Argo (2012) - Ben Affleck
Writer: MikeyB
Editor: Tariq
The Oscars have come and gone and tonights film walked away with "The Academy's" highest honor: Best Picture. As you may remember I did my "Top 5 Films of 2012" a few weeks ago and Argo was nowhere to be seen. So did I not like it? Well lets dive right in and find out.
The story centers around the 1980 Hostage Crisis in Iran. CIA agent Tony Mendez is sent in to extract a group of six US Embassy employees that have been hidden away at the Canadian ambassador's home after the Embassy is overrun. Tony's plan on extracting the group is by posing as canadian filmmakers that are in Iran to scout locations for a fake scifi movie. The group has two days to learn their cover identities and try to escape the country.
While I may not have included it in my top 5 from last year I have to say if it was a top "6" list, Argo surely would have been a part of it. From all the films nominated for "Best Picture" at the Oscars this year Argo was definitely the most deserving of the award. Affleck has once again proven how much he has matured as not only a Director but as an Actor as well. The pacing is superb, and though you may know the outcome you can't resist sitting on the edge of your seat through the finale. If you have yet to see the "Best Film of the Year" go out and rent it tonight. You will not be disappointed.
Fun Facts From IMDB for Argo:
In order to make the movie feel like the 1970s, Ben Affleck shot it on regular film, cut the frames in half, and blew those images up 200% to increase their graininess. He also copied camera movements and bustling office scenes from All the President's Menfor sequences depicting CIA headquarters; for L.A. exteriors, he borrowed from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
As shown in this movie, by the late 1970s, the Hollywood sign (which had first been erected in 1923 as "HOLLYWOODLAND" to advertise an upcoming real estate development) had fallen into severe disrepair. In 1978, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce had a fund-raising campaign in which they solicited nine prominent people to give about $28,000 each (one donor for each letter) for the restoration. Some of these benefactors included: Playboy Magazine founder Hugh M. Hefner, who gave the Y; singers Gene Autry and Andy Williams (the second L and the W, respectively), and heavy metal/shock rock star Alice Cooper, who replaced the third O (by far the most damaged of the letters) in memory of Groucho Marx. Warner Bros. Records, a division of the company that later released Argo, donated the second O. However, unlike the movie's depiction, this renovation was completed by the end of November 1978 -- a year before the hostages in Iran were even taken.
The character of Jack Kirby (played by Michael Parks), shown briefly as the artist of the storyboards for the fake movie, is the same Jack Kirby who was a pioneer of the American comic book industry and a co-creator of such seminal comic book characters as Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, the Silver Surfer, and the teams known as The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men. Kirby did indeed create storyboards for the adaptation of Roger Zelazny's novel Lord of Light, which were used as "proof" of the movie production during the real-life "Canadian Caper."
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