Looks like Tom Hanks is going to haul in another Oscar.
Outstanding movie. And for once, it’s a movie based on a true story where they actually tell the story, and not just shovel bullshit where the names are right and little else, like American Gangster.
Just saw the movie this morning, and I entirely agree with your post.
Okay, somebody has broken into Clothahump’s house and is using his logon. That’s the only way this could happen.
Just attaching my review from yesterday since this thread seems to have more juice.
Saw the film today and thought it was excellent…Tom Hanks was great and so was Julie Roberts, but Philip Seymour Hoffman stole the movie with his performance.
It is going to be a very interesting Oscar season this year!
Yeah, Hoffman’s having a hell of a year.
Very well-constructed screenplay. One of the best “confrontation in the boss’s office” scenes ever.
Hoffman should get a best actor nomination for “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”, a best-supporting nomination for this, and probably a best-actor nom for “The Savages” but I haven’t seen that yet; I’m just going on experience.
I really liked this movie. Engaging plot, but mainly dialog-driven, as Mike Nichols movies tend to be.
Great stuff. . .
The whole “I wasn’t listening through the door” sequence.
“You can teach 'em to type, but you can’t teach 'em to grow tits.”
“Which one is the weapons analyst? . . .It’s the geek in the white shirt. Trick question. Get used to that.”
PSH’s opening scene in his boss’ office was hilarious. Enjoyable flick, and Mike Nichols seems to get that movies – even movies about things like the war in Afghanistan – don’t need to be two hours and twenty minutes long.
I’ve read the book and I’m looking forward to the movie.
I’m from Charlie Wilson’s district. I heard him speak at campaign rally when I was 18. We never heard about any of his foreign affairs activities. Charlie was well known for taking care of the home folks. If you were having problems with the Social Security office, you called up Charlie Wilson’s office and they took care of it.
He was the keynote speaker at the graduation of a friend’s daughter two years ago. Time has taken it’s toll on him, but he still stands tall and and commands your attention. He was able to throw a few digs in at the current administration, too.
I remember toward toward the end of his career, he got caught up in the check kiting scandal in the house. Someone dared to run against him that term and tried to make political hay of it. Charlie’s attitude was basically: “Aw shucks, I never could balance my checkbook anyway. Ya’ll know me.”
The two times I’ve heard him speak, he was projecting the good ol’ unsophisticated country boy act. But, the book left no doubt, he was a pretty shrewd political operator. Either that, or he was the luckiest congressman ever to serve.
Yep, never assume somebody’s not smart because they have a good ol’ boy persona.
You are right. I’ve seen (and enjoyed) all three, and a casual viewer would never know it was the same actor in all three movies. Too bad an actor can’t be nominated twice in the same category, so he couldn’t get two Best Actor nominations (or two Best Supporting nominations), but he could get a Best Actor nom AND a Best Supporting Actor nom. He won’t though. All three performances will be ignored, I’m sure. None of them were nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award. It’s a damned shame.
In any case, he’s amazing, and I also enjoyed Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Amy Adams. The story was interesting and the movie was surprisingly witty, given the subject matter. We had a great time at Charlie Wilson’s War.
what I liked…
what I disliked…
no Bin Laden references wtf?
A pretty enjoyable flick overall.
Why would there be? He was a minor, very unimportant figure until long after the Soviets pulled out.
Agreed. The filmmakers assumed audiences could connect the dots themselves without wandering down a narrative bunny trail into another movie entirely.
I loved the movie too, and am glad to see it actually did a little business at the box office in a very crowded opening weekend. Hopefully good word of mouth will keep people coming.
He could have been used effectively as an allusion to the foreboding atrocities lying ahead.
As for the box office success, the movie seems to have become epidemic among old people (highlighted by the adjacent Alvin and the Chipmunks in my case).
That’s not the movie they were trying to make.
Too true. They made a fairy tale of the way we in the U.S. would like to think the world works instead of the way it does.
I thought Hanks and Hoffman were terrific, especially in the way they played off one another. This might be Nichol’s best directing job in many years. He’s as good with standard Hollywood dialog as anyone working and he had a near pitch-perfect script to work with. Aaron Sorkin did everything right here with his script that he did wrong with Studio 60. He gave us the behind-the-scenes look at the world that people pant for, even if it was so compressed into witty lines that any sense of how it must have happened in reality is incomprehensible. (Did anyone notice how seven years suddenly slipped by before the anti-tank missiles were in Afghanistan so that the war really did turn into Russia’s Vietnam?) Julia Roberts did little more than a cameo and was unconvincing at best. Her whole part could easily have been excised without hurting the movie. Why does this woman care about Pakistan? Who knows? Who cares? (I did feel sorry for her having to strip down into a bikini in the same picture that has Emily Blunt showing the same amount of skin. With one, it’s “Hot.” With the other, “how well preserved.” She shouldn’t do this ever again.)
The events currently taking place in Pakistan also made several of the scenes almost unbearably ironic.
“We fucked up the endgame.” Yeah, our policy in Afghanistan and in the rest of that part of the world was perfect until then, and so was the CIA. A fairy tale, and perfectly enjoyable as one. Do not confuse any moment of it with reality.
At least Dan Rather gets proper credit for bringing down the Soviet empire. 
Well, actually, they presented things very much in the tone of the book they were adapting, which was, I understand, the goal.
I didn’t like the way Sorkin (I’m going to blame him for this) represented the Russians in the film.
Yes they were the enemy, but for a film that tries to humanize certain foreign countries, it does the exact opposite for the Russians. The CIA agents were all too happy to kill Russians and the Russian helicopter pilots were portrayed as inhuman killing machines.
Other than that the movie was great. Sorkin is really good at portraying the American political system as broken, but one that has decent people in it trying to make a difference. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he is really good when it comes to writing about politics.
Odd thing about most of the reviews: none of them mention the fact that Charlie Wilson’s nickname was “Good Time” Charlie Wilson.
Favorite story: Charlie Wilson once said (to journalists with mics on, I might add) about Strom Thurmond, “when he dies, they’ll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to get the coffin lid shut.” He was referring to the fact that Thurmond fathered a kid at an old age (80? or so).
Old anecdote: When Lyndon Johnson was a senator, some lobbiest was giving his pitch and sad, “Well, I’m just an ol’ country boy–”
“Wait just a minute,” LBJ interrupted. “I’m ‘just an ol’ country boy’ myself and when I hear that phrase, I get a good grip on my wallet!”
I saw the movie New Year’s Eve. I was very entertaining, one of the better movies I saw last year. They skipped over a lot of stuff from the book, which give the movie view the impression that their aid to the Muj went a whole lot smotther and quicker than the story told in the book.
For example, the movie kind of skipped past the Oerlikon gun story. It was not a huge success.
See the movie reminded me of a related personal anecdote. When I was a teenager, rumor spread around East Texas that government buyers were showing up at livestock auctions to buy donkeys and small mules. The prices on such livestock went up pretty dramatically. The rumor was that the State Department was buying them for some sort of mining project somewhere.
Two years ago, when I was reading the book, the author mentioned them buying pack animals for the Afghans and the light bulb went off in my head (yeah, a rather dim bulb). That’s what was happening at the auction barns.