Tom and Julia like to leave on a high note, Hoffman might have be willing to skulk out. Also a continuation of the strange hair styles we've seen in other films this year. I'd give it a B.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Charlie Wilson's War
There was much to like in this movie. Smart way of telling the story, witty dialogue, great scenes of Afghanistan (or its stand in, Morocco) but I have to say Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance, brilliant as usual, threw off the performances of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. Theirs were the typical Hollywood portrayals, not bad, but a forties style acting; his was a riveting, burn down the house perfomance and the contrast was detrimental to the whole production. I also think the film skirts the final issue-- what happened after we stopped funding Afghanistan-- in an effort to not detract from Charlie Wilson's accomplishiment and much of the audience was puzzled by the cursory mention of funding a school and Congress's refusal to do so.
Tom and Julia like to leave on a high note, Hoffman might have be willing to skulk out. Also a continuation of the strange hair styles we've seen in other films this year. I'd give it a B.
Tom and Julia like to leave on a high note, Hoffman might have be willing to skulk out. Also a continuation of the strange hair styles we've seen in other films this year. I'd give it a B.
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4 comments:
Having just seen Hairspray, I can go along with you on the hairstyles. You have to wonder if Julia Roberts' wig was done by the same person who did Christopher Walken's in Hairspray.
And then there's No Country for Old Men, of course.
It made Julia look quite matronly-if that's what they were going for.
You're averaging better than I am this weekend, where due to it being also the weekend of my housemate Alice's birthday and the recovery, I hope, from the last remnants of Grippe Round 2, we've let her pick mostly...though we both liked my pick of EASTERN PROMISES the best of the three videos we've watched (not quite up to A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, I'd say, but that's a high bar...EP is a less complex story, more of a Look at What's All Around You expose). BELIEVE IN ME isn't too shabby, but even as all sports movies tend to run together BIM is extraordinarily even more like the recent (and better) EDGE OF AMERICA, only with no sense of racism, but a similar feminist agenda and a nice performance by Samantha Mathis (and it got us to looke at EDGE again, and to see if we could find a copy of the doc that inspired EDGE, ROCKS WITH WINGS). Alice picked TRANSFORMERS because she thought it would be a fun explosion movie...I had to walk away after the first half-hour, despite an infrequent half-decent joke, and she fell asleep shortly thereafter...the film is in the category of those which stroke the idiocy of the audience, such as INDEPENDENCE DAY/ID4 or I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER or CRASH the Haggis. Among those which were richly rewarded for stroking thus. While films about people striving for intelligent self-expression, say, AKEELAH AND THE BEE or Mathis's debut PUMP UP THE VOLUME, are lucky to make a dent, or their costs back.
EP seemed better at the time than it seems now. Viggo M was outstanding however, For similar milieu, I prefer Dirty Pretty Things. Haven't seen the rest.
Saw The Night Must Fall with Albert Finney on video. Didn't quite work because its sixties mentality superimposed on a thirties plot was a misfit. All the psychological trappings of the era.
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