New Girl - "A Father's Love" - Review

For a show like New Girl, the arrival of a parent, is meant to provide us insight into how a character became the way they are. We see this in “Parents” where we finally meet Jess’s mom and pops, and it clicks for how Jess became the queer fairy creature that she is. Here Nick’s father is so clearly uninterested in the well-being of his son and only in town to make a quick buck (and feel good about himself for popping in on his son).  

His appearance also allows the series to return to the well-worn fighting between Nick and Jess (who care about eachother deeply but whose world views don’t really mesh well together). Jess and Nick are polar opposites. Nick is cynical, grouchy, and quick to judge. Jess is hopeful, wide-eyed, and optimistic: she tries to see the best in people. When put together, the clashing of their world views often brings out the best in New Girl. Nick is mistrustful of his dad with a conman past, but Jess wants to give him the benefit of the doubt. Well, Nick’s not wrong; his dad sees how easy it will be to swindle Jess who is just a tad too trusting of people. We saw this before in “The Landlord” where Jess kept denying Nick’s claims that their landlord was hitting on Jess and doing favors so she’d sleep with him. Nick was right then and he’s right now. And as where last time that led dangerously close to an awkward threeway, Nick is pushed to make a trade where he’s attempting to sell a horse to mobsters (apparently horse semen is big over in India – Um, yea, don’t ask). In a great callback, his inability to not sweat when he lies blows the whole deal. Jess is left deeply unnerved by the whole situation. She put her trust in this guy, and he let her down. She (and we) finally get a sense of why Nick is as damaged and mistrusting as he is. It’s surprising he’s not any worse than he is. 

While Nick and Jess are clashing over Nick’s dad, Schmidt and Robbie (Cece’s most recent ex-boyfriend) are teaming up to find a way to break up Cece’s date arranged by her mother. They both want her back, and they scheme to find a way to ruin the whole thing. When they show up at her apartment, finding her family and her suitor’s family, they embarrass her and themselves. Even worse when Robbie unintentionally racistly yells, “White guy power!” Schmidt and Cece seem destined to end up together (so do Nick and Jess – which makes the paralleling of these stories interesting), and this sort of thing does not bode well for Schmidt getting back with her. It’s totally in character though; Schmidt would do something idiotic like this to try to win her back, and it probably would end miserably. 

Nick’s dad and Cece really aren’t what the stories are about though. They’re there as conversation starters between our characters. The shared feelings of Schmidt and Robbie creates an unexpected bond, while the arrival of Nick’s dad serves to test Nick and Jess’s relationship (while also highlighting who Nick is). While its fairly obvious from the start that Nick’s dad is every bit as bad as he makes him out to be and Schmidt’s plans are of course going to end poorly, it’s still charming and heartfelt and very funny, and the show gets more out of it than most series do. 

Stray Observations:

-A new game from New Girl: “What’s in the Cup?” – Nick can’t figure it out while his dad can.

-“Who’s going to mess with a guy wearing a hat that says ‘girls go bills’? … Everyone... Everyone did” – Winston is underutilized once again, but gets off some of the episodes funniest lines.

-“…That’s why they called him ‘little penis’”

-“He looks like Hilary Swank mixed with a small wet puppy”

-“Do you think she saw me?” “Well, you weren't wearing a hat”

-“How do you eat an elephant?” “With chopsticks” “No” “In a taco” “…One bite at a time”

-“There’s more to A Father’s Love than semen”

-“I’d be Brad Pitt … You’d be the crafty Asian fellow who did the crazy flips”

-“This is my first late nigh parking lot horse deal”

-“If you’re going to work on my sink, at least put goggles on. Your eyes are twice the size of normal eyes”

-Many hilarious jokes in Schmidt and Robbie’s ideas to win back Cece. My favorite: “We could get a Trojan Horse” “In this economy?”

Grade: B

Cougar Town - "I Need to Know" - Review

One of the most important things in life are our relationships. Cougar Town is about its seven main characters and how they relate to one another. Each episode, in a way, is about throwing something at a couple different pairings and seeing how they react to it (and in the process reinforcing why these people care about eachother in the first place). Cougar Town is great at making these conflicts very specific to the characters and grounded in a level of everyday realism. It’s also really good at creating emotional resolutions that aren’t just tacked on at the end of the episode as an afterthought.

This week’s episode is about Jules and Travis, and Ellie and Andy. Jules and Ellie want something out of their relationships that they simply can’t have. In the case of Jules, Travis has grown up and is off at college. He doesn’t need or want to see his mother on a regular basis. When she tries to give him some space, saying he doesn’t have to call her unless he wants to, she can’t handle him going nine days without contact. She calls him, but he quickly ends the conversation. Jules becomes so infuriated that she storms over to Travis’s school and tells all his friends that she still does his laundry. 

Ellie, at the suggestion of Bobby, starts rewarding Andy for doing what she asks of him (much like you would a dog – a joke the episode gets a good deal of mileage from). Bobby, however, is not one to idly sit by and watch this. He tells Andy, and Andy becomes understandably upset.

Now, everything up to this point is funny, but it works because we know who these characters are and that this is totally the sort of things they would do. And Jules and Andy would become upset and angry. But ultimately, they could never hold it against Travis or Ellie. Its sitcom mechanics that never feels like it’s going through the motions. Because the series goes for character work and a sense of place more than big laughs, it doesn’t try so hard to achieve its plotting and resolutions. Lack of resolutions can even feel awkward (e.g. Travis running off to Hawaii). 

So Jules goes to Travis and lets him know she’s so very happy for him, but she doesn’t want to end up a granny who never speaks to her son. Ellie opens up past her cold exterior (“I find it confusing when you’re vulnerable,” Andy tells her). Though she wanted Andy to do what she wanted him to do, what she wants more than anything is him. This could be a mission statement for the show. There’s conflicts between characters where each wants a different thing, but what they really want more than anything is eachother and for eachother to be happy. That’s why they can resolve these problems and it doesn’t feel forced or hackneyed. Trav is going to go off and do his own thing, but it doesn’t hurt to stop in and watch Game of Thrones with Jules every now and again. And he doesn’t do it because the Laws of Sitcom demand it but because it’s in the feelgood, low key, heartwarming DNA of Cougar Town. 

Stray Observations:

-Opening Title Card of the Week: “The letters in... Cougar Town can be rearranged to spell ‘Taco Rug’Now" (which also makes no sense).”

-The Cul-de-Sac Crew want Travis’s new girlfriend to feed Tom’s cat while he’s away: “I don’t live in the area” – To which they cry: EXCUSES!

-“I watched porn with Grayson and his girlfriend” –Many people have misinterpreted Game of Thrones as porn as well.

-“It’s like a brand new gay Ferrari” –The Grayson/Laurie storyline, though funny, felt out of place.

-Jules to Travis: “I want to be friends with benefits” – that came out wrong.

-The guys grow Tom Selleck moustaches. Because of course they would.

-“Trav will come back, you raised him to be dependent and helpless”

-“I must have butt dialed you” “From the Torres’ home?”

-Andy and Jules going “Oh” was very funny and adorable.

-“Once Trav ran away to Key Largo … I had to sell my soul to a Haitian shaman to get him back”

-“She was a real…” “Racist” “I was going to say collector”

Grade: B+

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" - Film Review

It’s difficult to get a good performance out of a young actor. Most children and young adults can put on a nice baby face and give a big grin for the camera, but the performances often tend to fail to have nuance. It’s even more difficult when you have to get a young actor to bring to life very serious material. Recent performances, especially on television, have proven it possible. Morgan Saylor’s quiet, nervous energy is wonderful on Homeland. Maisie Williams is incredibly charismatic and raw as Arya Stark on Game of Thrones. Kiernan Shipka has turned into one of the stealthily good performances on Mad Men as Sally Draper. Even on the big screen it’s not unheard of. Shailene Woody gives a great performance with some heavy, dramatic material in The Descendants. Other young actresses such as Saoirse Ronan and Chloe Grace Moretz have shown themselves capable of confidently inhabiting tricky roles. (Now that I consider it, there are not as many recent young male examples. The last truly solid one I can think of is Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.). Long story short, though it’s not unheard of for young actors to pull off weighty material, it’s rather difficult and that’s why it’s always great to see young, talented actors demonstrate their ability. All the more impressive when they’re only 5 years old, as Quvenzhané Wallis was when she played Hushpuppy in Beast of the Southern Wild.

We see almost the entirety of the film through Hushpuppy’s young, optimistic, imaginative eyes. Too young to always comprehend all the things going on around her; she doesn’t get many of the implications of the tragedies and triumphs surrounding her. But she’s got a big heart, and tries to see the best in people. Abandoned by her mother, she’s raised by her sickly, quick-tempered father Wink (Dwight Henry), who, though he often doesn’t show it as well as he ought to, loves her a great deal. They live in the “Bathtub” an isolated, impoverished Louisiana bayou community, constantly struggling to get by, but with a strong sense of community. Their lives and those of the community are imperiled when a deadly storm threatens to destroy the town. 

The film deals with the community’s struggles with poverty and their attempts to protect their homes from the storm with integrity, realism, and compassion. Gorgeously shot, and imaginatively depicted, it provides a dignified, realistic, memorable look at an under-looked part of the country and the everyday concerns of the people who live there. Wallis handles the very serious material with surprising ease, and you never once question her performance; she carries the film with a brightness and enthusiasm that help raise the film above its world weary, dreary undertones. This is a great debut film from writer and director Benh Zeitlin; hopefully we see more from him in the future.  

Grade: B+

How I Met Your Mother - "Band or DJ" - Review

After coming off its strongest episode of the season in its mid-season finale (something arguably true of last season’s “Symphony of Illumination”), How I Met Your Mother returns for more stall tactics. Now, stall tactics aren’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, many of the best series make an excellent practice of it (Older series such as The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood made very good use of a slow burn with minimal plot advancement doled out each episode, and more recent ones, such as Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and Justified have been just as successful). But HIMYM isn’t exactly the best series at stalling the inevitable; especially when we know what the inevitable is (The show’s title has been spoiling it for us for nearly 8 years now).

This isn’t to say “Band or DJ” is bad (it’s not; there’s a couple nice jokes and one excellent, touching scene between Ted and Lily), but it’s thoroughly grounded in saying: “trust me, we’re going to get there, and it will be great … but in the meantime, here’s some stories you don’t really care about to kill time”.

The jokes aren’t exactly laugh out loud funny either. There’s some chuckle worthy stuff that’ll put a smile to your face, but very few jokes make you go, “OH MY GOD THAT’S GREAT!” But that’s just par for the course for the show since they introduced Zoey. Which isn’t to say HIMYM suddenly got bad in its 6^th season; there was a predictable decline going on at times during the fourth (which has one of the series’ weakest episodes in the form of its finale “The Leap”)  and fifth (Don and Robin’s relationship in hindsight is so very, very pointless and ends incredibly abruptly) seasons. But the 6^th season changed my expectations of the show completely. The zippy pace and great jokes weren’t there; the use of narrative perspective and time to make jokes wasn’t as apparent. We got storylines that were so very strange and misplaced: particularly Zoey but also the death of Marshall’s dad (which wasn’t a bad story but came so suddenly, unexpectedly, inorganically and just felt cruel to do to the character). Zoey was the worst aspect of it though: she was a very obvious stalling tactic; very early on we’re told she’s not the one, and the show established a relationship we had no reason to root for and made little sense in the first place with the two so clearly always at odds with one another. 

So when a comedy series is stalling, it needs to do one of two things: be really damn funny or earn some nice emotional moments. HIMYM hasn’t really been selling me on either. Just look at “Who Wants to Be a Godparent”. It’s Marshall and Lily hosting a game show to determine who will be their kids God-parent, when we know good and well it’ll end up being all three of them in the end; throw in some very obvious, not particularly funny jokes and you can see why all this stalling is deeply unsatisfying. 

So what’s stalling us this week? 

Robin finds out Barney didn’t ask for her father’s permission for marriage, and Barney spends the rest of the episode getting the answer we always knew he’d get (although, it’s eventually with the help of Robin who won’t let her father come to the wedding if he doesn’t accept). I mean, there’s more to it than that, but that’s pretty much the gist to it. 

Ted and Lily fight over who gets to plan Robin and Barney’s wedding. Ted wants a DJ, and Lily a band. But then the band/DJ thing devolves into a weird metaphor for Ted being unhappy about Robin’s engagement. Lily finally gets episodic time dedicated to a story that isn’t involving Marshall or her new baby (something that hasn’t happened in so damn long! Alyson Hannigan can act people. Give her some more material!), in which she gets Ted to admit he still likes Robin (in exchange for her admitting  how having a kid can be frustrating enough at times that she considers leaving).

All in all, we’ve seen worse forestalling the inevitable from this series, and honestly, it was hard to follow up the mid-season finale, so this a good, but not great episode. 

Stray Observations:

-Oh yea, and there’s also some stuff about Marvin not pooping in a while which actually gets some surprisingly good jokes: “I haven’t slept in … January .”

-The “Halloween Theme”-like musical cue when Lily is angry at Ted for trying to usurp her place as wedding planner is wonderful. As is the moment after: “Imma cut you bitch!”

-“Oh, this is just cakes”

-“I bought with some oxen and spices from the East”

-Has Cobie Smulders lost her voice?

-“There’s a cat that says, ‘I can haz cheeseburger?’”

-“I killed a pack of bears, and the pelts to her father. That’s just manners”

-“Anything else I should know?” “I did some wetwork for the CIA in the 80’s”

-“Oh no, Fluffer Nutter just peed on my pants”

-The confetti-poop metaphor pays off in a nice visual joke.

-Robin’s dad was planning on getting a divorce from his wife in order to make Robin happy. Robin’s dad is crazy.

-I cannot stress enough how much I liked the rooftop scene between Lily and Ted. The show is lacking moments like this.

-Ted’s future wife is apparently in the wedding band. MYTHOLOGY!

Grade: B

What did everyone else think?

Bob's Burger - "Nude Beach" - Review

When I saw the title for this episode, “Nude Beach”, I knew I was in for something good. However, the nude beach isn’t actually the biggest element of the episode; it’s Bob’s relationship with Hugo the health inspector. The episode deals with the fairly typical sitcom situation of two individuals hating eachother and swearing eachother off, before realizing that they actually need eachother. But in the hands of Bob’s Burgers, there’s a weird charm about it, not to mention the fact that a good portion of the episode deals with a nude beach, something I don’t think you’d find in a standard sitcom.

Hugo has been a massive pain in Bob’s ass, constantly finding the most minor of infractions to hold against him. Bob wishes he didn’t have to deal with him. When Hugo goes to close down a nude beach with health violations, he ends up turning into a convert of the nudist lifestyle and abandoning his post as health inspector. A new, much more lenient health inspector Tommy shows up and befriends Bob. Tommy’s a little weird, but he’s making life at the restaurant so much easier that Bob is forced to tolerate him. But Tommy keeps asking favor after favor, until he’s staging a rock and roll show at the restaurant. Only problem is that Tommy is God-awful. He sings songs about his daddy issues and how good he is at sex, and drives away customers (except Teddy who is oddly loyal). Bob knows that this can’t last much longer, but when he breaks the news to Tommy, he doesn’t take it well, he pulls some rat poop out of his pocket (which apparently has been there the whole time), and shuts the restaurant down. The only way for Bob to save the restaurant is to convince Hugo to become a health inspector again. Hugo takes up a bet where if Bob wins the nude decathlon, he’ll return. So Bob out of sheer desperation strips down and does every event before losing in the final round to Hugo. Hugo however realizes that he wants it to be him and not some other person who shuts down Bob’s restaurant and so rescues the place.

The Belcher children meanwhile see an easy way to make cash, exploiting horny teenage boys’ desire to see nude women. They find a great vantage point of the beach and Tyler (who, played by Aziz Ansari, helped Bob play videogames in “Burgerboss”) provides them with a telescope (“basically the Hubble for boobies”) for them to check out the action. The boys are initially turned off because its nudity in all its ugly, messy glory, but Louise (in an exceptional, hilarious monologue) sells it: this is better than the nudity in magazines, THIS IS REAL LIFE! The kids end up raking in a lot of dough, even taking bets on the nude decathlon.

The series is so willing to show people doing things (things that other shows might make out to be bad or weird or wrong) and then doesn’t judge them for it. Bob and Linda have been shown to drink A LOT. Louise has practically tried to kill people on more than one occasion. And the kids are seen here ripping off people they know, while multiple characters choose to go to the nude beach and get naked. But it never makes a statement about the nude beach; it never goes out of its way to suggest that nude beaches are weird or wrong. It just makes them out to be a matter of life. In some places there happens to be nude beaches. If someone wants to go there, who are we to judge? The nude beach is almost an afterthought actually. So much of the episode is dealing with Bob putting up with Tommy and his antics that the nude beach, which felt like it would be the driving force for the story, is sidelined.  

  

Stray Observations:

-“Hands off my hands government!”

-“That’s how vendors sold food in the Bible” “Don’t bring religion into this!”

-Andre Royo (aka Bubbles from The Wire) appears in the training video on how to wash your hands.

-“It’s like the Internet but outside!”

-“We’ll be like the Louis and Clarke of nudity”

-“Where’s your fanny pack?” Hugo pulls up his belly fat to reveal his fanny pack.

-“We’re bushwhacking the a trail to the nude overlook”

-“He’s the new Hugo” “Well, there’s only one Hugo”

-“No sweat off our ass!” – Belcher children are totally cool with cursing.

-“Do you like rock?” “Like rock … music … yea” – Great delivery by H. Jon Benjamin.

-“I think dad just got to second base with that guy”

-Louise’s sales pitch: “All the dingles! All the dongles”

-“You strike me as more of an indoor nerd”

-Tommy’s other song: “That Elderly Prostitute” –An instance where saying is better than showing.

-The superimposing of Tommy singing over the nude beach was really weird.

-Tommy doesn’t even bother dumping the rat poop out of the bag; he drops the bag on the ground.

-Tommy is now at Jimmy Pesto’s. How kind of Hugo. 

Grade: B

What did everyone else think?

Girls - "It's About Time" - Review

Once you got past all the claims of nepotism and racism (both wrong in my opinion) that haunted Girls’s first season, you would find one of the most assured, confident first seasons of television. Carried by Lena Dunham’s unique, singular vision of twentysomethings in New York City, it created interesting, flawed, believable characters who could come off as complete assholes and yet you’d still like them (a sign of really, truly great writing). Dunham’s series has been compared to Louis C.K.’s Louie, both have narrative visions so unlike anything else on tv (crafted almost entirely by one person), both put themselves out there (often physically) for laughs, and each episode you don’t quite know where either is taking you until you get to the very end and go, “Oh, that’s what they were trying to say!” Girls would be required viewing for anyone obsessed with tv just for how unlike anything else it is, but the fact that it’s also really good is icing on the cake.

Hannah has started shacking up with her gay ex-boyfriend, Elijah. They seem to be getting along really well, and have gotten over some of their differences from last season. She appears to be dating Donald Glover (Hey, diversity everyone!), but she’s taking care of Adam at the same time, and keeping it secret from her supposed new boyfriend. She tells Adam she wants to see other people, and Adam is far more cool about not putting labels on the whole thing than she is. Adam lets her know that he’s never known another person quite as well as he does Hannah, and points to her weird attachment to him, asking why she’d want to go and fuck with this. Hannah does that though; she fucks up everything because she’s selfish, and mean, and bored. But we end the episode with her stopping in with her new black boyfriend and looking for sex and deep discussion of Ayn Rand objectivism. Hannah is simply refusing to face up to the facts. But for now, avoiding them sounds a lot more appealing than confronting the mess she’s gone and made for herself, yet again. 

Marnie has been fired from her job at the gallery. She’s good at her job but they can’t afford to keep her (which feels like a sly commentary on everything in her life: who can afford to put up with Marnie, she’s often just as narcissistic as Hannah). Her mother isn’t too pleased, and demands she get a new job immediately. Her mom’s back on the dating scene and over her divorced husband. She’s off shamelessly banging guys her daughter’s age (Marnie totally doesn’t approve. “Talk to me like you would your friends” “I am. I would be way harsher to them”). Marnie isn’t over Charlie if her lingering glances and semi-awkward chitchat during Hannah’s party count for anything. Or maybe not having a job AND  not having a boyfriend is a prospect she can’t deal with (we still haven’t seen anything come of her making out with the fat officiator at the wedding). Charlie’s relationship with his new girlfriend looks rocky; they’re very ill-suited for eachother, and he looks little pleased by her. Oh, and I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet: Elijah, after complaining about his boyfriend and pondering whether he may be bi, starts to have sex with Marnie. Marnie is initially reluctant, but her life is so shitty, that ya’ know what, damn if she shouldn’t at least get laid. Well, unfortunately, he can’t get it up, and Marnie ends up heading over to Charlie’s apartment: “I don’t want to cause any trouble. But I just need to sleep next to someone” (Are these two headed on a collision course to get back together?). 

Shoshanna, after finally losing her virginity to Ray last season, keeps rambling on with her usual sincerity about how she and Ray are no longer together, and she’s happy about it (Not that we ever buy it because no one talks at length about something like that without it being clear they’re lying to themselves). But of course when Ray arrives at the party, she can’t help (after some protestations) hooking up with him.

Everyone seems to be avoiding the truth of their situations. Hannah is failing to see that the go-between Donald Glover and Adam is problematic at best, and doomed to fail disastrously at worse. Marnie fails to recognize that she wants Charlie back (and that it’s probably at least partly due to her losing her job). Shoshanna fails to acknowledge that she may have feelings for Ray and that she may actually want to be with him. The one person, Jessa, who always seemed to refreshingly cut through the bullshit (but in many ways didn’t– the affair with her boss, and losing the kids she was babysitting were terrible decisions that she never fully admitted to herself about – And the last minute marriage could prove to be another instance of this) is absent for most of the episode. She shows up at the end with newlywed bliss hopping into a taxi with her new, weird fiancé, noting how she has no idea where they even live. 

Last season started out making us believe certain things and then inverting our perceptions to great effect. Adam was initially just this weird guy that Hannah seemed to be dating out of desperation. But it turned out that was just because Hannah failed to take the time to get to know him. These storylines appear to be headed in obvious directions (Hannah is going to have to choose one way or the other, as is Shoshanna about Ray, and Marnie, if she doesn’t get back with Charlie, is at least going to hook up with him at some point), but who knows if where we think we’re going is where we’re actually headed? Much of last season’s storylines didn’t totally make sense until the finale which had most of the season’s story arcs culminate rather nicely. I don’t really know where Girls is headed, but it’s funny and sincere and unlike anything else. And that’s enough for me for now.

Stray Observations:

-Nicely observed: the opening montage with Shoshanna doing a Buddhist type mantra and spraying out incense asking the universe for things, and Hannah and Elijah cuddling.

-Music Choices – The show has always had a knack for great music choices: Regina Spektor – “Your Honor” over the title sequence, Vampire Weekend – “I’m Goin’ Down” over the end credits, The Animals – “House of the Rising Sun” sung on the karaoke by Ray and Charlie.  

-“I came. You came hard. We all laughed” – Adam is often so open and honest about who he is and what he believes that he feels like the only character being straight with themselves.

-“Don’t say fired. You’re transitioning” – Well, a lot of why Marnie is the way she is has just been explained.

-“I’m deflowered, not devalued!” – Shoshanna is perhaps my favorite character on the show, but she was also the most underutilized individual last season.

-Also: her doing Karaoke = ADORBS! Song choice: Sean Kingston – “Beautiful Girls”.

-“I was watching Midnight in Paris and I was thinking, ‘I could make that’”

-“I’ll let you talk about Adam unlimited” “I don’t talk about Adam a lot” “You fucking do!” – You so fucking do Hannah.

-Shoshanna unfriended Charlie on Facebook

-“A panda next to a gun next to a wrapped present … That doesn’t make any sense”

-“We’re Mexican! We don’t know the rules!”
-"You know how hot you are. That's why you're such a bitch" - How accurate is this?

Grade: B+

What did everyone else think?

"Argo" - Film Review

The premise to Argo seems almost too absurd to be true: when 6 members of the U.S. Embassy in Iran manage to escape before the takeover, they hideout at the Canadian ambassador’s house; CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), when all other options seem impossible, comes up with the idea of faking the film production of a science fiction film and using location scouting in Iran for the fake film as a way to extricate them from the country. It almost sounds like the type of historical re-imagination one would expect in a film like Inglourious Basterds, not a historical drama. As Bryan Cranston’s Jack O’Donnell puts it though, “It’s the best bad idea we have”. It’s a footnote of history only brought to light in recent years when the incident was declassified under the Clinton administration, and it adds a new element to the already deeply fraught Iranian hostage crisis.

The film details just how desperate the CIA and the U.S. government had become that they would even consider such a crazy option. And even harder still at times, how to make a fake production of a film come off as real. But the film handles its historical drama well, balancing the tension between entertaining and informing (and the last twenty minutes of the film are totally plausible and yet all the more intensely nerve-racking for it). 

Ben Affleck really has made a turn in his career in about the last 5 years. Affleck had made a fairly big name for himself, but he had done little to suggest large credibility. His career had been mostly consigned to bad or forgettable movies (forgiving a Good Will Hunting here or there). But then he wrote, and directed Gone Baby Gone and The Town, two really good movies that seemed to usher in a new phase in his career. Argo is another solid film to add to his resume. It’s efficiently, tightly directed and moves with precision and a sense of purpose. It has nice, even lavish, period detail but doesn’t get bogged down in historical particularities. It’s intense without forcing intensity. Argo is what a historical drama ought to be: informative, but lacking obsession with the fact that it’s doing so, and entertaining, but without having to massively fudge historical accuracy. 

Grade: B+