Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
Directed by Mike Nichols
A Texas congressman sets a series of events in motion when he conspires with a CIA operative to aid Afghan mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviets.
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What critics compared Charlie Wilson's War to
Like Nichols, Mendes gives off a whiff of exhausting, smart-ass cleverness (seen in Nichols’s Wolf , Regarding Henry , and Charlie Wilson’s War ).
Working with a sparkling script by Aaron Sorkin ("The American President," "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"), director Mike Nichols ("Primary Colors," "Closer") may be the one to finally get through to the American public with a Middle Eastern war-themed film this year.
Imagine Charlie Wilson’s War , but with three Philip Seymour Hoffmans.
At times the film even seems to want to be a rowdier version of Charlie Wilson’s War, mining comedy in the absurdity of what draws ordinary people into atrocity.
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Throughout his career writing for film, television and the stage, from The West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War and The Newsroom to A Few Good Men and To Kill a Mockingbird , Aaron Sorkin has shown a consuming fascination with the trembling institutions of American politics and justice.
It’s as lively as other Sorkin-scripted pictures like Moneyball (2011) and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), and as astute as The Social Network (2010) was: we couldn’t have known at the time, though maybe we should have, that this story about the rise of opportunistic iconoclast Mark Zuckerberg was really a warning from the future.
For the prosecution: Across plays (To Kill a Mockingbird), television series (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Newsroom) and film (Charlie Wilson’s War), Sorkin has mastered the art of exasperating smugness.
But the main reason to watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 is because it returns Aaron Sorkin to the political-legal realm where he has soared in exercises such as The West Wing, The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War and his masterpiece, A Few Good Men.
Titles like The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, Moneyball and The Newsroom certainly bolster this viewpoint.
Nobody writes leading roles for such an actress any more, in the way that Ben Hecht (with help from Dorothy Parker, Moss Hart, and others) wrote “Nothing Sacred” for Carole Lombard; that’s why the best of Blunt resides in her bit parts, in “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and in the astonishing scene from “The Adjustment Bureau,” in the bathroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, in which she goes from meeting Matt Damon to smooching him in three minutes and twenty seconds.