ARGO: This is the Best Bad Idea We’ve Got

Argo (2012) – Directed by Ben Affleck – Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Victor Garber, Clea DuVall, Kyle Chandler, Tate Donovan, Michael Parks, Richard Kind, Titus Welliver, Rory Cochrane, Bob Gunton, Zeljko Ivanek, Philip Baker Hall, and Adrienne Barbeau.

Why is it ARGO gets Oscar talk yet The Avengers doesn’t?

I’m being purposely obtuse, of course. I know darn well why Avengers doesn’t get any Oscar talk, but I raise the issue to once again bash on awards shows. The Oscars is supposed to represent the best in cinema, is it not? Both ARGO and Avengers are incredibly well made movies with incredibly smart scripts, fantastic directing, great acting … yet ARGO will get Oscar buzz and Avengers will have to settle for being the third highest grossing movie of all time. It reasons like this why I don’t bother with the Oscars, as they are more politically and PR-driven than an actual award of filmmaking merit.

All of that is prelude to my reaction to ARGO, a darn good movie from the engaging directing hands of Ben Affleck. I was prepared for ARGO to be a solid drama, but I was not prepared for it to be funny.

ARGO is a very funny movie, however, chiefly through the first half of the movie before settling in for a tense, suspense-filled second half. It’s a smart decision, as it’s the first half of the movie where ARGO stands out from other political thrillers. Set during the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, ARGO tells the based-on-true-life tale of how CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) extracted six American diplomats from the Canadian Embassy in Tehran. Mendez’s plan to get them out is to create cover identities for the diplomats as a film crew for an in-production science fiction film.

There are a myriads of problems with this plan, not the least of which is that it depends on putting a fake science fiction film into production in order to fool the Iranian security forces who are scouring Iran to take any stray Americans hostage. The film gets its biggest laughs from the discomfort this plan raises in the Washington bureaucrats and the open-minded embrace from Mendez’s two Hollywood partners, make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin). Goodman and Arkin are fantastic together, with Chambers’ enthusiasm balanced perfectly by Siegel’s calmer demeanor.

The Washington/Hollywood split shows an interesting approach to casting in ARGO. The Washington scenes are quick-hitting, with plenty of known actors playing bureaucrats. Kyle Chandler, Titus Welliver, Bob Gunton, and Philip Baker Hall appear in a scene or two or three to question Mendez’s plan. None of these actors are playing characters as much as they are united in a kind of Gestalt of Dissent. Their job is to act incredulous, doubt Mendez’s plan, and make the CIA look smarter. In Hollywood, Chambers and Siegel become actual characters, allowing Goodman and Arkin to develop a wonderful chemistry in their shared effort to assist Mendez.

Affleck does a wonderful job contrasting the deadly seriousness of the hostages with the absurdity of creating the fake movie. While I’m sure it would have looked incredibly bad if the news got out that the CIA was in Hollywood getting Adrienne Barbeau to sign on for a movie they didn’t intend to make, it’s great fun for us and a smart creative decision to balance off the heaviness of the situation in Iran. Or worse, that they were putting on an elaborate reading of the movie for the press, with actors in full costume, just to try and get a notice in Variety in order to fool the Iranians. It’s a bit of weird world that we live in, of course, that sees us paying money to eat popcorn to see a story that exists because hostages were taken, but this is part of the way we cope with the hardships endured by previous generations.

Chambers and Siegel display a very cinematic attitude towards the plan, which is to say, that despite the gravity of the situation half a world away, they seem to enjoy playing junior spies. Chambers has a quip for every situation, and Siegel has a laid back, dry sense of humor. Both of these approaches allow Affleck to play Mendez as a rather boring dude. He’s serious about his work (which he needs to be), and Affleck sees no reason to give Mendez a bunch of over-inflated histrionics to make himself stand out. It’s a very understated performance, which allows his few fireworks moments to have a greater impact.

As I mentioned, it’s this first half of the film where ARGO stands out from other political thrillers. The back half is solidly put together and delivers a fair amount of tension, but it’s nothing that you can’t find in a whole host of other movies. Once Mendez hits Iran, ARGO is simply an extraction movie. To go back to the Avengers comparison, that script is much more complicated than this script, yet both of them do exactly what their respective movies need. The back-half of ARGO doesn’t need to be complicated because we’re already invested in the story. Really, the big star of the back half of the film isn’t Mendez or the hostages, but Bryan Cranston’s Jack O’Donnell.

O’Donnell is Mendez’s supervisor and at the start of the film he brings Mendez into a meeting wit the State Department, but encourages him to not get involved. State wants to run this situation, and O’Donnell is happy to let them do it. Mendez can’t help picking apart all of the various ideas that State has come up with to get a hostage out, as they’re the kind of ideas that sound good from a distance but would fall apart up close. (Like wanting to give the six hostages bikes so they could peddle for a border that is, as Mendez reminds them, several hundred miles away.) When Mendez comes up with his plan, State is hesitant to even listen, let alone sign on, but Mendez and O’Donnell’s sales pitch leads to two of the film’s best lines.

Both are from O’Donnell. On the way in to see Vice President Mondale (Hall) and another diplomat (really, the names of the diplomats and politicians are completely unimportant; as I said earlier, they work together to provide the Gestalt of Dissent), O’Donnell tells Mendez that talking to these two is going to be like “the Muppets talking to Statler and Waldorf.” Once inside the meeting, Mondale is skeptical and openly wonders if they don’t have better ideas, to which O’Donnell replies, “This is the best bad idea we’ve got.”

It’s O’Donnell that has the best dramatic scenes in the back half, too. After telling Mendez that the White House has called off the plan, Mendez stews on it (he takes a bottle of alcohol from the Canadian embassy but barely touches it), and then decides he’s going ahead with the plan anyways, White House be damned. This causes all sorts of problems for O’Donnell because Mendez’s plan needs his help. Specifically, O’Donnell needs to get the seven plane tickets out of Tehran confirmed before Mendez gets to the airport, or they’ll be all dressed up with nowhere to go. Cranston is fantastic running around Washington getting these tickets verified (he needs Presidential approval) and there’s a good bit of tension in Tehran with Mendez and the hostages getting through security. There are a couple beats that come off as trumped up, such as the tickets not being approved when Mendez checks in, but then appearing 30 seconds later, or Siegel and Chambers getting back to their office just as the Iranian security guard was pulling the phone away from his ear, but they don’t hurt the film in a significant away.

Indeed, even though I knew everyone was getting out, Affleck and his team do an amazing job creating as much tension as they do about what is essentially seven people getting on a plane. Affleck uses a lot of close-ups and a lot of contrasting frantic Iranians with nervous Americans, but it works really well.

Since I don’t watch awards shows, I don’t have any way of handicapping ARGO’s chances for getting nominations, but this is a very good movie. It is a quiet movie, though, that seems destined to be lost between the summer’s noise and the winter’s emotion. The only kick I get out of awards is that I realize that if people I like getting nominated or even win, that means there’s a greater chance I get to see more of them. There’s been a critical response around ARGO that Ben Affleck has arrived as a director. We see that Warner Brothers has taken notice, as Affleck was rumored to be in consideration for the Justice League movie. Both of these are good things for me because I like Affleck as a director. I see ARGO much less as a sign that he’s arrived, and rather as a sign that he’s established himself as a director who makes movies I want to see, as much for the stories he chooses to film as the way in which he assembles them.

Whatever film he directs next will be a film I’m already lined up to see.

TWIN PEAKS, Episode 7: Here Comes Mom with Milk and Cookies

Episode 7, aka “The Last Evening” – Season 1, Episode 7, Story 8 – Written by Mark Frost – Original Broadcast: May 23, 1990 – Agent Cooper closes the net on Jacques Renault. Jacques spills all kinds of beans. Leo burns down the Mill. Audrey finds out her dad owns One Eyed Jacks. Leland kills Jacques. Agent Cooper gets shot.

Hey, look, James and Donna do something useful!

Well, sort of. At Jacoby’s office, Donna discovers his fake coconut, and inside the coconut is the other half of Laura’s love pendant that she gave to James, as well as the missing audio tape from Laura’s secret stash. It’s not a huge revelation since we heard Jacoby listening to it earlier in the season but it’s important for James to hear that Laura thinks he’s sweet and dumb, and it establishes the presence and danger of the “mystery man” that Laura admits could kill her. It also brings to a conclusion (or a semi-conclusion, at least) the only really tedious plot in TWIN PEAKS: James and Donna’s ill-conceived “we knew Laura better than anyone” routine.

For James and Donna to truly be effective characters in an effective plot, I think they needed to be confronted with the very worst of Laura and they just never come face-to-face with this reality. Even after listening to the tape, they’re still only touching the edges of Laura’s wickedness. What do they learn that’s actually new? That Laura thought James was sweet but dumb? James is the guy who told his uncle Ed that Laura was “the one” a few short hours before making out with Donna in the woods and like a day or two before going over to Donna’s house for dinner with her folks. Did they learn that Laura was in to rough sex? Okay, that’s probably new but doesn’t exactly register as earth shattering news. Did they learn that Laura thought someone had maybe tried to kill her? Well, I mean, she’s dead, so no kidding. We can give them credit for finding the other half of Laura and James’ heart necklace, but that doesn’t force them to confront Laura’s darker nature.

For James and Donna’s subplot to have been worth it, I think we needed to see them discover something like Laura’s advertisement in Flesh World, or uncover that it was Laura who wanted Bobby to sell drugs, or that she was working at One Eyed Jacks. They needed to be confronted with the very worst of Laura, and then have to ask themselves whether they wanted to protect Laura’s memory or find her killer.

Watching the James and Donna relationship/investigation plot sputter like it has makes me wonder if Lynch and Frost had intended these characters to play a larger role in the show, but then changed their minds mid-stream when they realized there were other secondary characters (Audrey, Shelly, Dr. Jacoby) who emerged as more interesting options in the writing and filming stages of production.

By the end of this final episode of Season 1, Donna has been pushed to the side and James is confronted by an angry Cooper and a disappointed Harry. Bobby pretends to be Leo and phones the police station to tell them James has drugs in the tank of his bike. James arrives at the station to hand over Laura’s cassette tape and Cooper tells him in plain terms that he’s been too easy on James and he’s going to start expecting more of the young man. As he’s saying this, Harry comes in with the planted cocaine, and James looks very much the pretend tough guy he is; for me, this scene has the feel of an abrupt turn, as if the writers decided they needed to do something different with James and decided it was going to start right now.

I always remember James and Donna as being more integral to this show than they actually are, and I think they’re the one real misstep in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s plan for season one. They’re borderline parodies, akin to something like a romance comic come to life, and for all of their self-induced pathos, they really add very little to the show.

Episode 7 marks the end of the first season of TWIN PEAKS and David Lynch and Mark Frost do their best to let some plot threads come to a conclusion, while launching others in their place.

The center of the episode is the capture of Jacques Renault (played by Walter Olkewicz, who was on Wizards and Warriors, a show I remember fondly, even though I don’t remember much of it – I just remember liking it when I was a kid). As last episode ended, Cooper was playing blackjack and when the dealers switched off, Jacques became Cooper’s dealer. Here, Cooper buys the French-Canadian a drink and tells him that he’s the money man behind Leo’s operation. Jacques falls for it and agrees to mule something over the border for Cooper. When he gets to the American side to make the drop, Harry and his cops arrest him. Jacques gets one of the officers’ guns, and Andy shoots him in the shoulder, saving Harry’s life.

At the hospital, Cooper and Harry interrogate Jacques and he admits that he, Leo, Ronnette, and Laura were at the cabin and that Leo let the bird out of its cage when Laura was tied up. The bird, according to Jacques, had an unnatural love thing for Laura. Lest the mystery end right here, Jacques can’t tell the cops anything about the train car because he was knocked unconscious and awoke only after they were gone. Nor can he tell them anything of the mystery man.

Unfortunately, it’s the end of the line for Jacques because Leland Palmer finally does something other than cry and dance.

He sneaks into the hospital and suffocates Jacques to death, thinking he’s killing his daughter’s killer.

It’s nice to see Leland grow and pair and take some action, and action is the name of the game in Episode 7. Elsewhere, the whole “burn the Mill down” plot actually comes to a head as Leo carries out Ben Horne’s plan – and throws in a bonus for himself by tying up Shelly in the Mill in the hopes she gets killed in the process. It’s not a very smart plan, but then, Leo isn’t a very smart guy.

The most important character in this episode in many regards is Hank. Back from prison and re-establishing his place in town, Hank spends his days playing nice with Norma and his off-work time beating up Leo and scheming with Josie. We learn that Hank went to jail for killing Josie’s husband on her orders, and now he’s banking $90,000 for going to jail and not ratting her out. He lets her know that they’re partners for life, going so far as to form a blood pact with her.

Marriage is all over Episode 7, as well. Josie had her husband killed. Ben Horne cares so little for marriage his wife is barely a character in the show. Catherine is in so much trouble she asks Pete for help, and he’s only too happy to give it. Hank pretends to be one thing to Norma and an opposite thing in reality. Leo ties Shelly up so he can burn her alive.

Clearly, the message of TWIN PEAKS is that marriage is something sacred that we should all rush into because it promises nothing but happiness.

With some of these plots coming to an end – or at least some kind of resolution – new mysteries are laid out, including the mystery man that Laura mentions, the masked attacker that puts Jacoby in the hospital, and the identity of the person who shoots Cooper.

Oh, yeah, Cooper gets shot. Did I mention that?

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Audrey Horne all dolled up at One Eyed Jacks. It’s her first night on the job and she’s stuck waiting in a bedroom to spend some time with the club’s owner, because Blackie tells her the owner likes to spend time with all the new girls. So she waits and waits and waits, even though she’s seen Cooper out in the casino on a security camera, and as the episode nears it’s conclusion, the owner enters her room …

And it’s her dad.

But we’ll have to wait until next season for that conflict to come to a head.

All told, Episode 7 delivers plenty of action, plenty of folks getting shot (Jacques, Leo, Cooper), and plenty of new, or altered, mysteries. It’s a fitting end to a fantastic first season.

Previous TWIN PEAKS reactions: Pilot. Episode 1. Episode 2. Episode 3. Episode 4. Episode 5. Episode 6.

MONEYBALL: I Want It to Mean Something

Moneyball (2011) – Directed by Bennett Miller – Starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kerris Dorsey, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Robin Wright, and Spike Jonze.

I understand that Brad Pitt has 94 kids and is married to Angelina Jolie, who people keep insisting is the hottest woman ever despite my objections, so I can understand him not wanting to leave the house and spend weeks or months shooting movies. I mean, acting is what he does, but the guy must have enough money squirreled away so that none of his descendants would have to work for at least a couple generations. If he woke up one morning and decided to pull a Brando, buy an island, get humongously fat, and only return to TV to make out with Larry King’s corpse, I would totally respect that.

But I’m glad he hasn’t.

There are still people out there who like to cling to the notion that our movie stars aren’t good actors. Perhaps we can blame this on the 1990s, when the Schwarzeneggers and Stallones took over the box office, but I think we’re living in a pretty fantastic age of acting stars. Or star actors. Many of our biggest stars are also damn fine actors, and Brad Pitt is one of them.

All of this is to say that he’s pretty fantastic in MONEYBALL, Bennett Miller’s 2011 film based on Michael Lewis’ 2003 book about baseball and economics. Pitt plays Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s General Manager (for those not versed in baseball, the GM is the man responsible for putting the team together) who’s trying a new method of assembling his team. The film opens at the end of the 2001 season, with the A’s being defeated in the playoffs by the New York Yankees. It’s a story of the Little Engine That Almost Could, as the A’s were at the low end of baseball’s economic ladder and the Yankees were at the very top. Losing is bad enough, but the A’s became symbolic of the systematic flaw (or “flaw,” if you’re so inclined) in baseball’s economic model – rich teams prosper at the expense of poor teams. The A’s lose three of their biggest stars that off-season to big market clubs: Jason Giambi signs with the Yankees, Johnny Damon signs with the Red Sox, and Jason Isringhausen moves on to the St. Louis Cardinals.

It’s a bit of bad luck that all three players were entering the final year of their contracts, but that’s baseball. With their key components moving on, the A’s are stuck with the classic quandary of what to do to replace them, and the solution that Beane and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill – playing a character based on Paul DePodesta) come up with is the golden idea that turned baseball on its head: Moneyball.

The idea behind Moneyball was to find players undervalued by the market, allowing Oakland to sign them on the (relative) cheap. They began to value players who got on base and who threw strikes. It was a non-traditional approach to our most traditional sport, and Beane’s idea to rely on the numbers-driven, Yale-educated economist caused all sorts of baseball traditionalists to have their brains melted.

The worst of the baseball traditionalists are the sort of folks who want everything to be like it was in 1935 – you know, whites on top, blacks excluded, everyone else a non-issue. They cling so desperately to their precious notion of what the game “should be” that they turn a blind eye to progress, and a whitewash the game’s early days in such a hazy nostalgic glow that they forget many of these early stars were awful, horrible, racist assh*les. The traditionalists are often completely entrenched in the past, holding up baseball like some grand symbol of Americana that they refuse to acknowledge that the world is changing around them, and that, for the good of the sport, they occasionally need to change with it. Traditionalist mouthpieces have fought everything from the racial integration of the game in the 1940s, the elimination of the reserve clause, the advent of free agency, the creation of the Designated Hitter in the 1970s, the addition of the Wild Card in the 1990s … everything. So Beane’s idea to be the first GM to jump on the Sabremetric wave ruffled all the fundamentalist feathers.

MONEYBALL the movie presents Beane as a man at his wit’s end, angered at the economic state of the game and desperate to try something new. He visits the Cleveland Indians’ offices to try and work a deal and he’s intrigued by the chubby, quiet guy in the back of the room, so on his way out he stops by the guy’s desk and plugs him for information. Peter Brand is a numbers guy, focusing on a player’s .OBP, or On Base Percentage, which quantifies the number of times a player gets on base versus his plate appearances. (Basically, it’s Hits + Walks + Hit By Pitch over At Bats + Walks + Hit By Pitch + Sacrifice Flies.) Beane is taken with Brand’s approach because it’s different and it can save him money.

While Beane is the center of the film, it’s really Brand’s ideas that propel the plot forward. Beane is cast as the guy sitting between the newfangled ideas and the traditional ways of doing things. Because he’s the boss, Beane takes all the heat – from his owner, from his scouts, from the public, and from the baseball cognoscenti. What’s striking is that Beane has to be taught this new system by Brand, which means he suffers from all kinds of doubt when the A’s start the season off rather terribly.

Which leads us to the villain of the piece – the A’s manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Beane puts the team together but Howe is the guy that puts the team on the field, and he refuses to put the team on the field that Beane and Brand wants. At the center of contention is Scott Hatteberg, a catcher with a shot elbow that Beane signs to play first base.

No one but Beane and Brand think this is a good idea, including Hatteberg. On the surface, it’s a ludicrous idea to bring in Hatteberg to replace Jason Giambi, but Beane/Brand aren’t trying to replace Giambi with one guy but three. The scouts throw a fit at this and Beane pushes right back, totally emboldened by this idea.

There’s a subplot here, too, on how Beane was the wet dream of this traditional thinking back in the day. When Beane was a high school player he was a “five tool” player, meaning he could do anything and everything scouts look for in a player. Beane’s career fizzled out and the head scout tries to play this as the reason Beane is making this shift. It’s a stretch because baseball is just too random, but it makes a nice point of contention.

Pitt is wonderful as a guy trying to find something to believe in, but while he’s great with the baseball folks, he’s even better with his daughter (Kerris Dorsey). Beane’s divorced and shares custody with his wife (Robin Wright) and her new husband (Spike Jonze), but the wife and new husband are almost insignificant, except to give us another scene to show Beane uncomfortable. The scenes with Beane and his daughter are just awesome, though. Pitt is great with Dorsey, encouraging her interest in music and trying to protect her from the realities of his job. Dorsey is equally fantastic with Pitt; it’s always nice to see smart kids in movies, and this is one of them. She knows more about the precarious nature of her dad’s situation than he wants to let on.

With the A’s spiraling and Howe refusing to buy into Beane’s system, Beane hits his lowest point – is he all in or not?

Well, as you can imagine, he’s all in, or else we wouldn’t have a movie.

Beane trades away some pieces that have been preventing his ideal line-up to take the field, and thus Howe is forced to start playing Beane and Brand’s guys. The results are, literally, historic. The A’s start winning, eventually running off a 20-game winning streak. It’s important there’s this win streak, because the cruelty of the season sees the A’s bowing out of the playoffs, yet again, robbing us of that traditional sports movie ending.

And that’s what makes MONEYBALL such an interesting watch – it’s a baseball movie and so we have to have some of the traditional ticks in here, but it’s really a movie about the intersection of belief and science; it’s a movie about the old way of doing things versus a new way of doing things and just how scared people are at trying something radically different. Beane becomes a True Believer in this new system; as he tells Brand after the A’s fall to the Twins in the playoffs, “I want it to mean something.” He also can’t completely let go of the past, though, remarking at one point about the romantic nature of baseball.

In one of my favorite scenes of the movie, Beane is brought to Boston to talk to John Henry, the new owner of the Red Sox, about becoming the Red Sox new GM. The Sox are a big market club, but John Henry is intrigued about Beane’s methods enough to want to make him the highest paid GM in history to run his club. Henry is this wonderful combination of ultimate nerd and ultimate rebel, wanting to stick it to this entrenched system on principle as much as anything else.

Beane stays in Oakland by some mix of romanticism and stubbornness and desire to stay close to his daughter, and two years after he turns Henry down, the Red Sox win the World Series with his and Brand’s methods. The movie’s credits roll with Beane’s daughter singing a song, and cutely/cruelly singing, “You’re a loser, dad. You’re a loser, dad.”

MONEYBALL is a very good movie, and Pitt, Hill, and Dorsey are all great. I don’t think Hoffman has ever done less to get a paycheck, as basically all he has to do is look grumpy, fold his arms, and scowl, but he does it well. It’s one of the more unique baseball movies, because it’s as much an economic movie, as much a changing-of-the-guard movie, as it is a baseball flick. The film certainly resonates with those of us who think we need new ways of doing old things because the old ways have led us down a road we’d rather not be traveling. Bennett Miller does a really good job putting this story together, which is impressive considering Pitt seems to spend about 1/3 of the movie sitting in his truck. I won’t go so far as to say this is the best baseball movie I’ve ever seen, but it is a highly watchable, surprisingly funny movie, and you certainly do not need to be a baseball fan to enjoy it.