Shit like Arbitrage and Argo just makes me kind of
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Sorry for nerd diversion. Argo. Let's talk about it.
Moderator: drizzle
I thought they did a pretty good job of contextualizing how and why the event took place in a fairly quick and neat way.Tweak Da Leak wrote:Its trifling mix of action and sarcasm demonstrates no respect for history.
PopeyeJones wrote:^^^ Point me to a scripted 90 minute movie that's fully historical accurate and I'd by more sympathetic to that complaint (no Battle of Algiers).
You're taking this a little personally, so let it be known in advance: I don't give a flying fuck about your Iranian wife. I mean I wish you guys the best of luck, but yeah.PopeyeJones wrote:^^^ Point me to a scripted 90 minute movie that's fully historical accurate and I'd by more sympathetic to that complaint (no Battle of Algiers).
That a mainstream American movie literally begins with a historically accurate summary of the situation (that the revolution was largely fomented by a U.S. and & U.K sponsored coup d'etat that installed a puppet government that jailed and tortured political prisoners for decades), and one that American media (mainstream and not) is nothing if not entirely fucking silent about during the preposterous war frenzy that's now being targeted on Iran, buys Argo a fuckload of leeway in my book.
You can't explode everything into non-distinction. This is a film about a historical event that affects real people while claiming that "it's all true", and takes a dominant position in public discourse about very real fears of an Iranian Threat that were covered at length even in the presidential debates in a fantastically sensationalist way ungrounded in history or fact. Treating this as art with license that exists in its own world, and presuming that the American masses are morally and politically responsible for recognizing fantasy's departure from fact in the film while the film bears no responsibility? Not my thing.The Americans never resisted the idea of playing a film crew, which is the source of much agitation in the movie. (In fact, the ‘house guests’ chose that cover story themselves, from a group of three options the CIA had prepared.) They were not almost lynched by a mob of crazy Iranians in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, because they never went there. There was no last-minute cancellation, and then un-cancellation, of the group’s tickets by the Carter administration. (The wife of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor had personally gone to the airport and purchased tickets ahead of time, for three different outbound flights.) The group underwent no interrogation at the airport about their imaginary movie, nor were they detained at the gate while a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard telephoned their phony office back in Burbank. There was no last-second chase on the runway of Mehrabad Airport, with wild-eyed, bearded militants with Kalashnikovs trying to shoot out the tires of a Swissair jet.
“One of the actual hostages, Mark Lijek, noted that the CIA’s fake movie ‘cover story was never tested and in some ways proved irrelevant to the escape.’ The departure of the six Americans from Tehran was actually mundane and uneventful.
how i felt. i was kinda bored with the hostages until they got to the airport. very unlikeable who ever said that, i agree.Cash Rulz wrote:Good movie. Did not deserve Oscar at all tho'.
Agreed with this, and already said that IMO Argo would have been a dime a dozen in the mid 90s.Philaflava wrote:Cash Rulz wrote:Good movie. Did not deserve Oscar at all tho'.
The idea that the US Government can be simultaneously an evil/incompetent bureaucracy as well as the police chief of exceptionalist military adventurism is hardly something that reactionaries have a difficult time reconciling. Nor is the idea that the Iranian threat can be both savage and menacing and coldly calculating -- hell that's been employed so many times in cinema it's practically a convention of the genre thriller in addition to being a cornerstone of anti-Islamic fears.PopeyeJones wrote:
I think we might just feel differently about Argo, though. With regards to the historically inaccurate details you quoted, for me they're mostly incidental, and all pitched toward the same thing: working within the genre of a thriller.
Does it make the US look good to pretend that the US government almost abandoned folks from its consulate at the last second? I personally don't think so.
Does it make the Iranian government look bad to pretend that they caught on to the ruse and were much more on the ball about Americans sneaking out than they were? I don't personally think so.
If you're looking for someone who takes offense to generic conventions or cinematic portrayals, you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm simply calling things as I think they are: shitty inaccurate depictions that promote a particular ideology.All of this is taking something that happened and translating it into the context of the genre being worked in. As for the chase down the tarmac, I was personally more offended by the use of a hamfisted idiotic movie trope than the historical inaccuracy of it.
Meh. I think you're underestimating the extent to which the details I've mentioned shape an interpretation of that historical context.The minutia and details of this are personally just MUCH less important to me than the broader historical context, which is why I'm admittedly giving them a pass on details that get translated when turning history into a story.
I feel like maybe you are easily impressed.Taking the first three minutes of your popcorn thriller and using them as a documentary-style testimony about the really fucking horrible U.S. meddling and control that sparked a revolution in a Middle Eastern country is really impressive to me. That's a decision. It's not an obvious one or one that had to be made.
So it reaches them, permanently transforms them, and then ... the details of the rest of the movie do not matter because they have undergone the rock solid Pauline conversion that the neolib Hollywood elite insist directs their every decision?Tacking that on to the front of your thriller also reaches and incredibly wider audience than the people who already know that there's quite a deep back story to all the countries we currently insist "hate America" and "don't share our values" (namely that almost essentially all of these countries have a long history of U.S. installed and backed puppet regimes throughout the 20 Century that were deeply, deeply fucking with these people in these places). Just personally, that's the part that matters to me.
Cool. How about the fact that the movie starts out declaring the CIA to be the cause of the problem then spends the rest of it lionizing them (plus Hollywood!) as the ingenius saviors?I don't give a fuck if passports were really checked closely or not.
So much for the broader historical context?As for the Presidential debate, agreed it's bad timing, but I don't think you can really fault Argo for Republicans using the bombing of Iran as a casual talking point to drum up support from their vengeful base. The movie had been in the can for a year when Republicans decided to act like fucking idiots about Iran.
Well I wasn't exactly blaming the movie for the coincidence.Again, it's unfortunate that the release of the flick coincided with that, but I don't blame the movie.
Well that actually is what we're arguing over and there's probably no real resolution to that.And likewise, I think it's a fair question: does lying about how closely passports were checked feed into that, or does truth-telling about the U.S. installing a puppet government that led to disaster temper that? IMO it's probably wholly unrelated either way, but if it's anything it's the latter.