Monday, January 14, 2008

Movie Review: Charlie Wilson's War

At first this movie had no appeal for me. Just another movie about some political blah-dee-blah. Then I heard a review on NPR and I realized that it's a comedy. Sorta.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17525023

Charlie Wilson was a fairly worthless politician. He voted on other people's stuff and sat on a couple of key committee. He was a womanizer and a scoundrel and worked mostly to get reelected. But one day he saw Dan Rather on TV in a turban and wanted to know why. It's because the Soviets were in control of Afghanistan but the people were revolting. This led Wilson to push Congress to better fund the resistance and to get Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia to work together to provide funds, arms, and training. The movie ends with the Soviets pulling out and Wilson being laughed at and ignored when he tried to build a few schools and do just a bit to rebuild the country.

Elementary history shows that with us ignoring them once the Soviets were gone that they fell to the Taliban. Osama Bin Laden was among the people that we trained and armed.

I was hoping to get some of the old Doonesbury cartoons from when Roland did a Dan Rather bit but I'm having some trouble getting into the searchable archives. Maybe in the next day or three.

The movie has some great banter which really turns the movie from the standard bickering politicians to a dry comedy.

I won't get it on DVD but I did enjoy seeing it. It was pretty much exactly what I expected from the NPR report.

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