January 11: Argo (2012 -- Ben Affleck)

★★★

I’m at a loss to explain all the accolades Argo has been receiving.  Of course there are things I like about the film very much.  For one, the art direction evokes 1980 so well that, from the cars to the clothes to the colors, I can’t deny a bit of a nostalgia tug.  The film looks so familiar to me and yet so forgotten; I like that sensation.  There’s also some good cinematic story-telling here in Affleck’s resurrecting action thriller narrative techniques while sparing the viewer the now-common explosions and frenetic chase scenes we're so used to.  Scenes like the opening assault on the embassy, conversations among the Americans at the Canadian ambassador’s house and the tense exchange in the Iranian market all have a deft economy that creates tension and uncertainty.  And the humor and parody in Argo are fun, too.  Credit Alan Arkin and John Goodman with pulling off some very funny pokes at Hollywood, though the film ultimately goes on to show us how patriotic Hollywood actually is.

And it’s that heavy hand of conventionality that keeps Argo from soaring.  Affleck shows us he can build suspense effectively, but we see he doesn’t sustain the suspense as the film loses its balance at the very points near the end that should be the closer.  There’s tension at the airport as the guards begin to question the Americans, but the sequence goes on far overlong, eventually including the predictable character reversal of the dissenting American escapee.  And shortly after that, when we watch the soldiers chase the airplane in jeeps just as the plane takes off, Hollywood cliches have taken over so visibly that it’s hard to remain in the spell of the movie.  Conventions more hoary than those two would be difficult to find.

Which is only to say that Argo is good, capable entertainment even if it doesn’t break new ground or offer new insights.  There’s some controversy about the film drumming up anger against Iranians in our own time of American/Iranian tension, but the opening historical background certainly explains the anti-American anger of 1979 Iran.  And if that’s not enough, the Iranian housekeeper lies to the Revolutionary Guards in order to protect the Canadians and the Americans and has to go into exile as a result.  Through the history and through the housekeeper character, Argo goes to some length not to condemn the country or its people.  And it manages to create a fun cinematic thrill while doing it.

January 5:Grave of the Fireflies/Hotaru no haka (1988 -- Isao Takahata)

★★★★★

January 4:The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012 -- Peter Jackson)

★★★
The Hobbit is a film to see in Imax and 3D.  There’s no character development and little character to develop, but the story moves along as a series of chases and fights.  The pleasures of this Middle Earth are mostly visual, so the better you can see it, the better the experience.  And it looks great.

As I recall, Tolkien’s Hobbit is lighter fare than his trilogy, and Jackson and his co-producers reach to other Tolkien material to fill out a trilogy based on this prequel.  As a result, there’s some depth to the world that Bilbo is running around in, but the film lingers long on episodes like the dwarfs assembling at Frodo’s or having adventures among the goblin caverns.  It feels like there’s an effort here to fill out the film’s three-hour running time.  And, too, the narrative line sometimes takes a breather to give us a bit of flashback history that provides context for the action but doesn’t succeed in elevating the film’s stakes.  And the bottom line here is that we’re not very invested in the object of the quest: Foreshadowing aside, restoring Erebor to the dwarves lacks the impact of the earlier quest trilogy to save the world from encroaching evil by destroying the ring. 

Even though none of the characters is terribly engaging and we don’t feel there’s a lot at risk in the film, The Hobbit is still a load of special effects fun and lets fans linger once again in The Shire and Rivendell.  That’s not enough to create cinema with the heft of the trilogy, but it’s not a bad way to spend several hours at the movies either.