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Customer Rating:

Summary: Surprisingly interesting movie!
Comment: Worth watching just for Hoffman's character, who manages to consistently upstage the two heavyweight
leads of Hanks and Roberts. This guy is completely in the spirit and period of the movie and makes
the other two look like they're hamming it up something rotten.

I initially rented this
and assumed the unskippable advert was only on the rental copy - bit of a shameful oversight if it's
on the bought version, I think.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Good but could have been better
Comment: I have to agree with the reviews on here, this film covers a very touchy subject and gives you an
insight into American politics. A floored but good congressman (Hanks) stumbles into a war that he
didn't know that much about, upon finding out the true story dedicates his career with the help of a
wealthy texas woman (Roberts) to righting the injustice, and in steps another floored but honest
character (Hoffman). However a 90 minute movie on such a subject when no-one would blink if it were
2 hours doesn't do it justice. I feel if they had gone a bit further it would have been so much
better.........

Customer Rating:

Summary: Great Film, hate the advert
Comment: Although I already knew about US involvement in the covert war, it was interesting to see it
splashed onto screen - not sure how the US Govt feel about it as it shows them being dragged into
helping via Wilson, et al, rather than being proactive about it! The cast do a great job at getting
into the skin of the characters they portray. I feel the film portray's Wilson's frustrations very
well. Having rented the film, it is one I do feel I would buy. However - along with several comments
here - that UNICEF advert at the beginning is incredibly annnoying. Was staggered that could not
fast forward it, skip it, or get to the Menu. Never come across that before and it really wound me
up as had to endure it. More likely to contrbute to UNICEF as a result? No.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Really good film, but.......
Comment: A really good film which is nearly ruined by a compulsory advert that try as you might you can't
skip or speed up. I have no problem with UNICEF or the work it does but I strongly object to having
to watch a rather long advert before you get to the real menu for the film.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Bitter satire on US foreign policy
Comment: Directed by Mike Nichols and written by Aaron ("West Wing") Sorkin, and, an opening caption tells
us, based on true events, the War in question is the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahideen
in Afghanistan in the early 1980s. The film starts with a pudgy-looking Congressman Charlie Wilson
(Tom Hanks) being honoured by the "people of the clandestine services" in an aeroplane hangar. We
then cut to a naked Hanks sitting in a hot tub surrounded by strippers and drugs, with one eye on a
US TV news report on Afghanistan.

From this position of dubious moral authority, Wilson
decides the mujahideen must be helped and he gradually engineers a massive increase in US government
funds for CIA black operations. He's helped by a born-again southern plutocrat played by Julia
Roberts (in a garish peroxide wig) and the excellent Philip Seymour Hoffmann as an old CIA hand who
just wants to kill as many Russians as possible.

Made as it was in the aftermath of
9/11 and the global terrorist threat spawned in the ruins of post-war Afghanistan, this film's
depiction of the Congressman's glorious victory can only be bitterly ironic. Either that or this is
the most tasteless film I've ever seen. (The depiction of the Russians is plain racist.)
/>What's terrifying is how the US can exert decisive on a distant land where it has no real
geopolitical interest, with no vision of the repercussions we're all suffering from now. As the film
shows, once the shooting stops and the Russians have been forced to withdraw, the money is cut off
and the Afghan state is left to fail. Even though Wilson pleads for a paltry $1m to build a school,
he's met with indifference. Cue the Taliban and Osama bin laden.

Comedy? It's better
that that, it's satire in its purest form.

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