Movies I'm Excited About: "Juno" and "Charlie Wilson's War"

As some of you may have noticed, on the sidebar of this blog I have added a section called "Movies I'm Excited About" with a list of links to the imdb.com pages of those movies. (Note: I don't pick all of these because I think they'll be good or great movies. Anything with Keira Knightley will be going up on the list.) Two movies added to that list are Juno and Charlie Wilson's War.

First up is Juno, about a teenager with an unplanned pregnancy. Feel free to stop reading to see the trailer below.

Why this movie? For starters, anyone who's seen Thank You for Smoking knows it is one-of-a-kind humor, in part for the narration and editing. Take a second look at the how, when she tells her parents the father is Paulie Bleeker, the editing and cuts go to the the super-nerd from Superbad (Michael Cera as Paulie Bleeker). Again, when talking about the "stink-eye," the cuts are well-timed for the girl with half a face. Imagine a movie full of these, just as Thank You for Smoking was filled with similiar cuts to keep it well paced and moving.


The gem and centerpiece of the movie would be a great performance by Ellen Page. Her resume includes the suspense thriller Hard Candy and the walk-through-walls Kitty Pyle in X-Men 3. She may never have recieved enough attention for her role in Hard Candy, where a 14-year-old girl uses herself as bait for a trap against a pedophile. The movie is a two-man (or one-man, one-girl) show that she carried half the weight of in the tortureous settings. It is one thing for an entire movie to rest on two actors, but it is another for the movie to be so well-done in mind games that we keep guessing Page's age throughout the movie. (She was 20 at the time of making the movie.)

Equal appreciatation should go to J.K. Simmons and Alison Janney, who's few lines in the preview define the family's approach. I couldn't think of a better group, and I definitely couldn't think of those two together, but their sense of humor (compare Janney on "The West Wing" to Simmons on Thank You for Smoking and you'll start to see) works well off of each other.

I had the previlege of meeting Charlie Wilson when he spoke before a group of students at Texas A&M University. He told us about how he won is first election was it was the first chance for many black citizens to vote in his city, so he volunteered to drive people from the local black church to the polls, where, along the way, he would just tell them in passing the man he was running against had killed his dog (I don't believe he was lying about the dog as the man was his neighbor and the death of his dog is the very reason Wilson sought to unseat the man in office). As the photo above shows, the three key actors in Charlie Wilson's War have the look, and I personally know Tom Hanks has the character down. Again, feel free to stop reading to watch the trailer below...

Aside from the fact I miss Aaron Sorkin ever since his time ended on "The West Wing" and "Studio 60," and his film resume has been slightly small, there is one thing he always nails: he can make politics clearly understood. When the government student and the apathetic can sit down and be on the same page throughout an episode of "The West Wing" and The American President, you have some great writing. While I know the politics and consequences following the events in Charlie Wilson's War, I cannot explain them to you so clearly as Sorkin can.

The other half of Sorkin's writing is the humor, be it workplace ("The West Wing"), courtroom (A Few Good Men), or the uner-the-table deals (Charlie Wilson's War). Regardless of your political affiliation, the characters surrounding Sorkin's writing are just plain fun. If you didn't get a smile out of something in that preview, you weren't paying attention.

Furthermore, the timing for this movie couldn't have been better. Even if interpretted as scolding Wilson for providing weapons to Afghanistan (guess who's weapons they're still using now), the point of looking at the long-road and how to avoid more devastating battles in the future remain the same. The topic alone, if given in the proper light to historical facts, would make this movie one everyone should see to better understand the world around them.

Thanks,
--Jack