Argony

Argo won Best Picture because of its opening and ending credits. Certainly not for anything else. I mean, where's the tension? Everyone knew they would all get out.

The action was just...not. I didn't buy the whole pulled aside by the crazed airport guard (Farshad Farahat, the best actor in the whole thing) episode and the ridiculous tarmac pursuit because I had (a) never heard of these events from subsequent interviews and (b) they looked too Hollywood. Apparently, my instincts were correct.

The acting was...okay. Farahat was terrifyingly intense and quite believable, that is, until the silly tarmac chase. Alan Arkin was terrifyingly funny, as always. Ben Affleck looked like he was practicing a cameo for The Walking Dead, but you expect that. Everyone else...meh. The movie overall...meh. So, why the big deal?

Because, in the beginning, some enraged woman with a kinda Farsi accent tells us that the entire Iranian Revolution is George Bush's fault.

Not George Bush per se, but eeeevil American corporate imperialists who crushed the innocent, peace loving natural genuine aspirations of the gentle Iranian people by deposing their beloved and revered dictator, Mossadegh, and replacing him with that eeeevil Western puppet, Shah Pahlavi. That's why Iranian students stormed the Embassy almost 30 years later (took a while to get organized, because that eeevil CIA was soooo good at penetrating the students' ranks), when those eeeevil American corporate imperialists sheltered the Shah from righteous Iranian justice, all of which forced that conflicted man of action Ben Affleck, er, Tony Mendez, to Risk His Life saving the poor, innocent American embassy workers cruelly exploited by eeevil George Bush Republicans and oil companies. All, ALL! the problems in the Middle East ever since were caused by this! Grrrr!!

What rot.

Mossadegh was a dictator who liked to nationalize private property. Should he have been coup'd? No, of course not, but the issue in 1979 was Islamic radicalism, not political orientation. Even Mossadegh would have been overthrown by the fundamentalist Revolutionary Guard. Islamists don't like Marxists any more than they like capitalists.

Jimmy Carter's voice-over at the end, claiming he got the hostages released without resorting to violence is, of course, the ultimate liberal fantasy. It was the promise of violence from the incoming Reagan administration that convinced the Iranians to let our people go. 

But that would be an inconvenient truth.

And would mean no Academy Award.