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.

TOTAL RECALL (2012): I Give Good Wife

Total Recall (2012) – Directed by Len Wiseman – Starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, Bokeem Woodbine, John Cho, and Bill Nighy.

Are you new here – then be aware, SPOILERS LIE AHEAD. LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS, so if you don’t want the movie SPOILED, stop reading.

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Len Wiseman’s TOTAL RECALL is one of those films that just sort of exists.

It is not a bad movie, but it is not a great movie, either, and the result is a film that’s technically proficient without ever being spectacularly memorable. Wiseman directs a decent action sequence, but RECALL is a joyless chase film that’s mildly entertaining without being the least bit engaging.

I feel a bit bad bagging on a film like TOTAL RECALL because I paid my money, ate my popcorn, and for the most part enjoyed what I was watching. There’s a few times when the film lags, but I was largely impressed with how the film looked and moved. I just wanted more. I wanted to be drawn into this world and drawn into this story and these characters and I just wasn’t. The narrative is very robotic and predictable, and not predictable because this is a remake of the original TOTAL RECALL, but predictable because I’ve seen action movies before.

I wish Wiseman would get handed a great script because I think he could deliver a really great action film, but all of his previous action films are really just okay and nothing more. Technically, they’re fine, but emotionally, they’re flat.

One big problem with this movie is that, much like the original RECALL, the narrative wants the audience to be thinking, “Is what I’m watching real, or is it all a Rekall fantasy?” and just like the original RECALL the answer is obvious moments after Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell here, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the original) sits in the chair and gets his injection. In the original, Quaid gets a scratch on his neck that disappears once the injection goes wrong, and here Quaid gets a stamp put on his arm that disappears just as fast.

How fast? We see the stamp, the injection goes wrong, a bunch of officers show up with guns, Quaid puts his arms up behind his head and … no stamp.

Making it completely obvious right up front does take a bit away from the rest of the movie. It’s not enough to ruin it – I can still watch The Wizard of Oz and The Usual Suspects after learning at the end of those films that most of what we’ve just seen is a made up story inside the story – but it does make all of the “stop the action so we can debate the authenticity of this experience” moments a bit tedious. Paul Verhoeven had the decency to make his movie fun, but Wiseman has no desire to include humor. There’s literally only one moment in the whole film where I chuckled. It’s in the middle of one of the 857 big action sequences and Quaid and Melina (Jessica Biel) have just dropped into an elevator.

“Is this going down?” Quaid asks of the stunned riders.

One chuckle.

One.

I’m not going to spend much time discussing the differences between the Wiseman and Verhoeven films because the amount of fun generated in both films is the biggest difference. Let’s focus on the Wiseman film:

Doug Quaid lives in Australia (The Colony) and works in a factory in England (The United Federation of Britain). The rest of the world is a poisoned wasteland. How does Quaid get to work every day? Via the Fall, a big, honking gravity elevator that cuts through the planet. Doug has dreams about running away from cops with Jessica Biel. (Fittingly, these dreams are nightmares.) Doug is married to Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who tries to convince him that he should be happy. Even though their life together hasn’t turned out exactly as they dreamed, she’s still the most gorgeous woman on the planet and that has to count for something, right? (Note – that may not be exactly what she said, but that’s what I heard.) I’m not sure why it makes sense for Doug to visit Rekall and have fake memories implanted in his head when he’s having nightmares, except that these dreams leave him with the feeling that he should be doing something more with his life.

His work pal Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) plays the class card and wants to know if Doug thinks being a factory worker is something to be ashamed of, and Doug says No (though he means Yes), and then goes and visits Rekall, where John Cho implants the spy program in his body. Then everything goes “wrong,” meaning that Doug gets the exact experience he’s paying for, but he doesn’t have any fun because he decided to be a double spy instead of being a guy married to Kate Beckinsale.

Once things start to go bad, TOTALL RECALL simply becomes a lesser version of The Bourne Identity. Doug is on the run, trying to figure out what’s going on and who he really is, and he teams up with one woman as the government chases him. It’s not as skillfully made as Bourne is, and there’s a real herky-jerky quality to the film: everybody hurries up to do a bunch of shooting and running, then the narrative stops so Doug can find something that advances the plot, then everyone hurries back to the running and shooting.

After things go wrong at Rekall and Doug returns home, Lori decides it’s time to attack him and bring him in. So they fight. And fight. And run. And fight. And jump. And shoot. And fight. It’s a very good action sequence, first in their apartment and then through the rooftop streets of the Colony. (The Colony and UFB are elevated regions, so there’s multiple layers to the city’s layout.) I do feel it goes on a bit too long – in an action sequence you should never be wondering, “When is this going to end?” – but it’s good stuff.

None of the actors here have an abundance of personality and that hurts the film, too. Farrell, Beckinsale, and Biel are all good, but they don’t move me. I’m never on Doug’s side here. I’m not rooting for him. And not just because I’m rooting for Beckinsale, either, but because I just don’t care about Doug’s plight. One, I know that within the confines to the story his experience is a fake, and two, he’s a nice guy but not a compelling guy. Farrell has a sense of humor and I would have liked to see more of that put into the film.

And by “more,” I mean, “any.”

The best chemistry in the film comes between Beckinsale and Biel, and I wish we would have gotten more with the two of them going at it instead of Doug serving as the meddling third wheel. Farrell is a much better actor than Schwarzenegger, but he’s not a more fun actor to watch, and the script here doesn’t take advantage of Farrell’s talents. I think RECALL perhaps reveals why it will be so hard to reboot Scwarzenneger’s films – the man might not be a good actor, but he’s a huge personality. It’s tough to find actors who can shine that brightly

RECALL isn’t a very deep film. There’s a decent backdrop of politics, with the rich UFB government manipulating a war against the poor Colony workforce, but it’s all handled with the skill of a butcher using a chainsaw. There’s a good visual look to the cities, and plenty of well-executed action sequences (especially the magnetic car chase). All the actors do what they can with the roles they’ve been given, but the roles are all rather simple.

TOTAL RECALL can never escape that sense that it’s just a poor copy of other films and stories.

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And if you like good sci-fi action stories with strong female leads, please check out my 2011 novel,HARPSICHORD AND THE WORMHOLE WITCHES.

Harpsichord & the Wormhole Witches. The First Novel of the Deep. Now Available at Amazon.com in Paperback. From Atomic Anxiety Press.

JOHN CARTER: Of Mars

John Carter (2012) – Directed by Andrew Stanton – Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Daryl Sabara, Willem Dafoe, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston, Thomas Haden Church, David Schwimmer, Jon Favreau, and Art Malik.

It will be years before we have a true assessment of JOHN CARTER. Right now, in the final throes of its theatrical run, the film is caught between the media doomsayers who were quick to decry Disney’s $250 million production an epic bomb and a branch of sci-fi fandom who’ve rushed to counter the media’s negative over-reaction with an equally strong positive push, heralding JOHN CARTER as some kind of all-time epic that people are missing because Disney’s marketing arm created a bad marketing campaign and delivered limp trailers.

I’m not here to think for anyone when it comes to their enjoyment of this movie. The whole world is free to love JOHN CARTER or hate JOHN CARTER. I am here simply to tell you what I think of the film, which is this:

I’m rather confounded about the reaction of both camps: JOHN CARTER is certainly a disappointment in terms of its American box office performance, but when one takes the international haul into account the film has already made back its $250 million budget. You can be a disappointment with that kind of net (studios make films to make lots of money, not barely make back their production costs), but you really can’t ask, as Entertainment Weekly did, “How big of a box office bomb is JOHN CARTER?” unless you’ve either got some kind of ax to grind or are committed to a false narrative.

For those who have insisted to me that this film is a wondrous cinematic achievement, I’m at a loss, as well. JOHN CARTER is a good film that at times is a very good film but at others is a beautiful looking mess. Director Andrew Stanton is helming a live action movie for the first time and while he gets all the shots he needs, his storytelling abilities that served him so well in WALL-E and Finding Nemo have abandoned him here. (Stanton also reportedly had much to do with the marketing campaign, so if you’re inclined to praise his film you should be willing to dog his marketing sensibilities.)

Watching JOHN CARTER is a bit like listening to a band of talented musicians play a familiar song for the first time together – it’s a little rough at the start but once they feel each other out, it comes together for a strong finish. I have to admit, though, that as enjoyable as the John Carter/Deja Thoris (Taylor Kitsch/Lynn Collins) relationship is to watch, as good as the action sequences are, as much humor as there is in the film, and as truly wondrous a creation as Woola is, JOHN CARTER is too often akin to the film’s white apes: a large, lumbering, loud beast without a proper sense of refinement.

In both WALL-E and Finding Nemo, Stanton kept his story focused on a one-on-one relationship and let the adventure build around that relationship and let his plot push forward because of that relationship. Such is not the case in JOHN CARTER. Stanton attempts no less than 4 of these one-on-one partnerships: John and Tars Tarkas (Willen Dafoe), John and Sola (Samantha Morton), John and Woola, and John and Deja. This is a heck of a lot of one-on-one bonding for a guy who insists throughout the over-long opening sequence that he just wants to be left alone.

JOHN CARTER’s biggest failure is that it spends too much time with the pre-Mars sequence. Admittedly, this time spent is rewarded at the end of the film, as CARTER uses John’s death in 1881 as a highly effective framing device, but as a result of spending so much time in the present, three of the relationships in the center of the film (with Tars Tarkas, Sola, and Woola) suffer from under-development.

The movie opens in 1881. Edgar “Ned” Rice Burroughs (Daryl Sabara) is called to his Uncle John’s funeral at his estate in Richmond. John Carter was a very rich man and died suddenly and Edgar gets everything and there’s a journal and we flash back to John’s adventures in the west looking for gold and dear lord would you please get to freaking Mars already!

It goes on and on and on, and it’s not bad but it’s not going anywhere, either. We get a funny bit when John has been captured by Colonel Powell (Bryan Cranston) and John continually tries to escape, but it doesn’t go anywhere significant. I get that it’s establishing that John is a man who’s not interested in fighting anymore, which makes his decision to help Deja a bigger deal, but really, the only part of John’s pre-Mars life that we absolutely need to see is covered during flashbacks on Barsoom when we see his dead wife and child. Everything else is just eating up time I’d rather Stanton had spent on Mars, establishing and building relationship with Tars Tarkas, Sola, and Woola.

Instead, all three of these relationships are rushed and under-developed. The movie provides little evidence of Tars Tarkas and John bonding. We’re just starting to get to know them when the armies of Helium and Zodanga show up and John goes bounding off to save/impress Deja, which is almost immediately followed by Tars helping John, Sola, and Deja escape out the back of his tent to save them from Tars Hajus (Thomas Haden Church). The whole sequence with the Tharks feels like a series of greatest hits instead of a developed story; it’s like we’re getting all the emotional beats without getting any of the emotional foundation that makes those emotional beats resonate.

For instance, there’s no proper build-up of Sola and John bonding, and no proper introduction of Woola.

It’s a shame because Woola is simply awesome. A kind of big Martian dog, Woola is super fast and super loyal to John but he just appears out of nowhere and he’s continually used as an afterthought or side bit instead of having a real relationship develop.

Once John, Sola, Deja, and Woola hit the road, however, things start to come together, driven by the Therns. The Therns are bald guys in robes who can change shape and manipulate life on Mars. They’ve christened Sab Than (Dominic West) as the man to lead Barsoom into a new era, and Sab Than is determined to marry Deja in order to unite Barsoom’s two main cities. The Thern leader Matai Shang (Mark Strong) is always around Sab, and with Sab we finally get a villain in the film that gives John’s stories – his quest to get home and his desire for Deja – some real weight to it.

John saves the day in a big fight scene that breaks up Sab and Deja’s wedding, but Shang gets the last word as he banishes John back to Earth after John has foolishly discarded his special interplanetary teleportation medallion. John’s exile leads to the best part of the film, as we see, in flashback, John’s 10-year search for another medallion on Earth, which leads to him using his faked death to get a Thern to show up so he can kill him and steal the Thern’s medallion in order to go back to Barsoom.

JOHN CARTER keeps getting better and that’s a commendable accomplishment, but the pacing and emphasis in the first half really cripples the film for me. The acting here is solid but completely interchangeable; Kitsch, Collins, Strong, West, and James Purefoy are all good but with the exception of Collins you could pull them out and drop any other actor in their range into this role and it wouldn’t change anything. That’s not to say they aren’t good, but I didn’t find any of them to be all that memorable.

What is evident throughout the film, however, is that every single frame of JOHN CARTER feels lovingly put together by Stanton and the actors, and that makes me root for the film. Kitsch is very limited as an actor, but you can see him giving everything in his performance and when Collins speaks of Barsoom I feel like she’s talking about a very real place. I want JOHN CARTER to be a magnificent and epic achievement, but it just never advances to that level. For all of the problems in the first half, it does become a highly enjoyable film in its final half, even if it does cram too much stuff into too small a space. Where the first half of the film takes forever to get going, the back half needs a few more narrative pauses. Maybe there’s a 3 or 4 hour cut of this film that we’ll get to see someday that will give everything its proper time and space and the relationships between John and the various Tharks will develop a bit more organically.

As I mentioned, I’m not here to question your love of JOHN CARTER, but I wonder if some of the fierce defense of this film comes from the love most of us have for Burroughs’ Barsoom novels. Those of us who like comic books and sci-fi and fantasy have seen our loves rule the box office over the last decade and it stings a bit to see JOHN CARTER called out for being derivative of other films when we know those stories are derivative of Burroughs’ fiction. For me, JOHN CARTER is an uneven film that becomes enjoyable only after John, Deja, Sola, and Woola hit the road together and after Shang kidnaps John and the deep back story of the Therns is revealed. From then on, JOHN CARTER is a really good movie about a guy coming into his own and finding a reason to live after the death of his wife. “No longer John Carter of Earth,” he tells us in narration, “but John Carter of Mars.”

Good ending. Unfortunately, it just takes too darn long to get there for me and while I want to love it, I can’t do more than like it.