By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the Oscar winning true-life dramatic thriller Argo starring and directed by Ben Affleck.
Iran, Donald Trump, Supreme Leaders, The Strait Of Hormuz, petrol prices, people dying…the news is all bad lately, and it makes The Butcher long for saner, calmer days, like 2012, back when…oh, no, wait…that’s when Argo was released! Aaaaaaaargh!
It might have won just about every award in town (including the Best Picture Oscar and even the “coveted” Best Film gong in The 2012 FilmInk Awards, as voted for by the obviously taste-poor readers), but that does not make actor/director Ben Affleck’s “true life thriller”, Argo, a good film. No, not even close. First up, a message to Big Ben (the star of Gigli, Jersey Girl, Phantoms, Pearl Harbor, The Sum Of All Fears, Daredevil, Reindeer Games and Surviving Christmas): growing a beard does not instantly make you a good director.
One-time notable beardy, Martin Scorsese, shaved his off years ago, and fellow facial-fuzz-fanciers, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, have never made a good film anyway, except for Jack and Mission To Mars, respectively. Yes, we know that he did it “for the role” (an all-time actor’s excuse if ever there was one), but The Butcher suspects that Baby Face Ben may have also been making a hirsute clutch for instant credibility and maturity by adopting a little facial forestry.
Anyway, no matter which way you cut it (or don’t cut it), Argo is hairily bad. It starts with a brief history of Iran pitched at the level of a preschooler (it even unfolds in comic book form!), and gets worse from there. Not that The Butcher really cares about cultural sensitivities, but the film’s depiction of The Middle East is simplistic and immature at best, showing the whole of Iran as pretty much a fevered mob of whack-jobs.
Its positing of the CIA as the good guys (puh-lease!), meanwhile, is just another extension of the kind of typical jingoistic American nonsense that we see saturating most of the celluloid turds that come dropping out of Hollywood. In short, Argo is just a trumped-up Rambo movie…trying to disguise itself by growing a beard.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
