Charlie Wilson's War

As to the last point, most of the really scary stuff done by this administration has been done for what the people doing it would describe as those very reasons.

 

Looking forward to seeing the movie but sure that it can't do the book justice. Way to much ground to cover that a movie could only do in a cursory manner.

My overall takeaway - The U.S was a lot more involved in Afganistan that most were aware off in the 80's.

It's too bad that George Crile passed away. It would be interesting to hear about his research for the book.

 

The History Channel documentary was excellent.
I got the impression that Wilson was able to do what he wanted because of his committee memberships and that of all the people in Congress the one most likely to wage his own private war in Afghanistan was not the coke snorting, hooker dating congressman from east Texas. But Wilson basically took down the Soviet Union because his commie-hating girlfriend asked him to.

 

And then she went and got married to someone else.

 

No kidding.
"Hey honey, I risked thermonuclear war and the end of life on Earth today"
"You never listen to me. I'm leaving."
Did the movie have the American belly dancer bumping and grinding with a sword on the lap of the Egyptian defense minister?
My only hope is that the movie is as half as interesting as the real-life story.
I trust Sorkin though. He'll make it work.

 

Saw it over the weekend and Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the show in this film. He should win the Oscar this year for supporting actor for this film.

This movie is one of the best of 2007 and I highly recommend this flick along with I am Legend.

 

The movie did have an American belly dancer on the lap of the defense minister (don't recall the sword part of it). And the interesting thing here is the girl who played that part in the movie is Wade Phillips' daughter.

Anyway, I also thought the movie was good, not great, and agree Phillip Seymour Hoffman was outstanding.

 

At the risk of offending Ragu, and giving him his customary case of the vapors whenever threads do not go according to his peaceable design, this was the statement to which I was responding:

"The impression I got, though, was of a man who found ways to cut through red tape and do what he felt was the right thing. In the current political environment, I wonder if that possibility even exists."

Anyone who doesn't think that that describes what a lot of very unelected people -- in the VP's office, the DOJ, the White House Political Office, and the intelligence community -- have been doing in our names for the past seven years isn't thinking clearly enough yet. Wilson's strategy -- which had its basis, lest we forget, in Carter's resistance to the Soviets' forcibly replacing one puppet Afghan regime with another -- worked, until it didn't, which would have been September 11, 2001. I've seen him interviewed and he seems genuinely shaken by the blowback his crusade prompted.
I wonder more about playing this very important period for laughs. Anyone who's seen the movie can tell me whether or not Sorkin./Nichols et' al. get the balance right.

 

I thought they did. Clearly there were comical aspects to the movie, but you're never sitting in the theater thinking you're watching a comedy (at least by the current definition). The scenes at the refugee camps on the Pakistani-Afghan border pretty much assure that.

 

Because, lord knows you better never discuss politics with a smile on your face.

 

I took my daughter to see it on Christmas eve and we both really enjoyed it.

I suspect there is more under-the-radar stuff that goes on like this--we just never hear of it. The fact that Charlie Wilson hit everything with two X chromosomes just makes the story interesting enough to make a movie about it. I mean, who'd want to watch a movie called "Larry Craig's War"?