Julia Roberts

After the Hunt

  • Title: After the Hunt
  • IMDb: link

I don’t understand the point of After the Hunt, and, after seeing it, I’m not sure anyone involved in making it knows either. Set at Yale, we get a he said/she said script from the perspective of neither character involved in an alleged assult that happens off-camera.

Instead, our main character is a mostly self-absorbed professor (Julia Roberts) who is the mentor of the a potentially untrustworthy woman (Ayo Edebiri) who we see steal from the professor early on claiming she was sexually assaulted, and at the same time the best friend of notably flirtatious man (Andrew Garfield) who suggests the young woman made up the entire story for attention and to deflect from her largely plagiarized work.

A bit frozen by events, and honestly more concerned about her own illegal drug use and getting tenure, Roberts’ character is given plenty of reason to question what might have happened (although, honestly, I’m not sure she cares).

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Charlie Wilson’s War

  • Title: Charlie Wilson’s War
  • IMDb: link

“You can teach them to type, but you can’t teach them to grow tits.”

Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a junior Congressman from a small district in Texas, did the impossible.  Not only did he spearhead the largest covert war in United States history, but he kept it a secret for years.

Wilson, a member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and the only Congressman from a district “who doesn’t want anything,” was in an unique position to change the world while nobody was looking.

After learning about the Afghan resistance against the Soviets, and being cajoled into providing more assistance by a powerful political contributor (Julia Roberts), Wilson with the help of his friends and CIA operative Gust Avrakotots (Philip Seymour Hoffman), over the course of the decade began increasing the money, weapons, and training being put into Afghanistan and began fighting a covert war which only a scant few even knew was taking place.  And we aren’t talking a small increase here; we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

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