Brace yourself, it's like talking to those two old fucks from the Muppets

1. Found in this weekend's mail: my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #27, with a beautiful cover by Paula Friedlander and containing my poem "Kalligeneia 2012." This is the one I referred to for weeks as "the sap poem," because I hadn't found its proper title yet and because that seemed a good warning of its emotional content. I wrote it in March because of derspatchel. (He gets my other copy: a muse's ten percent.) It has Charon and subways and a shout-out to a popular song. Καλλιγένεια is the name of the third day of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the celebration of Persephone's return aboveground. We are heading back into the dark now. I don't mind the reminder.

2. I have mixed feelings about Argo (2012), which I saw on Friday at the Lexington ex-Flick, but since I'd like to see more films directed by Ben Affleck, I think it has fulfilled at least one of its purposes. Its major problem for me is one of tone, although less drastically than Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. It is correct that the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis are owed the weight of history (and Western culpability) in order not to feel like just another backdrop of exotic danger, and it is correct that the premise of what became known as the "Canadian Caper" is so fundamentally batshit that the satire practically writes itself, and the first two thirds of the film reflect these moods in turn—the close-quarters boredom and nerves of the six "houseguests" of the Canadian ambassador, the cheerful industry cynicism of the makeup artist and the producer recruited to do everything for the CIA's fictitious movie but make it, and when they're working off each other it is impossible not to think of the results as The Scarlet Pimpernel meets The Producers, they fight crime. Where the film runs into trouble is the last third, when the two states need to exist simultaneously—confidence tricks across the abyss—and instead it lurches heavily in the direction of nail-biting suspense it really doesn't need, especially considering the real-life caper came off with nearly anticlimactic success. Sticking to the facts would have strengthened the absurdity without trivializing the danger with a Hollywood hairsbreadth escape. As it was, right in the middle of a chase scene was when I started wondering about the historical veracity of what I was seeing, and that's not when you want audiences to remember where they left their disbelief hanging.

That said, Affleck makes a solid leading man and that's not faint praise—it's an ensemble film, so he can't give himself all the best lines and he doesn't, but he can't be a charisma vacancy, either, when Tony Mendez needs to be the CIA's best "exfil" man with an improviser's knack for cover identities and a forger's way with a passport. I like Victor Garber whenever I find him, here providing the major Canadian presence as the ambassador who shelters the six Americans and works the other half of the charade; I would like to see more of Sheila Vand, whose small, mostly watchful role as the Taylors' housekeeper is complemented by her voice opening the story, setting the scene of Iran's recent history over a flicker of movie storyboards. Alan Arkin and John Goodman are a meta-delight to watch snark their way around Hollywood's backlots like something out of Preston Sturges, leaving no aspect of their profession unzinged. ("The target audience will hate it."—"Who's the target audience?"—"People with eyes.") But someone had better start giving Bryan Cranston more film roles of comparable complexity to his television work, because I left the theater texting Rob about him and I just don't think I can do four seasons of Breaking Bad right now. He's Mendez's boss, the probably composite Jack O'Donnell; he has the unenviable task of pouring first water and then frantic gasoline on the home fires when the op is called off halfway and Mendez, in Tehran, flatly states he's still bringing the houseguests home, which means all of a sudden those seven plane tickets need to be un-canceled and someone had better be staffing the office in L.A. and if the Secretary of State isn't taking his calls, does anyone know where his kids go to school . . . ? He's a career spook in a three-piece suit (which he looks good in, a long-limbed man whose habitual posture is a tense striding stoop) and sideburns (which nobody in this movie looks good in, but at least he got to dodge the porn 'stache) and in the strictest sense he is there to make the plot happen, but because Bryan Cranston is a terrific character actor, I found myself trying to parse the layers as I watched him, how much of that seen-it-all snappishness is really what he feels, how much is the vibe he knows his people need to feel from him, and it only confused me slightly that Cranston c. 1979 looks a lot like Denholm Elliott of the same decade.

3. And last night rushthatspeaks and I heard a benshi at the Harvard Film Archive; it was an extraordinary experience. If you are in the Boston area and haven't finalized your plans for tonight, go hear Ichiro Kataoka perform Ozu's Dragnet Girl (1933). We heard the melodrama Shoes (1916) and Charlie Chaplin's A Dog's Life (1918). I had never before heard anyone do a voice for the Little Tramp. The character is a silent icon. He's going to sound like Kataoka-san's bumblebee-muttering, puttering commedia stream-of-consciousness every time I watch his movies now. And I don't even speak Japanese.

Plans for the remainder of this afternoon: in our ongoing efforts to watch everything of his that isn't Salò, Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962). And then clean all the rest of the things.