text: Your time and brains will be much better spent reading or listening to Charlie Wilson's War. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, plays the most enjoyable character in the movie, Gust, the Greek, and he plays him as a eunuch. Gust, in the book, is hard core and completely free to speak his mind. In the movie, he's not even shown as being equally important to Charlie. And poor Charlie is never shown donating blood (which he did every time he visited the camps in Pakistan). In short, the movie is too bland, and the history is too old for our modern time. We don't really care about the end of the cold war and the defeat of the Soviet Union (which happened in spite of Reagan, not as a result of) by a well financed group of people who were extremely willing to fight. Not quite the lesson we need to be hearing and seeing considering how well the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going. (As I read the book, I kept getting that deja vu feeling, except it was present day).