Ben Affleck
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Connections, in both directions
With the amount of time to rescue them dwindling—they fled the embassy during the raid and have been living for months in the home of the Canadian ambassador—Mendez comes up with a whackadoodle plan to pose himself and the six people as a film crew making a cheesy Star Wars knockoff called Argo.
They hilariously start reading—with terrible delivery—perhaps the most hackneyed post-Star Wars script since, well, Flash Gordon.
The title comes from an apparently risible Star Wars?knockoff screenplay used as a pretext to get six Americans out of Iran.
After flying to the West Coast, Tony meets with CIA-connected makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and curmudgeonly motormouth producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin, in fine, salty form), who set him up with a script – a Star Wars knockoff called Argo – along with a publicity campaign.
His rather nifty idea was to say they were all location scouts for a big budget Star Wars knock-off, and to support this cover he enlisted Oscar-winning makeup effects artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who had assisted the CIA before by crafting disguises on their missions.
''If I'm doing a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit,'' veteran producer Lester Siegel (a razor-sharp Alan Arkin) tells Mendez, and there are some amusing gibes as the production of the titular sci-fi epic (it's the era of Star Wars) is publicly launched to provide viable cover.
He also matches the historical era with its corresponding cinematic style, favoring a more traditional, gritty look that evokes classic ’70s touchstones like All the President’s Men (1976).
Sporting a love for movies on his sleeve, Affleck's film gives nods to the smart, entertaining and engaging thrillers from the '70s -- "All the President's Men," "Three Days of the Condor," et al. -- and playfully with B-movie science-fiction pictures of the era without ever trying to lean too hard into any specific homage.
It is his cleanest, most engrossing work to date and not only duplicates the look of the late 1970s but also recalls the movies from that era - such as Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor - with its grainy aesthetic and official subterfuge.
Affleck does, however, give himself a couple of hero shots, one of which recalls Robert Redford from Argo’s antecedent All the President’s Men.
Making clear its intentions from the start, with a 70s-style title card and an opening credits sequence full of faux print damage, Affleck’s follow-up to The Town is a love letter to the classy, serious political thrillers of yesteryear: films like All The President’s Men that strived to entertain and inform in PRECISELY EQUAL measure.
A sports drama in the same way that Aaron Sorkin’s Moneyball is a sports drama, Air uses the bones of an underdog comeback story and applies it to the macro world of sports.
This and other key moments play like classic Aaron Sorkin scenes, blending the inside-baseball insights of “Moneyball” with “The Social Network”-style power games.
If “Moneyball,” a spiritual cousin to “Air,” was baseball-adjacent, “Air” is about as far away from the game of basketball as one can get.
But there’s another, even more specific influence here in the form of Moneyball , itself a sort of Social Network clone, right down to the Aaron Sorkin script.
It feels like a scene lifted straight from Moneyball .
With echoes of Moneyball , which was also about the machinations that occur away from the game, the picture should enjoy glowing reviews and warm word of mouth.
The U.S. government turns to exfiltration specialist Tony Mendez (a magnificently bearded Affleck), who comes up with a plan so crazy it just might work (that it was inspired by Battle for the Planet of the Apes should have been a concern).
The costumes, hair and sets give off a pungent ’70s scent, starting with the old-school Warner Bros. logo in the opening credits to the movie Affleck’s son watches on a small TV – Battle for the Planet of the Apes, with makeup designed by John Chambers, played by Goodman here.
He's inspired by a late night viewing of "Battle For The Planet Of The Apes" with his son to create a fake science fiction film that is looking for exotic locations, requiring a trip to Iran.
So Tony Mendez (Affleck) gets the green light for a caper so wacky it can only have been inspired by his son watching “Battle for the Planet of the Apes.”
Directed by and starring Ben Affleck , who's working from a script by Chris Terrio, "Argo" settles in to a CIA conference room and lays out all of the scenarios and cover stories that won't work to get these four men and two women out of the country before Affleck's character, Tony Mendez, finds inspiration in a TV rerun of "Battle for the Planet of the Apes."
Luckily, Mendez has an inspiration while watching, of all things, “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” on television with his son.
Affleck combines visceral excitement, bracing authenticity, and an ambiance of malice and dread to make what might be the best movie set in Boston since The Friends of Eddie Coyle — and that includes his own Gone Baby Gone .
He includes a nod to that decade's Boston-set "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," a melancholy crime drama that would have laughed this movie's sentimental ending right into the Charles River.
Sporting a love for movies on his sleeve, Affleck's film gives nods to the smart, entertaining and engaging thrillers from the '70s -- "All the President's Men," "Three Days of the Condor," et al. -- and playfully with B-movie science-fiction pictures of the era without ever trying to lean too hard into any specific homage.
It is his cleanest, most engrossing work to date and not only duplicates the look of the late 1970s but also recalls the movies from that era - such as Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor - with its grainy aesthetic and official subterfuge.
I was frequently reminded of 1995’s Apollo 13 in that we know how the whole thing will turn out, but the suspense is still borderline unbearable.
In the populist vein of Ron Howard 's “Apollo 13,” Affleck's rouser salutes the Americans (and, more offhandedly, the Canadians) who restored our sense of can-do spirit when we needed it.
In that vein, it’s very much like Ron Howard’s equally thrilling “Apollo 13,” albeit with a far more humorous bent that’s perfectly in keeping with Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and his theory on how tragedy and farce relate to history.
"Argo" is a lot like "Apollo 13" in that the outcome of the real story is public record.
The script by Affleck, Peter Craig , and Aaron Stockard , based on the novel "Prince of Thieves" by Chuck Hogan , draws less on life than on other, similarly themed movies, especially " The Departed ."
The title of the The Town, which is based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan and adapted by Peter Craig, Affleck, and Aaron Stockard (who also worked on Gone Baby Gone, refers to Charlestown, a square-mile neighborhood in Boston that opening title cards inform us is responsible for producing more bank and armored truck robbers than any other place in the United States.
Affleck takes the Clint Eastwood/Kevin Costner/Mel Gibson route by directing and starring in "The Town," a taut adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel "Prince of Thieves."
(“The Town” was adapted from “Prince of Thieves” by Chuck Hogan.)
The Departed (2006)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced The Town (2010), Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Themes Plot
A worthy if decidedly less ambitious effort from actor-turned-director Ben Affleck, "The Town" doesn't quite match the thematic complexity or moral ambiguity that made his first feature, 2007's " Gone Baby Gone ," or 2006's like-minded " The Departed " so very good.
Like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed or James Gray’s We Own the Night, The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.
The Town never reaches the operatic heights of the movie to which it will inevitably compared, The Departed, but it's a solid improvement on the plothole-riddled Gone Baby Gone, and sports so many quality performances that miraculously don't drown each other out.
The script by Affleck, Peter Craig , and Aaron Stockard , based on the novel "Prince of Thieves" by Chuck Hogan , draws less on life than on other, similarly themed movies, especially " The Departed ."
The British producer clearly recognised elements in Chuck Hoganâ??s novel that reminded him of his biggest success thus far, Martin Scorseseâ??s The Departed, likewise a Boston-set story pitting cops and mobsters against one another.
As a classic Hollywood thriller it succeeds on most levels, the cop vs criminal interplay is not as thought out as it could have been but its evocation of Boston rivals Martin Scorsese’s urban gangster drama The Departed.
This gangster movie may not be on par with the caliber of “The Godfather,” but "Live by Night," remains a solid drama with a great pedigree that will be worth seeing for fans of the genre.
"Live By Night" works a bit like Affleck's directorial crime drama debut "The Town," filtered through Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," with Lehane's adapted story coming off worse for the compassion.
That’s a lot of plot real estate to cover, but with a leaner, smarter screenplay than Affleck himself has delivered, the sprawl could have remained just as epic, the intentions just as ambitious and noble, the impact just as incisive and intimate as, oh, say, The Godfather.
Affleck’s love of The Godfather is evident throughout Live by Night, to the extent that it’s almost impossible to discuss the latter without mentioning the former.
"Live by Night" wants it both ways and while the first "Godfather" picture, among others, managed to have it both ways, well, "The Godfather" is "The Godfather."
An outright catastrophe as historical drama, it gets halfway to redeeming itself as camp: reaching for the operatic heights of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Affleck’s belly-flop lands nearer to the terrain of lounge act Duke Mitchell’s infamous Massacre Mafia Style (1974)—though Affleck’s antiseptic money pit is nowhere near so lovably, eccentrically handmade.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced Argo (2012), The Town (2010)
Themes Plot Visuals
I mean we cheered Bonnie and Clyde because we saw them rob the big banks but let customers keep their own money; we cheered Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon” because we really came to empathize with him; and we sympathized with the prisoners in “In the Name of the Father” because we saw the role politics and coerced confessions played in their convictions.
So we get a good heist movie that can be filed alongside genre classics like Heat and Dog Day Afternoon, along with one of the year’s better love stories.
(Disabling cell phones wasnâ??t a problem that Al Pacino and John Cazale ever had to confront in Dog Day Afternoon.)
Argo isn’t quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage—smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like Dog Day Afternoon .
And the pacing is exquisite, recalling such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and The Marathon Man .
That’s especially true in the terrific final act, when the film goes from “Wag the Dog”-type satire to “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Midnight Express”-style tension.
Villeneuve, who directed the fascinating 2010 film Incendies, plays with echoes of many of the better crime films of the past two decades, including The Vanishing, Mystic River , Gone Baby Gone , and, most notably, David Fincher's multiple contributions to the genre.
It joins films like “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” as touchstone works about such tragedies.
It's an anguished ordeal of a movie, its two and a half hours soaked with freezing rain, anxiety and nods to Silence of The Lambs, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and everything Michael Haneke ever did.
Its child abduction story might seem to put it alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River or Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone.
Admirers of Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” and Ben Affleck’s “Gone Baby Gone” – films that deserved more awards season acclaim than they received – will feel right at home here.
It may not have the endlessly pummeling effect of Mystic River or Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, but in terms of child-abduction thrillers, it's engaging and gut-wrenching—without diving into an abyss of emotional torture in the name of entertainment.
This and other key moments play like classic Aaron Sorkin scenes, blending the inside-baseball insights of “Moneyball” with “The Social Network”-style power games.
Like “The Social Network”—a movie it surely will surely compared to—this is a vibrant time capsule capturing a moment in the culture when a series of events led to a revolution that forever changed the worlds of sports, business, fashion and lifestyle.
For instance, what would The Social Network (2010) be without the so-called friendship between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin as a microcosm of how people would use their platform in the future?
With carefully curated production design and sterile, fluorescent aesthetics—a kind of ambient boardroom hum punctuated by a string of reliable I-Love-the-’80s bangers—Affleck’s film belongs to a contemporary subgenre of corporate origin myths whose gold standard is probably The Social Network .
Of course people think of Moneyball and The Social Network but you can go back to movies like Broadcast News and Network .
The film is reminiscent of the 1995 Michael Mann drama "Heat," striking a similar tone.
Unfortunately, like "Heat," "The Town" kind of whiffs it in the male-female relations department, though in Affleck's case it hurts his movie more than it hurt Michael Mann's.
Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan, the plot may be similar to Michael Mann's Heat but the film is much more intimate, focussing so tightly on the relationships between the characters that action scenes feel almost like distractions.
It is a classically structured thriller, bringing elements from the masterpieces of the heist genre especially Michael Mann’s Heat and sticking to some of those hammered old cliches: the dynamic between Cop and Criminal, the final job before fleeing to Mexico with the cash, the corrupting factor among the crooks etc.
In the pantheon of serious-minded heist films, The Town is a respectable addition, falling beneath the bar set by Michael Mann's Heat but alongside 2008's The Bank Job.
It comes up short in that category thanks to Jon Hamm’s stock performance as the FBI agent on their tale, Hamm severely lacking the “pop” of other dogged law men before him (Al Pacino in Heat , Mark Ruffalo in Collateral).
The Star Wars references not only recall the name given in the 1980s to Reagan's mooted missile-defence program, but also hark back to The Men Who Stare at Goats, a more pointedly satirical docudrama that mocks the fantasy of American military power as benign (both films were produced by Smokehouse Pictures, the company owned by George Clooney with Goats director Grant Heslov).
(As they proved with 2009’s The Men Who Stare At Goats, Clooney and Heslov have a fondness for oddball espionage.)
And, somewhat akin to "The China Syndrome," it has the distinction of having history repeat itself right as it's released.
Skilfully directed by the Oscar winning screenwriter, and written with real zing by tyro scribe Alex Convery, AIR plays partly like one of Adam McKay’s period pieces on industry highs and lows ( The Big Short, Don’t Look Up ), and part like Cameron Crowe’s inspiring, sports-agent classic Jerry Maguire (this film also using music and motivational quotes, spliced between pivotal scenes in a similar fashion, to great effect).
At times, the editing speeds up, and we start getting whip-pans and smash cuts; things could start feeling awfully reminiscent of Adam McKay’s “The Big Short,” which can be insufferable if not done right.
Boston challenges Chicago (The French Connection, 1971) and San Francisco (Bullitt, 1968) as a setting of unforgettable car chases.
Affleck�s car chases achieve the high quality set by Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971), the two films against which all subsequent car chases must be measured.
Near the middle of the film there is a botched armored truck heist that leads to a hectic police chase through the narrow streets and back alleys of Boston, and the film’s climax involves an attempt to rob the cash coming out of Fenway Park, both of which Affleck and cinematographer Robert Elswit (who won an Oscar for 2007’s There Will Be Blood) stage and film with the kind of shaky, verite-style intensity that William Friedkin used so memorably in The French Connection (1971).
So much for subtext, but I can’t argue with the result: the sequence rivals the classic scenes in Bullitt and The French Connection , and it makes you wonder why no one’s shot something like that in this labyrinthine neighborhood before.
The plot suggests Wag the Dog — David Mamet’s 1997 political satire about a Hollywood producer inventing a foreign war to divert attention from a Presidential scandal — but in reverse.
A more optimistic take on the power of Hollywood to orchestrate a media spectacle than Barry Levinson’s “Wag the Dog,” Affleck’s tale shifts from brooding espionage to amusing farce when Mendez heads west to hire acclaimed makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and cigar-chomping producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) to flesh out the plan.
Whenever they appear on the screen for their comic-relief turns, Argo turns into a cross between Wag the Dog and The Producers.
And while at times Argo resembles a reverse Wag the Dog, it never lets the audience forget that a very dangerous and very serious situation underpins everything going on.
Like “ Wag the Dog ” before it, “Argo” takes full advantage of the overlap between tradecraft and showbiz, depicting the movie industry at its most tacky, mendacious and fulsomely amoral.
That’s especially true in the terrific final act, when the film goes from “Wag the Dog”-type satire to “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Midnight Express”-style tension.
The Untouchables (1987)
Directed by Brian De Palma
influenced Live by Night (2016), The Town (2010)
Characters Themes
Heâ??s a lawman with a hint of Kevin Costner in The Untouchables and a strange, smirking relish for telling suspects about the sexual indignities theyâ??ll suffer in jail.
His work in front of the camera isn’t unlike Kevin Costner’s contributions to films like The Untouchables and Dances with Wolves .
Affleck’s effort bests classic prohibition-set movies like “The Untouchables” and “Miller’s Crossing” by only its volume of bloodshed.
Adult male audiences with an appetite for old-school gangster action might be intrigued, but anyone hoping this would join the ranks of distinctive Prohibition thrillers like The Untouchables, Miller's Crossing or Once Upon a Time in America will find it lacks the teeth of those films, even though it doesn't stint on bloodshed.
It doesn’t help matters that it’s a Prohibition-era film that takes place mostly in Florida, inviting comparisons to “The Untouchables” and “Scarface” whether Affleck wants them or not.
It’s a genre that seems hard-wired into our sense of what’s cool and stylish about movies, whether it’s classics like The Godfather and GoodFellas or also-rans like The Untouchables and Public Enemies.