Movie Review: Charlie Wilson’s War

Occasionally I watch a movie that opens my eyes to well-known events and shows me an angle that I had not considered before.

Charlie Wilson’s War is presumably based on true events, and I have no evidence of  this being true or false, so let’s say it’s true. In the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was getting all the credit for ending the Cold War, the Russians were fighting a cruel and bloody war in Afghanistan. They had absolute superiority in terms of numbers and military equipment. The Afghan freedom fighters were resisting with rifles on the ground. The Soviets came in with helicopter gunships and blew away villages, men, women and children indiscriminately. They actually created mines that looked like toys, so the children would pick them up to play, and their hands and sometimes arms were blown away, if they survived. The Russians had figured out that it takes much more time and effort to take care of maimed children than healthy ones, and parents taking care of children had to time or resources to take up arms against the Russians. By 1990, half of the entire population of Afghanistan was under 14 years old, and many of the children were maimed.

In comes a U.S. Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks). He travels to Afghanistan and sees the refugee camps, observes the sorry state of the resistance, and is truly moved to do the right thing. That’s a stretch for a hard-drinking, cocaine-using and womanizing congressman from Texas, but he seems like just the right guy for the job. With the help of a Houston Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a cunning and courageous CIA veteran Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour), he raises money from the U.S. government for the Afghans. Five million dollars a year gradually turns into one billion dollars a year for Russian weapons that, through a complex set of maneuvers, comes from Israel through Pakistan into Afghanistan. Helicopters get shot down, tanks get blown up, and the Afghans start getting the upper hand and drive out the mightiest army in the world. The cold war ends, and Charlie Wilson does not get any credit. Really, did you know who Charlie Wilson even was before seeing this movie?

This is where the movie review ends and the social criticism starts: Fast forward a few years. The lost, abused and maimed children grow up. What will their worldview be? They need to survive, without much of a country, with no parents, no industry, no love and no hope. The very freedom fighters that we trained and supplied with arms in 1988 slowly morph into – yes – the Taliban. The poverty, despair, physical pain, hunger and lack of love and security drives them to Muslim fundamentalism. Soon they blow up schools, libraries, art, treasures of antiquity and anything foreign. They brutalize their own women, take away their rights to an education, and start turning against the West. Terrorist camps arise, and soon 9/11 happens. We don’t remember that we helped create this in Afghanistan. Do the research! Just like we armed Saddam Hussein in those days. Oh, how quickly nations forget.

All that and much more buzzed through my head as I was watching Charlie Wilson’s War.

Rating: ***

Movie Review: John Adams – the HBO Miniseries

I purposely waited until I had finished reading the book by David McCullough before I watched the movie. And it was worth the wait. After writing much about the book and adding a number of history vignettes in posts in the last couple of weeks, I won’t spend much time retelling the story and my impressions here. Let’s focus on the impact of the movie after I have read the book.

First I noticed that there were thousands of details missing. The movie had about 5% of the depth of the book, even though it was a 7 hour miniseries. So many things were skipped over, glossed over or omitted, but of course, that’s necessary to make it all fit.

Then I noticed that time just went by faster, and the viewer had no idea of the actual ordeals the people went through. In the beginning, when John Adams would travel to the continental Congress in Philadelphia, he would one day ride away from his house, and in the next scene he would be in Philadelphia. The viewer does not get the impression that there were four weeks of arduous travel between the two scenes. The same thing happens when Adams first leaves for Paris. He boards a ship, we see him seasick, and then he disembarks a coach and meets Franklin in Paris. The viewer does not realize that months of challenging travels occurred between the two scenes. I got the impression the characters traveled back and forth like we do today, in Boston one day, in Philadelphia the next.

I loved seeing how the costumes and living conditions came to life. You don’t realize how bad everyone’s teeth were, given that there was no dentistry, until you see all the gaps and black rotted teeth in people’s mouths. That was well depicted.

I enjoyed seeing the White House built in the middle of the bush, down a few hills from the Capitol. The entire area was surrounded by woods, hills, barren fields, and rough wagon trails. If only the first occupants could see it now.

The movie does a great job helping out the imagination and filling in details that would not have come out by reading. But watching only the movie, without reading the book first, would deprive the viewer of a tremendous wealth of detail. Overall, I am enriched by watching the movie, by fortifying my knowledge of the historical details. They did a fantastic job showing the characters age, with Adams starting out in his thirties at the beginning of the movie, and ending up 90 when he died. They represented this very realistically.

A tour de force. HBO did a remarkable job.

Rating: ****

Movie Review: The Man With No Face

Mel Gibson directed this movie and starred in it. It tells the story of a dedicated  teacher who, through a streak of very unfortunate events, ends up severely disfigured and disgraced. He lives as a hermit in a small coastal community in Maine, ostracized by the locals and shrouded in mystery and pure misinformation. A boy, quite by accident, befriends him and ends up being tutored by him for an entrance exam into a prestigious military boarding school.

It is a story about character in a man whose outside is very flawed but whose essence is strong as an oak and clear and clean as crystal. The normal people around him are the neurotic and hysterical ones. Their prejudices eat them, their pettiness keeps them from having fulfilling lives themselves. But they are in the majority and they dictate how our world is run.

Just and fair it is not. But, as this story tells us, integrity perseveres and the tutor and the student succeed in their own way.

Rating: ***

Movie Review: Quicksand

In this 2003 action / adventure movie, Michael Keaton plays a workaholic compliance officer for a bank who travels to Monaco to investigate a company his bank is funding. Michael Caine plays a jaded actor trying to make a buck in a B movie. As it turns out, the banker and the actor get drawn into a web of intrigue and corruption, with the Russian mafia abducting girls, drugging them and forcing them into porn and sadism. The banker is set up to appear to be a murderer, and soon enough seemingly all of France’s police force is after him. He discovers that he can trust nobody since the police and politicians also appear to be in on the scheme.

This is a well-done movie that keeps you watching, but there isn’t anything new here that I had not seen elsewhere before. I was entertained for the time being, and I had to convince myself that I should write a short review, just for good measure.

Rating: *

Chop Shop – the Movie

Within the first few frames, this indie movie takes you to a world you didn’t know existed. In the middle of Queens, New York, in the shadow of the Shea Stadium, with views of the Manhattan skyline, is a ramshackle neighborhood of car repair and body shops, called the Iron Triangle. Alejandro, or Ale, as everyone calls him, is a 12-year-old street orphan who has learned to survive.

He is smart, responsible, hardworking, industrious and resourceful. He lives in a plywood room upstairs in a body shop where the owner allows him to be, partly because Ale cleans up, locks the place and is basically a human watchdog twenty-four hours a day. Ale makes money waving customers into the shop, the helps with body work, he sells bootlegged DVDs, peddles candy on the subway and he snatches purses when he has to, all to make a living.

Then his older sister arrives and now he has even more reason for success. He has dreams of making a better life for himself and his sister.

This movie took me to a different world, and the images are so desperate, you keep thinking you’re in Rio de Janeiro, or Nigeria, or Calcutta. But this is New York City. The images are disjointed. You can’t understand their slang half the time, but it does not matter. The images are all in English. Adults, teenagers and children are fighting for survival, frame after frame, and at the end, you wonder what the story was. The movie, as a movie, didn’t work. It just kept stumbling along, and when the credits rolled, I was dissatisfied and ready to give zero stars.

But then, perhaps that was the point, day after day of endless struggle, frame after frame of more of the same desolate images of dirt streets, graffiti covered walls and roll up doors, junk everywhere, the story disconnected. Perhaps that was the message after all?

Rating: **

Knowing – the Movie

Here is a science fiction movie that started out great. Just reading the jacket cover got me going. An elementary school in 1959 buries a time capsule filled with drawings of children. In 2009, the time capsule gets unearthed and elementary students again get the letters from their counterparts, fifty years before. Fascinating. I’d like to do that.

Well, I sort of did, once. In 1981 I built houses in Fountain Hills, Arizona. The house on on 16411 E. Glenbrook has a full Sunday newspaper, the Arizona Republic, of some date in August 1981, with all sections, including the ads and inserts, in the wall of  the master bedroom closet. It’s now 28 years later, and I am certain that paper still sits in the dark in that wall. One day somebody is going to remodel that house and open up that wall and find my little present dated 1981. But I digress.

A boy named Caleb, the son of an astrophysicist at MIT named John Koestler (Nicholas Cage), gets a different kind of drawing altogether. It contains only a long string of numbers, which turn out to be a code. I can’t tell you the content of the code, but it shakes up the boy, the father, their friends and their lives as they know it.

The movie races along at breakneck speed, with fantastic special effects, suspense that keeps you on the edge of your seat, and you wish you could live in the Victorian house that John and Caleb live in – you’ll see why.

The movie was fascinating to watch, suspenseful and exciting, until about the last 15 minutes, when it got outright hokey. This would have been 4  stars, but I can’t get over the ending, it just didn’t work for me. Ebert, for a change, gushed about this. See for yourself.

So if you’re willing to take that chance, go and enjoy.

Rating: ***

Duplicity – the Movie

Spy movies have this maddening requirement that you pause the movie at critical junctures, use a whiteboard with different color markers to keep track of the plot, its chronology, the various events and how they intertwine so you understand. Duplicity starts five years in the past during the starting credits, then moves to the present, and then flashes back to various points in the past to put things together. Since you figure out pretty quickly that nothing is what it seems, and that every action is bested by the opponent’s action, which is bested by the first action again, you find yourself lost quickly with no incentive to keep track of stuff. All the complexity of the plot goes over your head and you don’t care anymore.

Clive Owen and Julia Roberts star as Claire and Ray, two spies for different government agencies in the past, and now working as industrial spooks for two competing conglomerates. The tension comes not from getting shot or killed for a change, but from the incredibly high stress of being first to market with a new product. Claire and Ray have good chemistry and clever dialog, and the story is funny and captivating, even though I was lost throughout the movie.

There is a young medical genius whose brilliant invention could change the world, and the two companies are trying to steal it from each other in a web of subterfuge. It’s a bit disappointing about American business, where the message is that it really does not matter who invents something, who does something best, who does something cheaper, but rather — who steals the idea first and most effectively. But that’s beside the point.

Duplicity is reasonably good entertainment, I got a few laughs and I walked away glad I have a simpler life than those guys.

Rating: *

Mask – the Movie

No, not “The Mask” with Jim Carrey, but “Mask” with Cher and Eric Stoltz, made in 1985. I was flipping through the channels the other day and came upon this movie right at the beginning. I had seen it before, when it came out, but not since then.

This is a wonderful movie, based on a true story, of a teenager with a very rare disease. Excessive calcium deposits on his skull cause his face to be greatly deformed, giving him the look of wearing a grotesque mask. The deposits do not only happen on the outside of his skull, but also inside, causing headaches and unimaginable damage possibly to the brain.

When we first see him we are totally shocked. We cannot imagine how a person can possibly go through life with this face. Teenagers are uptight about going to school with a pimple. This seems impossible.

The boy’s name is Rocky Dennis (Eric Stoltz) and his mom is Rusty Dennis (Cher). As soon as Rocky starts talking we recognize that he is an extremely well-adjusted teenager who has learned to deal with his handicap superbly. When his mom enrolls him in junior high school, and the principal tries to tell her that Rocky should be going to a “special” school, she shows what she is made of and the principal never thinks of Rocky the same way again.

Rocky has a deep effect on everyone he meets and he changes lives. His mother is a character, without an apparent job, hanging out with a biker gang, sleeping with a different guy every night, using drugs and worrying her teenage son. “Mom, all you want to do is get high and get laid!” he complains at one point. Rocky is the responsible person in this family.

Within minutes of getting to know him, we like him, and like everyone else around him, we only see the brilliance, the inner beauty and the  indomitable spirit of  the boy, and we really don’t see his handicap anymore.

But how will he deal with girls? After all, he has all the hormones of a healthy teenager.

This is an old movie. If you have seen it once, see it again. Every minute is worth it. If you have not, go and get it. It’s timeless.

Rating: ****

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – the Movie

After losing a nanny position due to her gruff demeanor, Guinevere Pettigrew steals a business card and gets herself into a social secretary position with a London socialite. The movie follows her from morning through the day and the night. We get a glimpse of London society in the time of WW II, with all its pretensions, affectations, pomp and falseness. The only real person is Pettigrew, it seems.

I had a hard time getting into this movie, and eventually finished watching it simply because I wanted to know how it would end. It was predictable and lightly enjoyable to watch.

The moral is: be true and honest and forthright, and you will find likewise. Be deceitful, and things crumble, sometimes very quickly. In this movie, Pettigrew wins and gets the unexpected prize. And if you want to find out what it is, you just have to watch the movie. But don’t all trip over yourselves now.

Rating: *

A Fistful of Dollars – the Movie

Devin suggested I watch the famous The Man with No Name trilogy, starring Clint Eastwood. I didn’t know what I was getting into, so I rented the first one, A Fistful of Dollars, and sat down to watch.

I found the movie corny, slow, predictable and difficult to understand, both in following the plot and due to the mumbling of the characters. I almost lost interest about halfway through and then it picked up a bit and I stayed with it.

Supposedly, this movie made movie history. Published in 1964, it was Clint Eastwood’s first movie. Before that he was just an obscure TV actor. I didn’t know, until the day after I watched it, when I did my research, that it was directed by Sergio Leone, the man who made the Spaghetti Western famous. So A Fistful of Dollars is a Spaghetti Western. And now it rings a bell. The music, the photography, all points forward to Once Upon a Time in the West, the big movie that Leone would do in 1967. Once Upon a Time in the West has always been one of my favorite movies of all time, and I love the music.

So, even though I was convinced I was not going to have the patience to watch the other two No Name movies, once I realized that Leone was involved, I changed my mind, and on we go.

However, this movie on its own just doesn’t do too much  for me, so the rating is low.

Rating: *