Do you want to see me talk a lot about movies?

At the grocery store they were having a sale on DVDs! Now I don’t actually buy very many DVDs. I can usually resist them as an impulse buy but these were two for ten dollars! And they weren’t just crap movies with Paul Walker in them!

I ended up buying “The Good Shepherd” which is that three hour long movie with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie (both giving totally lukewarm and forgettable performances. And I say that being a BIG fan of both of them). It’s basically about the formation of the CIA as experienced by Matt Damon’s character Edward Wilson, a character that is loosely based on the real-life James Angleton, who ran counter-intelligence for the CIA during much of the Cold War (and was played – much more interestingly, actually – by Michael Keaton in the 2007 mini-series “The Company”). It is a long and slow movie that requires you too know waaaaaaay too much of the history of the early Cold War, generally and even more about the history of the CIA, specifically. And poor poor Angelina Jolie is terribly miscast as the sad and distant Company wife. Though now that I think about it, maybe her performance is good, it’s just that when you’re watching Angelina Jolie in a movie and she isn’t like scorchingly hot, you kinda just go, “Eeh.”



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Is that anti-Feminist of me? If so, sorry, but you know it’s true. You totally do! That’s why you loved “Mr & Mrs Smith” but never even saw “Changeling”. One other thing about “The Good Shepherd”, it has one of the single worst pieces of casting that has ever happened. Ever.



This young actor named Eddie Redmayne (who is probably a very nice person and all) plays the adult version of Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie’s son (yeah, that guy in the picture up there). He has a sort of long horse face and he is like 18 feet tall and so he towers over both of his “parents” while looking nothing at all like them. Also he is that kind of skinny-like-the-lead-singer-of-a-faux-punk-band-skinny. And his performance is just awful. Just terrible.

Anyway, it’s a great movie to just put on in the background while you’re doing other stuff.

The other movie I bought was “Charlie Wilson’s War”. I’m sure you know all about “Charlie Wilson’s War”, it stars Tom Hanks as the Texas Congressman who basically started the CIA’s covert war against the Soviet’s in Afghanistan in the 1980s (I guess I had the CIA on the brain. Or maybe I’m just that particular sort of nerd). Anyway, it was written by Aaron Sorkin, or as I like to call him “the modern Shakespeare”. Sorkin of course was the creator and (for four glorious seasons) the writer of “The West Wing”. I hate to be the one to tell y’all but if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing for television. It’s true. Think about it for a second.

See! Now that you’ve thought about it you totally agree with me.

Anyway, “Charlie Wilson’s War” was Sorkin stretching his legs after being confined to 43 minute television writing for so long and it kinda shows. The first half of the script is really good but by the time it gets around to about an hour and twenty minutes he sort of realized, “Holy shit! I don’t get to leave all of this story for the next episode!” So what ends up happening is this montage of actual B-roll of Soviet tanks exploding and Mig-24 gunships being blown out of the sky. And then TA-DA! We totally won and stuff!

It is really underwhelming.

Also it doesn’t help that the director Mike Nichols did a really second-rate job. He is kind of a legend, he did “The Graduate” and “Catch-22” and “Working Girl” but he probably shouldn’t have tried to direct a movie about back-room politics and international intrigue with the same happy-go-lucky zip that he used in “The Bird Cage” and “Biloxi Blues” (Fun six-degrees-of-Kevin Bacon moment: Aaron Sorkin wrote “The West Wing” which stared [among others] the delightful and talented Allison Janney who got that part not because of her pitch-perfect performance as Wes Bentley’s soul-dead mother in “American Beauty”, but because of her vibrancy and wit and grace in the film “Primary Colors”, which was directed by … wait for it … Mike Nichols!). It is pretty clear, as soon as you get a nice big shot of Tom Hank’s bare ass early on in “Charlie Wilson’s War” that Nichol’s thinks this story is fun and zany! Also, he inserts a lot of lithe young actresses in the movie and tries to get away with it because the actual Charlie Wilson was a notorious cad and womanizer, but I was a 14-year-old boy once and I recognize a blatant sexual objectification of hot actresses when I see it and, quite frankly, that’s all fine and good if that’s the movie that you’re making, but here Nichols is basically just being a dirty old man and no one has willing to say, “Ummmm, Mike, why does that girl need to have her top off?” (How awesomely long was that sentence that I just wrote BTW?). I like to imagine the conversation when Nichols told Oscar-wining (and dreamy!) Amy Adams, “Yeah, so for this shot we’re going to do a tight shot of your ass as you walk down a marble hallway in high heels for like ten minutes.”



Also, if you read a little about the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan you know that those Mig-24 helicopter gunships were basically the most frightening thing since god sent locust down on Egypt. Those things were designed to chew up American tanks on the battlefield and the Soviets sicced them on mud huts and children. If you know anything about the Mujahideen you probably know that one of them told a journalist (I’m paraphrasing here), “We don’t fear the Russians, but we fear their helicopters.” The film does a pretty good job of helping the viewer understand that giving the Mujahideen the ability to shoot those things down is what turned the tide against the Soviets, but Nichols treats them like they’re kind of cute. I think the one scene where we see one of them doing its thing has some sort of farcical version of “Russian” music playing over it. Like Wild E. Coyote is using it to go after the Road Runner. The director doesn’t understand the terror.

Or am I going on too much?

To Sorkin’s credit he does end the movie with a discussion of the way that America bailed on Afghanistan once the Soviets left and that we were (at least tacitly) responsible for the rise of the Taliban. I thought that was refreshing because no one really talks about that anymore. No one has ever really said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have taught Osama bin Laden how to raise a guerilla army and given them all of those guns, missiles and training.”

It is occurring to me now that maybe I bought these two specific movies not because I like them, but because I like talking about them. That’s totally possible.
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