Cloverfield is not bad, but nor is it particularly good. As stupid genre exercises go, it’s a reasonably entertaining one. Its strengths are similar to Sunshine‘s: energy, sensory overload, and a reasonably pacy set of genre thrills. Its weaknesses are also parallel: kind of dumb, when you step back and think on it.
Charlie Wilson’s War has the brilliant P. S. Hoffman in a great role, with some excellent screenwriting by Sorkin in the first hour, but it loses its way in the second half, forgoing snappy snarky dialogue for montages of rockets and more emotion. Now, Sorkin can do the sentimental laced with bite as well as anyone, but the film really seemed unsure of its footing, its outrage blunted by some patriotic enthusiasm, its venom diluted in sap, its thesis blurred so that it wouldn’t really offend anyone. Still, it lays out a reasonably smart backstory which does indict the historical blindness of the recent years’ foreign policy… but the film could have been so much better. Hanks is pretty good, as usual; Roberts is kind of irrelevant, and distracts more than sells the role.
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