The opening of Argo recaps modern history between Iran and America: we wanted their oil, we crapped on their politics in order to be sure we’d get that oil, and in 1979 the people had finally had enough and kicked our puppet dictator, the Shah, out. When Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah to come to the US for medical treatment, furious Iranians took out their anger on the American Embassy, and we got the endless hostage standoff. 

Argo is the story of the six Americans from the embassy who managed to flee during the takeover and hide out in the Canadian ambassador’s residence. The Iranians are very close to figuring out they don’t have all the Embassy employees they should have. If the Iranians find out the Canadians have the Americans, there’s going to be hell to pay. The Canadian government is going to close down their diplomatic mission anyhow, because the chaos is spreading and pretty soon all North Americans are going to be in the line of fire. The American government can’t do anything overt without inflaming the situation further, so the guys at State come up with plans to get the six Americans out. Such as, they can bicycle their way across Iran.

The experts over at the CIA — such as director and star Ben Affleck — tell the State Department those plans are DOA, and if they go through with it, the Americans are DOA too. At which point the challenge comes: “You have a better idea?” 

Hollywood loves having itself portrayed as the good guy, so I expect that this movie has a good shot at being Best Picture next year. I haven’t seen Lincoln and I know perfectly well Big Epic About War And Race is always a lock, but Small Action Pic About Middle East Turmoil is pretty damn relevant too. 

There are absolutely no surprises in this movie: there’s a Big Problem, there’s a Big Plan, nobody believes in the Big Plan except the little guys, there are hitches in the plan, but since we know to a T what the plan is we in the audience know how well it’s succeeding.

This movie works so damn well because of 3 things: 

1. If you remember your history of the time, or you’ve heard any of the publicity about this movie, you know how it’s going to turn out. Since we have no public schools dedicated to memory of the six Americans, you can probably guess how it turns out too. Act 3 is still wildly suspenseful. Seriously, damn good job there, Director Affleck. 
2. The direction of the action scenes is really good. You know what’s going on at all times and who’s doing what to whom. Seriously, if the whole writer-director-actor thing doesn’t work out for him, someone re-hire Matt Damon as Bourne and have Affleck direct the next one. 
3. While there are no big surprises in the storytelling, there are some definite fun little ones: historic (John Chambers: special effects guru and CIA helper-ally-facilitator!), character-based (I’ll leave that one to be the fun little twist it turns out to be, but it involves one of the six Americans), and irony-laden (the “feel-good” ending for one of the Iranian characters). 

There’s no extraneous character stuff. There’s no derring-do at the CIA (talk about your office job). Argo is reminiscent of the political thrillers of the 70s in more than just art direction (which is awesome, and have I mentioned recently how much the 70s sucked?), and it’s a nice change of pace from the bloated, moronic “political” thrillers that we usually get.

Basically, I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt. If he’s in a movie, I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it more than I might otherwise. Brick, The Lookout, 500 Days of Summer (a movie that depended on you liking him, if Zooey Deschanel is not your cup of tea), 50/50, Inception.

Also, Bruce Willis: he’s smug, he’s annoying, and he’s been known to sleepwalk through a movie. But he’s still a movie star: his sleepwalking tends to be much more interesting than most actors doing their full-out acting. 

Plus: a science-fiction story with time travel! Who wouldn’t love this? 

In the future, time travel has been invented and then made illegal, which means only the Mob is using it. (Of…course.) They send people they want dead back 30 years in time to 2044, where Loopers kill the marks and then dispose of a body in a time period where no one would be looking for the body. Eventually one of the marks sent back will be the 30-years-older version of the Looper, at which point you collect a big payday and realize you now have 30 years to live.

Caveat #1: do not think about this premise too hard. You do have to allow them the premise, though, because that’s the whole foundation of the movie.

Caveat #2: there’s another element to this movie that I think waters down the premise a little. However, since the movie depends on both caveats being true, it’s not like they could change this. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a young guy who kills marks and then gets high all day. The dystopia of 2044 is pretty bleak, and you can imagine that you might spend all your time getting high if that’s where you had to live. His future self, Bruce Willis, gets sent back in time, and Joe doesn’t kill him. Chaos ensues. 

Gordon-Levitt does an amazing interpretation of a young Bruce Willis. He’s not doing a full-on Bruce Willis imitation; there’s just a few things sprinkled here and there. I completely believed Gordon-Levitt would grow up to be Willis. He’s good. The other actors in the movie–like Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano–are also good, even in small roles. There’s one newcomer, Pierce Gagnon, who I thought was scary-remarkable.

It’s a good thing they got such good actors, because the characters are actually the weakest part of the movie. Every character has a good actor and some tics. Believe me: if a character has one tic, you are going to see it fourteen more times. I would have preferred a little more depth to any of the goings-on.

And be warned: This movie is ridiculously violent. I guess that goes along with the setup. Wow, did I close my eyes several times. 

On the way home, Darin and I discussed the plot some and why we weren’t more thrilled about the movie (which is very good, but not the 10 we’d both been expecting). And I think it is because of the time travel elements that you shouldn’t think about too hard. Because the second you do think about them, the punch of the ending (I sure hadn’t known what to expect) fades away. 

On the other hand, right now it’s a few days after we saw it and I can still tell you the whole story. I bet I’d miss few if any plot points. Which is a sign of a really tight story, and boy howdy, do we not see enough of those these days. 

Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is an intern at Seattle Magazine, and she’s so unhappy that during the first scene of the movie she’s interviewing for a waitress job at a restaurant. During an editorial meeting, Jeff the full-time journalist (Jake Johnson) pitches doing a story about a weird classified ad they saw in another publication: someone is looking for a companion for a time travel mission. Who would put this ad in the paper? What’s his story? Jeff asks for interns to take with him, and he takes Darius and Arnau (Karan Soni) with. They manage to track down the author of the ad, Kenneth (Mark Duplass). Jeff tries to volunteer for the mission, but Kenneth, who’s a little twitchy and believes he’s being followed by government agents, doesn’t trust him. So Darius steps in as the possible time travel companion. 

Safety Not Guaranteed is a story about people who don’t want to be in the situation they’re in and who want to go back to a time when things were better, or easier, or however we remember them. Darius never feels at ease in her life. Jeff wants to return to when he had no responsibilities and everything was easy. Arnau wants to be somewhere else, anywhere else. And Kenneth wants to return to…well, that’s not really that clear. (The movie’s dedication to hitting its themes in every scene, often to the point of annoyance.)

I liked the movie a lot, the way it swung between farce and pathos and had some really touching emotional stuff in it. Midway through the movie I found myself thinking, Wouldn’t it be cool if he really had a time machine? I liked the way that it’s a pretty small story (inspired by a real ad that a magazine put in its own classified ads as a lark) and doesn’t try to be more than that. The one big “action” scene is mostly hilarious (and pathetic). This is a movie that’s about people trying to get through their lives as best they can, whether it’s by being frozen (Darius), a douche (Jeff), an overachiever (Arnau), or a weirdo (Kenneth). 

The downside of the movie is that it hits the “Women just want someone who’s really sincere, to the complete disregard for whether they’re batshit insane or not.” The romance in this movie is quite touching, except for the fact that Kenneth is clearly that guy that most of us cross the street to avoid. Sweet, and totally crazy.

I definitely recommend it, though: I’m becoming quite fond of movies that don’t assault my senses, and instead make me think more about the people involved.

Also, we’re living in the Mark Duplass Decade, so get used to him. (I can’t find a link to the EW story about him, but he’s everywhere all of a sudden.) 

The other day we sat down to watch Groundhog Day with the kids. Fancy that, a movie we can all watch together that doesn’t have me rolling my eyes or the kids hiding their faces in embarrassment. I forgot how many awesome quotes there are from this movie. I mean, I still say, “Don’t drive angry!” all the time.

Dialogue is one of the last layers of a script. You have to start with the story (why are you telling this?), then develop a rock-solid spine (how are you going to tell this story?), and develop the characters who are going to act this story out (you want to attract the best actors you can!). Then, and only then, do you start working on dialogue. When you’re trying to figure out the best way to have the characters talk to one another about this story. Everyone wants to start with dialogue, because it’s easy and we can write pages and pages of it. But dialogue’s the easiest part, because writers tend to be, uh, good with words. So you have to do the harder part first.

What I’m finding in most of the recent movies I’ve seen is that not only are they not doing the harder parts of “story” and “theme” and “spine,” but there’s absolutely no dialogue worth talking about. 

Have there been any great quotable movies recently? I tried to think if there were any fabulous quotes from a movie I’d seen relatively recently and I came up with “The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio.” And maybe “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” But maybe that’s just because Zombieland got me thinking about Jesse Eisenberg. 

Oh, of course: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” 

(Aaron Sorkin knows how to turn a snappy phrase. I betcha he doesn’t start with the snappiness, though.) 

I guess Joss Whedon does too: “Puny god.” Or, “He’s adopted.” “Let’s get a shawarma when this is all over with.” But I can’t see a lot of application for those in people in everyday speech.

Movies used to be very quotable. People still say, “You’re going to need a bigger boat,” all the time, and that movie came out almost forty years ago. I can’t think of any quotes from the original Alien but I can quote the hell out of Aliens. If you’ve spent any time at a computer company you can recite the entire Monty Python oeuvre without ever needing to see one of their shows or movies. Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. 

I thought about some of the possible reasons for this. 

• Scripts by committee. It is true, scripts are massaged by tons of writers — you have the original author, then you have the guys brought in to “punch it up,” then every star has their personal writer “do a pass.” But I’m not on the “writers are just typing monkeys” bandwagon (Jesus, I hope I’m not). I guess writers might get rid of other writers’ hilarious lines in order to make sure the hilarious writers don’t get any credit when it comes time to handing out credit.
   
  (And as a mom who had to watch Toy Story and Toy Story 2 about a zillion times, I can tell you that those scripts had a lot of writers and were still quotable. So committees are not a sure way of creating dross.)
   
• Action movies. Overseas is a huge part of the movie business now, and the less trouble studios have to go through in order to translate dialogue for a foreign audience, the better. Comedies are extremely hard to translate overseas — so what’s their excuse? 
   
• Movies are so disposable now — putting them in the theaters is more of a promotional exercise than an income-generating one. That there’s no point in giving them any personality.
    
• The dispersion of popular culture. There used to be three TV channels, and maybe you had one or two movie theaters nearby. Now there are probably ten multiplexes within fifteen miles of your house, and even though the same movie is showing on a huge percentage of the screens (see: “movies are disposable”), there are still a ton more movies being released every year. And the number of TV channels! And other ways to get stuff! We’re not all watching the same things any more. So even if you quote something, I might not recognize it.
   
• Writer-auteurs work in television, not movies. (Eg. Sorkin, Whedon.) Directors are king in movies, and most of them have no clue what a halfway decent script is, let alone good dialogue.  

I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong and kids do go around quoting movies as much as we did. Or quoting TV shows. Or whatever. But I haven’t heard of any particularly quotable video games (although every time I’ve heard dialogue from Deathspank I’ve cracked up). 

If there is fabulous dialogue in recent movies, could you point me toward it? I don’t want to be all “movies were better in my day” but I’m really coming to the conclusion (especially after the horrible Prometheus) that they really, really were. 

Yeah. Spoilers. If spoilers keep you from seeing a movie, keep reading.

I still remember the review I read of Alien from 1979 — Richard Schickel in Time? That part I don’t remember — wondering if the movie was supposed to be a thinly veiled satire of corporate life, because the ship’s crew members were so interchangeable and personality-free and we just didn’t care when the Alien ate them. 

I wonder what the same reviewer would make of Alien in comparison to Prometheus, because the former is a finely-crafted character study in comparison to the latter. It’s a finely-crafted everything in comparison to the latter. 

Prometheus is a bad film. Not everyone in my household believes this, but Darin is just wrong this time. Ridley Scott clearly had a huge budget and he forgot to spend any on writers — of course, as Darin says, “Did you miss the part where it said ‘A Ridley Scott Film’?” Okay, he makes a fair point. Characters are not Scott’s forté. 

Going by this movie, the only thing that is Scott’s forté is lens flare.

From beginning to end, this movie makes not a goddamn bit of sense, either on a macro story level, or an a micro individual-scene level. The characters are crap (what there is comes solely from the actors and not a bit from the dialogue or what the characters actually do). The tension varies between boring and someone’s-going-to-die, only I don’t care that they’re going to die because everyone’s acted like an idiot up until this point.

Case in point: We have an extended sequence in which two horrible things are going on: the leader of the scientific expedition has been impregnated with an alien and has to do a grisly self-surgery on herself to get it out, and a former crew member, reanimated by Something Awful, has come to the ship and starts killing people. On a ship of 17 inhabitants, 3 or 4 get dispatched during this scene. I’m going to assume that for a deep space expedition, millions of light years from home, that every person you bring with has a goddamn purpose. You’ve just lost 3 or 4 of them. 

The surgery is dealt with. The zombie has been dealt with. What’s the next thing the people on the ship do?

1. Get the hell out of Dodge and warn the people of Earth never, ever, ever to go anywhere near this verkakete planet again, or
2. Suit up and take everyone, including the ship’s captain, to the place where the zombie came from. 

On the macro level, though, the movie is even more offensive. There’s a whole theme strand about religion: the leader of the scientific expedition wears a cross, which is the lazy filmmaker’s way of indicating she’s wants to find God. Primitive peoples all over the world have led her to this place — a plot thread that, given what they tell us about the aliens from this world, makes no damn sense whatsoever either — where she’s going to find the Engineers (an unbelievably pretentious title) who made us. Except the film has nothing to say on any of these elements. They’re just thrown out there, as though mentioning them is an adequate substitution for taking a stand on them. 

I loved this quote from Ben Owen at Parabasis blog in his fabulously titled “Gay British Androids Monitor Your Dreams: Some Thoughts on Prometheus”:

Having your characters talk constantly about whether they have faith or not doesn’t mean your film has anything interesting to say about theology.

(Actually, his entire entry about the film is marvelous and correct and I won’t hold it against you if you go read him instead.)

I’m glad Prometheus is finally in theaters so I don’t have to suffer through its migraine-inducing flashy-flashy trailer again. But this movie is a stinkin’ pile o’ poo.

By the way, in our theater, after the final scene (in which the familiar HR Giger alien makes its first appearance), people laughed. If that’s happening a lot…oops. Bad call, Ridley.

Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) is a sweet, mild-mannered funeral home director in Carthage, Texas. He is universally beloved by everyone who knows him, and he goes out of his way to help everyone he can, particularly in their moment of grieving and pain. He leads choirs, he volunteers for every possible charity, and he may be a closeted homosexual — if he does date, no one knows about it.

Marjorie Nugent (Shirley Maclaine) is as universally despised as Bernie is loved. She is a cranky old woman, mean to everyone, and miserly with the money with her late husband left her. She never has a nice thing to say to anyone, and she has no family who want to talk to her except via lawyers as they sue her to get at their inheritance.

Bernie, by Richard Linklater, is the true story of how Bernie and Marjorie meet and become friends, and how Bernie ends up murdering Marjorie and hiding her body. The absolute best thing about this movie is that all of the interviews with the townspeople of Carthage apparently are real, actual interviews — those are the real townspeople giving their memories of Bernie and Marjorie. A couple of these people end up filming scenes with the actors and they are all very good. I would, in fact, credit the director with an amazing touch here: these people are by far and away the best part of this movie. 

Darin and I split on how we felt about this movie, which we both had reservations about. Darin said he had no idea who he’d recommend this movie to or why (except for the interviews), because it’s so weird: how are we supposed to feel about this guy who murdered someone and then hid her body? 

My problem was that I couldn’t get past Jack Black in the title role. 

The movie opens with one interview after another about how wonderful and sweet and kind and caring Bernie was. When Jack Black shows up, my initial reaction was, “But you know he’s playing y’all, right?” Black actually does a very good job as Bernie — he doesn’t mug at all, he sings very earnestly and sweetly, and he plays Bernie as very soft and caring. I just didn’t believe him in the role of a selfless, supportive, wimpy guy. I kept expecting him to break character or do a double-take or whatever. So the spell never worked on me and I couldn’t quite understand this character.

But the townspeople are great. If you have any interest in seeing Bernie, I recommend it for them.