichaean, making it an easy film to watch.  Director Warren Beatty also stars as the comic strip detective in a yellow coat, but it’s the criminals at whom he fires his signature tommy gun that steal the audience’s attention: Al Pacino as Big Boy Caprice, William Forsythe as Flattop, and Madonna as torch singer Breathless Mahoney.  But while the colors look great and lend the film a very intriguing visual style, the film hasn’t aged well in terms of substance.  Some of the performances come across as wooden (though I suspect Beatty is deliberately one-note as the do-gooder, Madonna’s work isn’t captivating), while others (ahem, Pacino) are overly blustery and cringe-worthy.  What sells the movie is that it’s populated by tons of high concepts and interesting visuals, characters with cool faces or wacked-out wardrobes, but Dick Tracy is almost overpopulated, and as a result some elements don’t make sense at the end.  I’d have liked to have seen more of Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles (an apt moniker), but as it is I’m still not certain what motivated a few characters, especially The Blank (“No-Face” in my childhood parlance).  Rewatching Dick Tracy brought back memories (especially of the complete trading card set I collected), but through my rose-tinted glasses I recognize that there is a truly great movie waiting to be made with Chester Gould’s source material.

The Rocketeer (1991) – The Rocketeer, however, has aged remarkably well and remains one of my all-time favorite superhero movies (a list, I suppose, I’ll have to make once I get around to Top-10’ing this site).  It might even be one of my all-time favorite movies, period, if only because I can’t watch it without my mood changing for the better.  If you’ve never seen it, for shame.  Billy Campbell stars as Cliff Secord, who discovers a rocket-pack designed by Howard Hughes (Terry O’Quinn); with the help of his mechanic Peevy (Alan Arkin), Cliff becomes The Rocketeer to save his girlfriend Jenny Blake (Jennifer Connelly at her most beautiful) from dashing Nazi actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton).  Really, the only thing preventing this film from being a perfect one is that it’s a little cheesy in parts, but I’ve found that a bit of nostalgia goes great with cheese.  The performances here are solid and endearing, and the 1930s atmosphere is pulled off with such grace that it’s no wonder director Joe Johnston was later asked to helm another period-piece superhero flick, Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Rocketeer is a lot like the Indiana Jones franchise, but with more heart than you might expect; while the superheroics are all top-notch, the movie is surprisingly earnest in its sentiment.  Campbell and Connelly are almost star-crossed as lovers, and the development of their relationship over the course of the film elicited a surprise mistiness in my ocular region.  That’s right, true believers, a more emotional filmgoer might have wept at The Rocketeer.  Even if you don’t cry, The Rocketeer is such delightful fun that you’ll want to watch it again once the credits roll.  Oh, hell:  maybe it is perfect.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Get Smart (2008)

Would you believe "best movie of the year"? No. Would you believe "funniest movie of the year"? No. Would you believe "so-so espionage farce with a few good chuckles"?

That's approximately my assessment of Get Smart, a movie that unfortunately let all of the good parts out of the bag with its marketing campaign. A sequel/update of the classic television series of the same name, Get Smart is a spy farce in the tradition of Austin Powers with Steve Carrell as the imperfect Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 in CONTROL.

When Smart is promoted by The Chief (Alan Arkin, perhaps the funniest actor in the movie), he teams up with sexy superspy Agent 99 (an incredibly gorgeous Anne Hathaway) and the suave Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson, who is still "The Rock" even if he drops the nickname from his credits) to fight the forces of KAOS and its pseudo-leader Siegfried (Terence Stamp, who's again as out of place here as he was in Elektra). Obligatory references to the original TV show, half-hearted laughs, and spectacular explosions ensue.

Something tells me this movie would have been funnier if I hadn't seen the trailers, although call that the "Cinema King Paradox" - too-good trailers ruin a movie, but I wouldn't see a movie if I didn't like the trailers. Go figure. The problem here is that all the funny moments, punchlines, and slapstick choreography have been spoiled by the trailers, which contain the best parts of the film. One notable exception - Alan Arkin delivers a line near the end of the film that made me about fall out of my chair. Oh, yeah, that and crunchy pudding. And a hysterical cameo by Patrick Warburton (Puddy) as... well, I won't ruin it. Best casting since Heath Ledger as The Joker, though.

(Speaking of The Joker, I was inordinately thrilled by the presentation of the "Happy Trails" trailer for The Dark Knight which appeared before my screening of Get Smart. Available at http://whysoserious.com/happytrails for those poor folks who haven't seen it yet.)

Perhaps part of the problem is that Get Smart tries to be a serious espionage story with injections of comedy. What's then disorienting about that is that the film falls into all the spy tropes - feuding partners who fall in love, a surprise double agent (whose identity I predicted even before the story introduced the threat of a double agent), the villain's henchman who develops a conscience, &c - without adequately poking fun at these cliches --- something the Austin Powers scene did brilliantly. [I still crack up at the scene where Dr. Evil's son asks him of Austin Powers, "Why don't you just shoot him?!"]

There aren't as many laughs as the trailer would lead you to believe, and if you've seen the trailer, you've already seen the best parts of the movie. But there's something to be said for a movie that contains a ton of explosions, something a filmgoer such as myself can always appreciate. It's just that I was looking for something a little more substantial in a movie this weekend. Of course, it was between this and The Love Guru, so I think my choice was fairly obvious.

Oh, well. Missed it by that much.