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.

GHOSTS OF MARS: Tide’s Up. Time to Stay Alive.

Ghosts of Mars (2001) – Directed by John Carpenter – Starring Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea DuVall, and Joanna Cassidy.

Look, I have a lot of love for John Carpenter. I think his passion for film is every bit as strong as any other American cinematic auteur, and there’s so much passion in the way he makes movies that I can overlook a lot of the lack of refinement.

GHOSTS OF MARS puts that to the test.

This is a movie that was released in 2001 – and not because it was found in a vault with leftover films from the 1970s. But that’s what it looks like, with special effects that look decidedly old school. Maybe that was the intent or maybe that’s all they had in the budget, but for the first time in his career, Carpenter’s work feels a bit too anachronistic to overcome.

If the story, the dialogue, and the acting were exceptional, of course, I could get past the weak model work, but they’re all lacking, and for all of GHOSTS looking like a movie 20 years older than it actually is, it’s that failure of story, of dialogue, and of acting that sinks this film.

The plot is simple enough – Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) is a member of a police unit assigned to pick up prisoner Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). The team includes leader Helena Braddock (Pam Grier), new addition Nathan Jericho (Jason Statham), and two younger officers: Kincaid and Descanso (Clea Duvall and Liam White). They get into a train to head on out to the mining town prison where Williams is being held. When they arrive, the town is deserted except for a few deranged miners and some prisoners. It turns out the miners have been infected with a red cloud of badness full of disembodied spirits.

Williams’ crew tricks Jericho into letting them inside the prison, where they turn on the cops to let Williams out, except that Ballard locks them all up, which leads to Williams and Ballard cutting a deal. Then the cops and robbers team up to kill the possessed miners, who are more than happy to try and kill them back.

If you just talk it out, the story seems perfectly suitable, but for some reason Carpenter has decided to clunk up his film with all manner of flashbacks. The movie opens at the end of this mining colony adventure, as Ballard is the only person on the returning train. She’s called in for questioning and then tells us the inquisition panel her story. Which is fine, except that when we get into the story, the people inside it give us more flashbacks and it just gets too repetitive. It bogs the film down. Case in point – when the cops arrive at the mining colony, the team splits up. We stick with Ballard and Jericho and then later when they reconnect with Descanso, he relates what happened to him and we see it through a flashback.

Why? What’s wrong with following along with two subplots at the same time? Why get all of one, and then get all of the other one, when the two events were happening concurrently?

The characters are a problem, too, a condition that’s not helped by the acting. Statham is a decent enough actor, but Jericho is a horrid character, more interested in trying to get laid than anything else, even in the middle of a mission. Ice Cube is fine playing the sneering bad ass, but we’re told that Williams is this ultimate bad ass and then we never see it. Is Carpenter engaging in a critique of the Age of Hyperbole that we’re living in, or is it just a stupidly conceived character?

It’s the latter, I’m guessing.

The biggest problem is Henstridge’s Ballard, however. Cube at least has some real charisma to help him power through this role and overcome the script’s deficiencies, but Henstridge is a weak actress playing a weak character. That Ballard says stupid things is on Carpenter; that Henstridge delivers most of her lines as if she memorized them 10 minutes before the performance is on her. It’s a completely wooden performance in a film that’s desperately crying out for a charismatic lead. Maybe it wouldn’t have ultimately made a huge difference in the film, but if Cube and Henstridge switched roles, I think we would’ve seen an improvement.

There’s just so little chemistry anywhere in GHOSTS OF MARS that it makes for a hard watch. Now, there’s plenty of killing and action, so if you like post-apocalyptic movies, GHOSTS OF MARS will probably do the trick as a way to spend 90 minutes of your life and not feel totally cheated. (Well, it will probably do half the trick, but you get the meaning.) It’s not a horrible movie, but it’s certainly not a good one. Carpenter didn’t deserve to disappear for an entire decade (coming back with 2011′s The Ward) but he needs stronger material than GHOSTS to allow his strengths as a director to really come through.

THE FACULTY: Aliens are Taking Over the World. Weigh It.

The Faculty (1998) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez – Starring Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Chris McDonald, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Usher Raymond, Jon Stewart, Daniel Von Bargen, and Elijah Wood.

I love THE FACULTY. It’s one of those under-the-radar movies that I champion whenever I get a chance. Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Robert Rodriguez, THE FACULTY is a really good, really smart high school horror film that deftly plugs into teenage anxiety to create characters that are built on clearly recognizable types, but then quickly outstrip them.

While not as clever a script as SCREAM, THE FACULTY is does a far better job with allowing its characters to become more complex as the film progresses. High schools are wonderfully awful places where kids try to figure out where they fit in the grand scheme and teachers try to successfully tread water until retirement hits; students in high school are amazingly easy to type based on surface appearances and Williamson starts with what everyone can see to begin his character examinations.

Williamson’s script does two things to complicate his characters: reveal hidden truths and let new talents emerge. For characters like Stan (Shawn Hatosy), the captain of the football team, Williamson reveals that Stan is tired of everyone kissing his ass. He tells Stokely (Clea DeVall), the grungy, solitary “lesbian,” that his tipping point came the previous year when his ‘D’ on an exam was changed to an ‘A’ by the teacher because he had a good year. This torques Stan off: “I earned that D,” he insists. “That was my D.” Stokely also gets the reveal treatment: first by telling Marybeth (Laura Harris), the cutesy new girl, that she’s not actually a lesbian. She just tells people that because it keeps people away. Later on, in response to Stan opening up to her, she opens up to him, telling him he was a great football player. Stan is both as surprised that Stokes follows football as he is pleased that she knew about him.

On the other side, we have characters birthing new talents as the film progresses and the alien takeover threat becomes more pronounced. Zeke (Josh Hartnett), the bad boy repeating his senior year, develops a natural leadership ability. When the kids are huddled in his garage-based laboratory, it’s Zeke who insists they all do a shot of his caffeine-based drug that he peddles at school. And later, when the kids have trapped Principal Drake (Bebe Neuwirth) in the gym and they’re hesitating to either shoot her or douse her with the caffeine, it’s Zeke who steps in, takes the gun, and sends a bullet through her forehead. Casey (Elijah Wood), the high school’s whipping boy, is allowed to leave his shell, becoming an important member of the group. He’s not the biggest brain, but he has the wits to see how things connect, and in the biggest turn, he becomes something of an action star when he’s the Last Kid Standing and needs to take down the alien queen all by his lonesome.

The one character who doesn’t really change all that much is Delilah (the always stunning Jordana Brewster), the snotty It Girl who dates Stan simply because he’s the quarterback of the football team and she’s the hottest girl in school. Obsessed with the school’s social hierarchy, she dumps Stan when he quits the team. We get a bit of a reveal in that she’s the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, but she’s not EIC so she can investigate hard hitting issues; she’s the EIC because she can use the paper to settle personal scores and embarrass people at the school. When she and Casey stumble onto the secret that one of the faculty is dead and being stored in the faculty room closet, she shows up at school the next day wearing glasses so she’s not as noticeable … as if that ever works anywhere except Metropolis. At the beginning of the film she dumps Stan because he’s no longer the top guy on the school’s social ladder and at the end of the film she’s dating Casey because he’s now the top guy, as the national media descends on the school to hear Casey’s story.

THE FACULTY brilliantly taps into realistic high school fears of not being cool and not being believed (not aliens). All of the kids are aware of the power of their coolness, or lack there-of, and keenly aware of their place in the social structure of the high school. In that regard, THE FACULTY has as much in common with The Breakfast Club as it does Scream, though like Scream, THE FACULTY is aware of the “rules” of the story. Stokely is a big sci-fi fan and clues the group in on the way these stories are supposed to work.

While the kids work together, they’re not all “all for one and one for all,” and their shifting importance to the group keeps the tension running high. The actual threat is a lot of adults standing around looking menacing, but I always felt the stakes were real in THE FACULTY, and that the kids knew how that. Crisply paced, tightly directed, and wonderfully acted, THE FACULTY is an under-appreciated gem.