Two things: I'm not as good at alliteration as I thought. Two, I realized as soon as I posted my first post that Consuming Life is also the name of a Zygmunt Bauman book that is far more worthy of reading than this blog will ever be. Moving on.
So, I saw Argo this Saturday, and I was very impressed. Ben Affleck managed to make a film that is very topical. It is interesting to see a movie about the Iranian hostage crisis while we are on rocky diplomatic ground modern Iran; I also think that the storming of the U.S. Embassy in the movie is terrifying in light of the recent rash of attacks in the Middle East today. It sort of shows that while thirty years have passed, not much has changed. The film is very much a Lumiere-style film in that it attempts to capture the world as it was/is, and Affleck does a great job. The real news footage spliced in is a great device, and I wouldn't be surprised if Argo gets an Oscar nomination. At the end of the movie they even do a side-by-side comparisons of the cast of the movie and the actual people they're portraying, and they're more or less spot on.
With one exception. Ben Affleck. Great actor? Yes. Dreamboat? Objectively so. Latino? Nooo . . .
And yet he plays Tony Mendez, the main character of the movie. Let's go on a tangent with Moebius the Time Streamer. Before Batman: Dark Knight Rises came out, I was a little disappointed to find out that Bane, a Latino character (he's a luchador), was being played by Tom Hardy, who one might say is less than Latino (he's British, the opposite of Latino. If you touch a Latino and a Brit, I'm pretty sure they explode). I said I was disappointed that they were taking one of the few ethnic characters in Batman and making him white. People responded with "Well, Bane is the villain. Maybe they didn't want to cast a minority as a villain." Okay, well, I disagree, but that's a valid point.
Woooo! Back the the present. WHY ISN'T TONY MENDEZ BEING PLAYED BY SOMEONE OF CORRECT DESCENT? He's a hero, a super-intelligent man of mystery. One might be tempted to say that it's this new color-blind casting thing, but then why is everyone else in the film "ethnically correct"? When Louis C. K. cast a black woman as his wife and the mother of his two white children I was like, "Yeah, okay. That's fine." Why? Because Louis is a more Melies show. The purpose of the show is absurdity, not representing the world as it is, and Ben Affleck was definitely trying to portray the world as it is. Why then would every character except the main character be so spot on?
There's probably money behind it: would anyone see it without Ben Affleck's mug? It's certainly not because there's a dearth of Latino talent (though there are too few non-white actors appearing as main characters these days). Maybe Ben Affleck just really wanted the part because he idolizes Mr. Mendez. That's not the worst motivation in the world.
Argo is a great movie. If you're not a slave to MPAA ratings (the MPAA is the devil, don't let them censor your life!), see it. It really opened my eyes about Iran and U.S. relations, past and present. But you don't have to hate something to criticize it, and I wish that Mr. Affleck hadn't whitewashed the film.
Watch it.
Also, ate at Carl's Jr. after the movie, and while the teriyaki burger was nothing to write home about, the grilled cheese and bacon burger was good. Mhm.
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