THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOVIE PAGE

 

IS 'ARGO' THE WORST BEST PICTURE EVER?

Blame Martin Short.

That joke about how he’d flown to Toronto on Air Canada….” Or as Ben Affleck would call it, US Air.”

I got steamed about it all over again.

The towering intellect and stature of THE Ben Affleck; co-star of ‘Gigli’, now playing eternally in the Cineplex From Hell; who so convincingly played the boneheaded construction worker in ‘Good Will Hunting’; the losing half of a multi-hour marriage to Jennifer Lopez.

Actually I might have to give him that one. It was JLo after all.

This is the guy, along with the Integrity Specialists in Hollywood, who decided to transplant the heroic and successful ending to the 1979 Iran hostage crisis from the Canadians who actually did it. And award it to the U.S.A. who more or less showed up for the after party.

Aside from that grudge, I remember watching it and being absolutely stunned that such a fatuous, second-rate thriller (and I use the term lightly) won anything more than the Oscar for Obnoxious Appropriation of History.

Except for a few wonderful scenes from John Goodman and Alan Arkin early on, it was just laughably bad. Affleck sitting there in Immigration, looking and sounding about as Canadian as only someone born in Berkeley, California can. Seriously people, can’t you even make an effort?

At least someone in Iran is suing.

Letting all of that go, ( I promise), I still think it raises a serious question: What is the Worst Movie ever to win Best Picture?

There are two real categories of The Worst Best.

First, there are the decent movies that just have the misfortune of beating out much more deserving great ones.

 The top of that list belongs “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1979. The Academy invoked its “Head-in-the-Sand Clause” to choose the eminently forgettable tearjerker about the breakup of a marriage between Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, over the brilliant, iconic but (then) controversial “Apocalypse Now.”

Still Kramer was a much better film than Argo. But then, as you may have gathered, I’ve seen Justin Bieber videos better than Argo.

And don’t get me wrong. I loved Rocky as much as the next guy. But was it really a better movie than the rest of the bumper crop of 1976: Taxi Driver, Network or All the President's Men? 

But the generally accepted worst offender of all time in this category was the 1941 epic How Green Was My Valley. 

How Bad Was This Movie?

It wasn’t awful. Though how the great John Ford could make something so drear AND schmaltzy at the same time astounds.

Its biggest Crime Against Cinematy was beating three of the best movies of all time:

Bogart’s The Maltese Falcon; Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York; Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

But was How Green better than Argo?

Hell, yes.

Then there are the just plain old Stinkers.

Some of them are just out and out bad and their selection can only be explained by Academy politics or a collective brain cramp. Argo is a serious contender here.

Titanic (2007) almost goes without saying.

I never understood how Forrest Gump (1994) got made or what it’s about. I guess they wouldn’t vote for an innovative bloodbath like Pulp Fiction.And thank God they didn’t give it to Four Weddings and a Funeral.

A few critics campaigned for Hoop Dreams, the wonderful documentary about young basketball players trying to escape their inner-city lives. It would have been a great call.

As a final thought here, I always recall A Beautiful Mind (2001) as being 2 totally wasted hours of my life I’ll never get back.

The heavyweight in this division, though, is the legendary the 1956 production of Around the World in 80 Days.

A huge, sprawling, excruciatingly lifeless 2 hours and 55 minutes with several of England’s cinematic superstars.
David Niven, Sir John Gielgud, Noel Coward. Throw in Marlene Dietrich, Buster Keaton, Frank Sinatra, and Shirley MacLaine. Written by S.J. Perelman and narrated by Edward R. Murrow. I mean this cast could beat the Miami Heat.

Michael Anderson directed and he went to bring us not only The Martian Chronicles but The New Adventures of Pinocchio as well.

But was it a better movie than Argo?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.