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...Drimmelen; original music by James Newton Howard; starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Ned Beatty. Color, 97 mins. A Universal Studios release.
"You'll definitely want to stand up and cheer," reads a blurb line from a monthly magazine reviewer quoted in Universal Studios' full-page Sunday newspaper ad for Charlie Wilson's War. "Definitely" is the weasel word in this sentence, as if the reviewer needed an extraneous adverb to overcome some lingering doubt about his quotable effusion. His conscious mind no doubt convinced him it was a good thing to recommend cheering a movie that purported to tell how the good old U.S. of A. flummoxed the Russian military in Afghanistan and swiftly brought down the entire Soviet Empire. But his unconscious must have been warning him, 'Is it okay to stand up for the guys who brought us 9/11?'
Charlie Wilson's War, claiming to be "based on a true story," is a weasel film, evading and obfuscating the fundamental significance of its account, as a number of leftist experts on the CIA and the Middle East have been quick to proclaim. The best source on the facts is the author Chalmers Johnson, who brought into popular discourse the CIA jargon term "blowback," meaning adverse "unintended consequences" of covert actions, as in arming and training the Afghan mujaheddin to defeat the Soviets also brought about the creation of Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Johnson takes pride of place not only by dissecting the film's flaws but also having taken to task, in a 2003 Los Angeles Times review, the movie's nonfiction source book, also...
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