Showing posts with label Ben Affleck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Affleck. Show all posts

Monday 25 February 2013

Argofuckyourself - Best Film at the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards

This is a review, and commentary on the reception, of Argo (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


25 February

This is a review, and commentary on the reception, of Argo (2012)




After the awards last night, Mark Cousins has followed up that Tweet to-day with a host, giving names of Iranian films :










All well and good from Cousins, though few are likely to have the time to explore this area in as much detail. But I want to go back to the criticism that he has levelled at Argo, and see how his very specific experience of the Iranian country and people have a bearing on what he has written.

As far as I recall, the three main ways in which Iranian people are portrayed are :

1. At the US embassy, which, I believe, included some original footage from the Carter years

2. The scenes leading to and at the bazaar

3. The laughable (and invented) attempts of the Revolutionary Guard to foil the escape


I simply do not know of what relevance to these portrayals 'In 2001, [...] I stayed for three weeks in Iran, mostly in villages and in the hills, but in the big cities as well. Though it is often in our news media, I found myself in a terra incognita. Where were the crowds punching the air?' or 'Several years later [...], I went back to Iran, and I went back again, for much longer, to make a series for Channel 4 on the history and poetics of Iranian film. On these trips I made friends in Iran, smoked the sheesha, walked the streets, spent hours in Tehran’s traffic, went to the Jewish cafes, saw how ardent and brave many of the young people were, saw how most didn’t identify with their current government, how Iran is not its government or Mullahs, saw how restless and urgent for reform the country is. Mostly, though, I felt the welcome of the people.'


The film is set in 1980, and it is historical fact that the US embassay was stormed and hostages taken and escaped. The fact that the people whom Cousins met, 21 years later, did not behave in that way cannot belie what did happen. The bazaar business was almost certainly invented, but it is still an invention about 1980 - is it a plausible one, given making a thriller about the escape plan, that people on the streets would behave as shown ?

As to the risk of being caught, in fact, no one knew that the six who had been hiding out, thanks to the Canadian ambassador, had ever been in Iran, and the film fictionalizes the reassembly of shredded photos of staff, so none of what is shown, with the possible exception of the scrutiny of the apparent Candian film group's credentials, happened at all. It is meant to make what happens exciting, but chasing the plane down the runway is clearly the stuff of fiction - as if a commercial pilot would not have stopped !

Does the film claim to depict the Iranian people, or some of them at the time of real events when feelings were running high, or is it, as Cousins says, a Great Escape ? He seems to be the one with the conflict :

The film gripped me and moved me and I hated it for this. Affleck is talented, liberal and a nice guy – I met him recently. And yet he has made a film which chronically under-imagines, or mis-imagines Iran. I looked into its whirring thriller machine to try to glimpse even moments of truth about Iran, its people, subjectivities, lives and street scenes, but saw none.


Affleck is 'a nice guy' - how could he have made a film like this ? Where I have greater issue with the menace of those on the look-out for people getting out and make a muck-up up of what the film shows as evidence of conspiracy, because, for all their cunning (with the patching together of the photos), they are disorganized and bumbling : as a stereotype, one would have every reason to find that offensive.

And Cousins does not seem to acknowledge that faking a Hollywood production to help some people get away is such a preposterous <i>true story</i> that it cries out for making into a film, not some other film set some other time to put Iran across in a less negative way than suits 1980, and, if it is set then, then it will have to be against the background of what happened then...

And, for good measure, you can find out how Kevin B. Lee demolished the film, with much emphasis on Iranian buffoonery and American superiority.


STOP PRESS





Friday 9 March 2012

A very delayed excuse for a review of Red State (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


10 March

Yes, well... What follows - more of an excuse of a review, than for one - has been lurking on my desktop* for a very long time, and, when I opened it just now, didn't even turn out to be the limerick that, I thought, was the best part of my response to this screening at last year's Festival (yes, some six months ago).

I have tidied and tarted it up, but it remains what it is: incomplete (if only I had that limerick!)


* Contains spoilers *

Can one ever be prepared for Kevin Smith? I don’t think so. (He probably isn’t himself.)

So I don’t think that, just because I hadn’t done my homework and managed to watch Clerks (1994) my companion at the screening was at an advantage: the world into which we were plunged was one of proud intolerance, casual killings, being right (in more than one sense) in the face of everything, and prepared to fight to the death. Not much scope for humour there.

My friend enjoyed what Smith, despite all odds, did wring from the situation by way of comedy at the end, but I was less sure – being unsure is not a good foundation for comedy, unless it is one involving a nervous kind of tittering.


Where will I go next, if I feel in need of searching out Smith? Well, I could investigate Dogma (1999), the one whose poster owes more than a little to (the work of) Gilbert and George, but why should I watch Damon team up again with Affleck? That said, Alan Rickman and Salma Hayek are both in it…


End-notes

* Which we know doesn't mean that thing that the computer - or part of it - stands on, because we call that 'my desk', and 'top' never has anything to do with it!


Friday 7 October 2011

Contagion and what is contagious

This is a Festival review of the Surprise Film, Contagion (2011)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


8 October (Tweets added, 21 July 2015)

This is a Festival review of the Surprise Film, Contagion (2011)

I’m not imagining that I understand, not having looked at it, much about the spread of disease and its control. However, I cannot believe the following sort of scenario, without seeing some credible evidence that it makes real biological sense:

If a fox, detected in a chicken-run, drops something that it has been eating in its flight, and that food is not only palatable to the chickens, but is also infected with a virus that the fox has had, the chicken (or chickens) that eats its, merely by having eaten that food, will give rise to a fox/chicken-type virus (whose genotyping will show origins in both the fox and the chicken).

If the chicken is then, sadly, run over, its blood will be infected with the virus, and another species that comes into contact with it will (or could) contract the virus that it contains.

As I say, it may be that I know nothing about the matter, but this seems about as simplistic as thinking that, because certain foods contain more anti-oxidants than others, because anti-oxidants will react with and neutralize free radicals, and because free radicals can react with cells to give rise to ageing and cancer, eating those foods will reduce one’s liability to those undesirable effects.