Archive: 'Charlie Wilson's War'

Movie Review
Charlie Wilson's War (2007)


This sure has been a great year for movies. But what "Charlie Wilson's War" has over the other movies this Oscar season is that it's appealing and pure entertainment for the adult crowd. This is the type of movie you go to see after a dinner out, enjoy while you're watching it, and then pretty much forget about it after you go see it. Not to say that the movie isn't good, though, because it certainly is; it's just not great. It's a perfectly breezy, fast-paced political satire that's more of a hoot than one would expect and hits all the right marks without diving into anything too deep.

Directed by Mike Nichols with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, this is the true story of Texas congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) in the 1980s who single-handedly helped to end the Cold War. He's a good ol' boy with a personal life that isn't perfect, but everybody loves him, which is why he keeps getting reelected again and again. He has an office full of voluptuous young women (who are also very smart) at his every call, and he's never without a drink in his hand. It's as if Charlie Wilson stumbled upon the career move of his life on accident when he initially decides to double the budget for Afghanistan's defense against the Soviets.

When we first meet Charlie, he's sitting in a hot tub in Las Vegas surrounded by a bunch of naked Playboy women and cocaine usage. While sitting there, he witnesses some Dan Rather footage on the adjacent TV about the situation in Afghanistan. After his first sudden reaction, the wheels really start turning when Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a rich Houston socialite, gives him a call and opens his eyes to what's really happening. He has always taken an interest in her, and they casually sleep around together. While he's soaking in her bath tub, she tells him about the Afghans needing weapons to shoot down the Soviet helicopters, and since Charlie is on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he would ideally be the man to help. The problem is that they need to get the weapons from somewhere else. The solution is to use Soviet weapons left in the hands of the Israelis and transfer them through Pakistan to the Afghans.

To aid him in his covert arms plan, he finds the only helpful person in the CIA: Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman). This pot-bellied, hard-hitting guy full of resentment is just the man for the job. After a planned visit with the president of Pakistan, General Zia, meetings with a few other men, and the help of a friendly belly dancer, Charlie Wilson pulls off the deal. He eventually raises the funding for Afghanistan from a useless $5 million to a whopping $1 billion, all done in secret. The whole ordeal is done so frivolously, it makes you wonder if politics really can be this fun. It's also amazing how so much information actually fits into a 97-minute movie that's basically comprised of one semi-comic scene after another. Talk about an easy history lesson.

With three excellent performances under his belt, it's going to be tough to choose which one to recognize Philip Seymour Hoffman for this year. He steals every scene he's in, whether he's hitting on Joanne or exploding in rage and breaking a window. This isn't Tom Hanks' best performance, but it's still pretty good, as he gets a chance to be somebody we've never seen him as before. He has a good time with the role, being sexier, sleazier, and more wry, creating a person we immediately like. Julia Roberts isn't even in the movie very much, which is actually a shame because the relationship between her and Charlie could've been fleshed-out a bit more. Although somewhat of a letdown, she's still enjoyable to watch. And then there's "Enchanted"'s Amy Adams, who's as charming as ever, playing Charlie Wilson's assistant. She keeps him in line, keeping track of his schedule, and admiring him all the way.

"Charlie Wilson's War" has an underlying wit of irony about it in that we wonder if Charlie Wilson's commitment to his cause was truly intentional. The audience also realizes that although all of what Charlie did looked good at the time, it opened the bag for all that is happening now with the war in Iraq. The "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan became the Taliban, using those same weapons against us, and things only escalated from there. There's a message on the fact that it didn't end where the movie ends. Charlie had a right for what he did, that's for sure, but he wanted plans for reconstruction that Congress didn't follow. As he quotes at the end, "We fucked up the end game."

Archive: 'Once'

Movie Review
Once (2007)


Back when "Once" was still in theaters, I knew it was something I wanted to see. I just never got around to it and watched as it kept getting more and more acclaim. Now, this little film is on many critics' top ten lists and available on DVD, which gave me even more reason to check it out. It felt like an indescribable movie, something that I had to see for myself to know if I would truly, really like it. Well, I rented it, watched it, and they were right.

The formula is simple. Take a budget of nearly nothing and 88 minutes and create a movie filled with pure emotion and absolutely great songs. The movie contains hardly any dialogue and is driven by the heart behind its music, and it doesn't even have names for its main characters. Taking place in Dublin, it's simply about a guy and a girl who meet one day and decide to make wonderful music together. The Guy (Glen Hansard) is a street musician playing for money, and the Girl (Marketa Irglova) stops to listen and loves his music. She's a pianist herself, and he wants to hear her play. They go to a nearby music store where she knows the owner, and she sits down at a display piano to play him something. He then offers a song of his own for them to play together. And so they do. There is the longest delay before anything else happens next; we are simply watching and listening, completely drawn into the moment, which is exactly what the movie wants.

The relationship that grows between these two is so warm and sweet because these are two good-natured people. They are falling for each other, yes, but they aren't merely picking each other up. Even better is that we sense the real passion for music these two real-life musicians have. Glen Hansard is known in Ireland as the leader of the band The Frames, and Marketa Irglova is an immigrant from the Czech Republic and only 17. They are simply playing themselves, how they would be in the real world. They actually love music as much as they want us to think they do. And that's what is so pure about it.

The Guy decides he has become too cynical to write lyrics for his own love song, and he enlists the Girl to help him. Soon enough, they decide to gather a group of other street musicians together to record a demo of his songs. They get the job done, and their story progresses mostly through terms of song. We meet her daughter and find out she has a husband, which both come as a surprise. And we find out he's taking his music to London, and he has a girlfriend he dumped. This is not just a conventional love story; their bond occurs by chance and grows into something deeper and riskier than anything of what it could be.

John Carney's "Once" doesn't aspire to be anything more than just down to earth. It doesn't hold any great ambitions and simply wants to express the joy of making and listening to music. And it communicates this longing so easily and honestly that it's magical from start to finish. This is the kind of movie that you silently watch in awe, holding your breath in admiration. Every single musical number soars, and you'll be swooning right along with each one. It's a movie where you wonder if it knows how good it is, and then you're so happy when it never missteps. Even the mixed emotion bittersweet ending, too, you'll realize, is perfect. This is a winning movie.

Archive: 'The Diving Bell And The Butterfly'

Movie Review
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)


"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is the remarkable true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the editor of the French magazine Elle, who had a paralyzing stroke that left him in a condition called "locked-in" syndrome. He couldn't move from head to toe aside from being able to blink with his left eye. This blinking became his only form of communication through the help of a gentle speech therapist (Marie-Josee Croze). She arranges an alphabet in the order of most frequently used letters and reads it off to him, waiting for him to blink to choose a letter. Soon, a caring amanuensis (Anne Consigny) takes her place, and it's in this way, letter by letter, word by word, blink by blink, that Bauby wrote his personal memoir, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," in 1997 shortly before his death.

It's an amazing story, but how does something like this translate onto the screen? Adapted by director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood, they transform seemingly impossible material into a beautifully filmed experience. Great creativity has been exercised to take us inside the mind and memory of Bauby. We're not merely shown a man sitting in bed; we're shown what he sees, the people around him, and his viewpoint, and we dive deep into his memories and fantasies. In the first moments of the film when we're looking through Bauby's single blurred eye with doctors hovering over him; we hear him speaking but soon realize that only the audience can hear him. Bauby gets his right eye sewn shut, and as we witness it, we hear him screaming in horror, and yet, nobody else can.

We're shown Bauby's past, revealing that he was a womanizer who left Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), the devoted mother of his children. He leaves her for a mistress who doesn't even have enough courage to visit him in his condition. Even at the hospital, Bauby continues to be surrounded by beautiful women including his speech and physical therapists, and even the still devoted Celine, who still comes to his bedside every single day. Bauby even creates a fantasy lover who, in his imagination, keeps his ability to have lust and love full and alive. All of these people in Bauby's life keep reminding him to stay true to the man he is inside, and from that, he begins to frown upon any thoughts of self-pity. Everything we hear in the film is filtered through Bauby's consciousness, which leads to moments of genuine insight and humor.

Mathieu Amalric plays the man of Bauby in two respects. He is the unmoving man who talks to others one blink at a time, and he's the man very much alive in memories. He shows great tenderness in a scene between Bauby and his father (Max von Sydow), which is their last meeting before Bauby's stroke. Later in the film, his elder father tries to speak to his son again in a devastating phone call to the hospital. Greatly colorful cinematography from Janusz Kaminski protects the film from being a downer and actually turns it into a fascinating exploration of feeling and a celebration of life. Highly experimental camera techniques mixed with human emotion and experience combine to make something daring, different, and wondrous. These filmmakers have created something of a small miracle.

This is a movie so imaginatively made, so in tune with the indescribable something that makes life what it is, and so in touch with the pleasures of everyday senses that it's surprising. It's a masterful and viscerally emotional film, one that is miraculous in how beautifully it has been pulled off without falling victim to becoming locked-in itself. It opens up to us with visual ambition and gorgeous storytelling while approaching delicate subject matter with honesty and passion, telling a true story that to just say is inspirational would be an understatement. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is French, but it shares a message that is ultimately universal on the strength of human consciousness and the human spirit. I mean, to write an entire memoir essentially in your mind, that's an amazing feat.

He's Living As A Ghost

Movie Review
The Ghost Writer (2010)


An author (Ewan McGregor) is hired to write the memoirs of a controversial former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), and from the moment he takes the job he's referred to as the Ghost. Throughout Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer," the Ghost is never given a name. He is a man without a past, without any family or other ties. Throughout his work as a ghost writer, he is more often referred to as a literal ghost than a ghost writer. He is a man who might as well not even exist and who can be easily wiped clean. Ghost writers are expendable anyway and fully replaceable as this ghost is actually the successor to another one who drowned mysteriously. Whether it was suicide, an accident or something more ominous is unclear. The Ghost is played by Ewan McGregor in a performance that sets the ideal tone for the film. The complexity of the Ghost's situation and his condition is expertly realized as he unravels the muddled backstory of Adam Lang.

As the Ghost arrives at Lang's secluded beach house, he soon realizes that he's gotten himself mixed up in something bigger than himself. The Ghost's goal was to take the dry and overlong draft of Lang's original memoirs and trim it into something more approachable for readers. He wanted to include personal anecdotes from Lang and infuse the work with personality because the Ghost himself isn't much of a man for politics. Outcry about war crimes committed by Lang starts spreading like wildfire, and angry protesters stake their claim outside Lang's home. His house on Martha's Vineyard off the Massachusetts mainland acts as a fortress from the outside world; it is eerie and almost unnatural. The Ghost is first greeted by Lang's assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall of "Sex and the City") and later by Lang's severe-looking wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams of "An Education"). Both of these women are cordial and yet have the air of being a potential suspect because in the world of Lang, everybody is a suspect and nothing is ever certain.

The circle of unrest grows as the Ghost navigates his way through this uncertain world. Based on the novel by Robert Harris, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski, the story works like a spring coiling tighter and tighter until it finally releases at an explosive climax where papers fluttering around never held such meaning. The tension, sprinkled with bits of dark wit, builds not out of action, but rather, out of lack of knowledge and a series of revelations. What we know is limited to what the Ghost discovers, and no bit of information can ever be taken for granted. The sequence where a navigation system leads the Ghost to the house of a man named Paul Emmett (a calm and calculating Tom Wilkinson) is haunting in its implications. A rain-soaked trek on a bike around the lonesome island and a close encounter on a ferry all leave the Ghost in an entanglement of the absurd yet dangerous. The accompaniment of a tantalizing score by Alexandre Desplat perpetuates the tone of unease and playfulness.

A lot is peculiar about the job the Ghost has agreed to, especially considering the fact that he was only trying to make some quick cash. The manuscript of the first draft can never leave a certain room, Ruth's discontent with her husband is nearly impossible to read and even the servants seem like they're up to something. There are holes and lose ends, too, spots where everything just doesn't seem to add up, and yet it's easily ignored considering the circumstances. These are strange waters we're treading in, and Polanski pulls off the feat of embedding it in realism. There is no denying the true life political undercurrents with Lang resembling Tony Blair. Robert Harris worked closely with the former prime minister in reality.

Also in reality is the current condition of 76-year-old director Roman Polanski ("The Pianist," "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown") who is under house arrest in Switzerland for his U.S. case back in 1977 for having sex with a minor. But hey, let's focus on his latest movie, his first in four years, the taut and intelligent thriller where political conspiracy gets personal, "The Ghost Writer." It's great.