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Deep Joy... or Not.
Mar. 21st, 2013 10:28 pmAccording to the weather forecast we're expecting anything up to 40 centimetres of snow overnight and through tomorrow. And it's cold outside. Bloody cold. If and when it snows it will stick.
Mar. 21st, 2013
Movie of the Week: Argo
Mar. 21st, 2013 11:39 pmWe missed this the first time round but after the Oscar win a few movie theatres have brought it back again. It was certainly worth seeing. Very tense. A nail-biting finish even though you more or less knew the outcome. Did it deserve the Oscar for Best Movie? Probably not, but that didn't make it any less entertaining.
It's a caper movie taken from actual happenings during the American Embassy siege in Iran in 1980. Six embassy staff escape the siege and have to be extracted from their sancuary in the Canadian ambassador's house through an Iran filled with hate for all Americans. The least bad option is to disguise them as film crew making a SF movie in the mode of Star Wars (then a recent phenomenon). Ben Affleck (director and star) is the CIA agent who makes it happen together with some substantial help from a couple of Hollywood insiders. (As an inappropriate aside: Ben Affleck with a beard = good!)
It's a fairly straightforward linear plot - which is actually to the film's advantage. It's all scene setting and tension with not much room for deep characterisation. The stakes are hugely high and the situation in Iran at the time is shown with no punches pulled.
Recommended.
Though it did serve to remind me of Forough Koocheck, a young Iranian woman I was at Library School with, who was from a fairly well-to-do family in pre-Ayatollah Iran. She returned home in the seventies to take up a career as a librarian. Chris, her particular friend, had a few letters through the seventies, but none of us heard from her again after the revolution. I'm guessing a career woman from a family involved at some level with the Shah's government did not fare well.
It's a caper movie taken from actual happenings during the American Embassy siege in Iran in 1980. Six embassy staff escape the siege and have to be extracted from their sancuary in the Canadian ambassador's house through an Iran filled with hate for all Americans. The least bad option is to disguise them as film crew making a SF movie in the mode of Star Wars (then a recent phenomenon). Ben Affleck (director and star) is the CIA agent who makes it happen together with some substantial help from a couple of Hollywood insiders. (As an inappropriate aside: Ben Affleck with a beard = good!)
It's a fairly straightforward linear plot - which is actually to the film's advantage. It's all scene setting and tension with not much room for deep characterisation. The stakes are hugely high and the situation in Iran at the time is shown with no punches pulled.
Recommended.
Though it did serve to remind me of Forough Koocheck, a young Iranian woman I was at Library School with, who was from a fairly well-to-do family in pre-Ayatollah Iran. She returned home in the seventies to take up a career as a librarian. Chris, her particular friend, had a few letters through the seventies, but none of us heard from her again after the revolution. I'm guessing a career woman from a family involved at some level with the Shah's government did not fare well.