Smart Words About Cinema
Argo, the movie inspired by the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, is going to win the Academy Award as best picture of 2012. Go ahead, place that bet in your office Oscar pool, but don’t expect to reap much advantage, because everybody else is just as sure that Argo is going to win. The signs are [...]
Argo (Warner), the third feature from actor-turned-directo?r Ben Affleck, was released early in October, just before the traditional roll-out of high-toned dramas and Oscar-bait showpieces gets aggressively competitive, and debuted to glowing reviews, enthusiastic audiences, and impressive box-office. Pretty good for a real-life drama about the stranger-than-fiction rescue of the six Americans who escaped capture when Iranians stormed [...]
I have a hunch about what’s helped keep Argo’s awards slowly, stubbornly piling up inside Hollywood: Benghazi and its seemingly interminable fallout. Argo opened one month and a day after that murderous attack. It was a month that reshaped what we knew about the realities of “diplomacy” when, in the presence of the President and [...]
I started to describe why Argo struck me as brilliant and almost unendurable, all at once, but that’s silly. Just drop everything and go. For such a full-throttle, gripping, movie-goer’s-movie, it has depths that linger — certainly at this house. I haven’t been writing for a while. Even before the September 11th attacks in Benghazi, [...]