Argo [DVD] [Region 2] (English audio. English subtitles)

We decided to improve the level of movie standard we were watching. We sought refuge in the (debatable) safety of the Oscar Best Picture category. We loved the drawn out tension in this film. As a child of the 70’s I somehow missed this historical event at the turn of the decade from my primary school point of view of the world. So the plot filled in a historical hole and explained much of the misremembered early 80’s news stories that I must have experienced but not understood at the time. I’m not sure of the historical accuracy and Hollywood gloss but images from the film presented alongside the ‘real’ photojournalist ones infer absolute integrity to the facts.The tension built in the 2hr or so is truly impressive and I will certainly continue my journey along the Oscar Best Picture shelf...

As 2 hours of entertainment - this is outstanding. It has high drama, almost unbearable tension, some sparkling dialogue and lovely humour. Affleck has done a great job as an actor and director. Late 70s USA and I suspect Iran are shown so well its as if someone had found a time machine. Alan Arkin and John Goodman are great as two cynical but clever Hollywood operators given the chance to do some good.It should be 5 stars, but a point has to be knocked off for the usual shameful riding roughshod over the real facts, which wouldn't appear to add to the story greatly but do make the US look better. Yes its based on a true story but as with all these films it takes itself very seriously and is happy for people to take it as fact (which many people do of course) If you can stomach or ignore this - then its highly recommended.

This was an interesting story about the American hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979. Iranian students invaded the embassy holding 52 hostages for over a year, but six diplomats escaped before the takeover. The film is mainly concerned with their extraction from Iran by CIA agent Tony Mendez, played by an expressionless Ben Affleck, and was known at the time as the ‘Canadian Caper’.It has been acknowledged, including by Jimmy Carter, that the film is fictionalized and only ‘loosely’ based on the real events. I wouldn’t normally have a problem with this in other films, but why is the Canadian’s involvement largely written out? Also in the film they say that the British embassy turned away the six diplomats, whereas in fact they did stay there for a while until it was unsafe, and then went to the Canadian embassy. No wonder it won three Oscars when you can make the Americans involvement look heroic and everyone else a bit useless.What could have been a really exciting fact based account of the incident has been turned into a US comic book story. I do hope Mr Affleck doesn’t make any other ‘historical’ films, as some will take this film as fact.

As a drama this works very well but once again the American habit of downplaying the assistance given by allies, lets it down. The British and New Zealand embassies did not refuse to help. Far from it.

An entertaining, enthralling, often gripping portrayal of a real event, a CIA operation that relied on a bizarre deception. I knew of the story because of the involvement of my all-time favourite comic book artist, Jack Kirby. As part of the plot, the CIA needed to produce a convincing fake film production called Argo. To lend a sense of reality to it, they used a group of designs that Jack Kirby had done for a proposed sci-fi theme park based on the novels of Roger Zelazny.Ben Affleck, who also directs, is great as the agent tasked with pulling off this unlikely rescue of a group of American diplomatic staff trapped in Iran after the fall of the Shah. The rest of the cast are equally good and Affleck's direction is assured, nicely building the tension and cleverly blending documentary footage into the mix.Excellent.

It's not often a film gets a 5* review from me; there's usually something not quite right or room for improvement. Argo nearly warrants a top star rating. I'm always sceptical about movies nominated for loads of Oscars as often they're just jingoistic flavour-of-the-month or hyped by a well funded PR campaign (witness `The Hurt Locker'). In the case of Argo the recognition of a job well done is mostly deserved. Ben Affleck the actor seems to be improving & maturing with each successive movie, but in his return to directing since the disappointing `The Town' he has taken a refreshingly un-Hollywood approach to attention to detail and production values.I'm old enough to remember the events first-hand (though admittedly it was a long time and a lot of wine ago) but I was pretty shaky on the detail but the introductory `history lesson' using real and cleverly faked footage from the time made sure that we were fully aware of the context of the crisis. What we, and everybody else at the time, were unaware of was the CIA's and Hollywood's improbable involvement in the repatriation (or `exfiltration' as they seem to call it) of a group of escaped hostages. However, the alleged historical veracity has suffered, as usual, at the hands of the Hollywood machine. Just a brief bit of Google'ing shows how actual events have been subverted by the convenient `based on a true story' subtitle. The role of the British was completely ignored (just what have the Yanks got against us?) and the role of the Canadians was downplayed significantly.This could have easily been one of those slow, stodgy films that take themselves far too seriously but there's just the right undercurrent of light humour in the Hollywood proceedings and the casting of Alan Arkin and the irrepressibly good humoured John Goodman was inspired. Despite the American penchant for re-writing history for their own shallow glorification this is still a splendidly watchable film and we shall undoubtedly re-watch it many times.