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.

Revolutionary Road

Save your money.

From some rather obscure and quickly forgotten 1960's novel now being hailed as a classic, this is nothing but hippie angst.

You know- the sheer horror of your own house in a safe neighborhood with a secure job and friends and prosperity. GAAAAAAAAAWWWWD! I just wanted...wanted...you know...to be free! To...just...just love, man! Uninhibited! Unstructured! Dance barefoot in clover to music only I can hear , tra la tra la tra la! Not have my soul and dreams crushed by, you know, responsibility! You oppressor!

Big friggin' yawn.

Don't bother

Here's another movie you shouldn't waste your $25 on: The Day the Earth Stood Still. What? you say, but this looks epic! Cool effects! Gort!

Effects are for video games. Plot is for movies, and this one definitely isn't your Dad's Earth Stood Still. Based on what previews I've seen, here's the movie:

Keanu Reeves, chosen for his robot-like acting abilities, is sent by some Mysterious Galactic Power to rid the fragile, long suffering Earth (Gaia, whatever) from the plague of lice infesting it- us. It seems Gaia old babe is a sentient being linked through some eerie ethereal means to all the other sentient beings that constitute planets in the Universe. She has been sending out distress calls because, unlike all the other lice in the Universe, we have not learned to love and nurture our Mother. Instead, white middle-aged corporate men have raped and cruelly treated her for centuries, most especially under George Bush, and she has cried out in agony for relief. Took awhile for the call to reach the MGP (Universe is pretty big, after all) but it's back and it's mad and the Day of Reckoning is at hand. Some cute ethnic kids and an oh-so-smart sensitive woman will buy the rest of us crass, butt scratching, Amazon burning, oil spilling cretins more time. But will we learn?

Yawn.

See the original. Much better.

Don't bother

This movie Australia is coming out, but I've already seen it. About a hundred times. So have you, but for those still curious, let me spare you $25 and give you the whole movie right here:

Nicole Kidman is a repressed, stiff, judgmental product of the Victorian white male patriarchy which has stifled her natural passions and desires into a hidebound series of nonsensical societal rules designed to make sure she never, ever has an orgasmic thought. She even, ugh, believes in God. Through an odd series of unfortunate circumstances, she goes to Australia. Or, through some patronizing sense of do-goodism, she goes to Australia. Not sure which scenario holds true here, but you can bank on one or the other.

There she meets the vulgar and ill-mannered Hugh Jackman, who, of course, represents Man in State of Nature, which all that English hoity-toity social engineering has worked so diligently to eradicate. Not out here in the Outback, mate, where a man is a man and doesn't have time for all that fruo-fro. And, he smells like sheep. She is repelled but strangely intrigued, fighting hard against her first orgasmic thought by invoking God (ugh) and Daddykins and her ever-so-smart circle of equally repressed and judgmental frigid ice queens.

So, how are we going to get these two kids together? Well, of course, through a crisis, conveniently brought on by the mongrelized Japanese horde trying to impose their wog ways on the cream of white culture. Something about mongrelized lessers attacking the purity of English life that just releases the passion between the classes, I guess. So, they get together, quite heroically, and abandon hundreds of years of Western thought for the lustful and relativistic concepts of post-modernism, thereby ensuring the destruction of Western civilization and the eventual election of Barack Obama.

Oh, yeah, and there's some cute Aborigine kids, too.