Directed By: Ben Affleck (The Town)
Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman
Rating:
R for language and some violent images
Run Time: 2 hours
Synopsis: On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries took over the U.S. embassy
in Tehran and took 52 hostages – but 6 American diplomats were able to escape
and took refuge with a Canadian ambassador. As tensions reached a tipping
point, C.I.A. “exfiltrator” Tony Mendez (Affleck) hatches a plan, with the help
of Hollywood makeup artist John Chambers (Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel
(Arkin), to fly in to Tehran, pose with the “Houseguests” as a Canadian film
crew scouting locations for a sci-fi film called “Argo,” and fly out together.
REVIEW
Andrew:
Hello readers! Yesterday Sarah and I caught a morning showing of Ben Affleck’s
new drama, Argo, which is based on the true story of CIA “exfiltration”
expert Tony Mendez’s mission to get six American embassy workers out of Tehran
during the 1979 Iran hostage situation.
Argo is Affleck’s third directorial effort and his second
in a row where he’s pulling double-duty behind and in front of the camera. It’s
a film we’ve talked about at length now, Sarah, what with our appearance on the
As Your Watch podcast where we talked about it and we previewed it a bit on
Thursday, too.
It’s one that we’ve been
hearing a lot of good things about including plenty of Oscar buzz. So now that
we’ve seen Argo, what did you think of it, Sarah?
Sarah:
I was thoroughly impressed! I thought that the storyline was good, but how
Affleck execute the plot was amazing. The movie is based on a true story of a
classified CIA operation and the general public didn’t know about it until
President Clinton declassified it in 1997. (Editor’s
note: Until then all the praise had been given to the Canadian government
because if Iran knew the U.S. had successfully gotten embassy workers out from
under them, the hostages would be in trouble.)
So the strength of the movie
was that even though we knew how the story would end, the execution of
presenting the story and keeping it as intense as it was was incredibly.
Another strength of the movie was the cast. I really enjoyed this movie and can
see why Oscar buzz is already surrounding it.
