Change Your Image
bahram_ks1981
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Iranium (2011)
Good footage but fraught with misinformation
This is a documentary which covers some historical background on the root of the Islamic Republic in Iran and continues to the present time and the hotly debated issue of acquisition of nuclear technology by Iran. While the historical background and the footage seemed sound and objective in the first few minutes, the bias toward absolute demonetization of Iran is apparent through the misinformation, hyperbolic hypotheticals , outdated examples and extreme exaggeration of it's influence in other regions beyond the middle east by the interviewed experts which uniformly state the same thing over and over (it also includes John Bolton, to no surprise after you realize what message the film wants to convey). Most of them talk about the imminent danger, failing to take in account the huge differences in the supposed and the actual and realistic potential of Iran's very limited logistics, financial and technological abilities. As an example for some of the misinformation that can be easily fact checked; it is claimed that there is a clear and proved collaboration between Iran and Al-Qaida, which although probable, there exists not even indirect evidence. Or the claims about ongoing (present tense is used) "rape of virgins to prevent them from going to heaven", which this has been the case in the very early stages of post-revolution crackdown on opposition forces, there has been no case reported in the past 15 years or so in my knowledge. Or, the Fox-news style non-sense about Hezbollah working with Mexican gangs... again ignoring that Hezbollah has never operated outside of Lebanon because they would like to be viewed as a national resistance force. again not surprisingly, almost all TV snippets are directly from Fox news and contain the same usual fals claims and exaggeration (e.g. the effect of an EMP weapon). It's maybe necessary to explain that I am in no way a fan of the lunatic regime, nor do I deny in anyway the widespread and systematic violation of human rights in Iran, but this documentary reminds me too closely of the misinformation spread by the Bush government in the propaganda in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. In the last sequences of the film, its stated over and over again that US the and free western world in general has to do "anything in their power" to help the people to dispose of the regime. As an Iranian in exile who would like it very much to see the regime disposed, i think this is very wrong, there can basically be no good coming from outside forces in a popular uprising, it should be handled by the people of the country, like what we just witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt. In conclusion, watch the film if you are interested in the issues, but take the information with a grain of salt as the material does not appear to be objectively presented or properly fact-checked as one expects from a proper documentary.
Gran Torino (2008)
What is happening here?
After watching flags of our fathers and the million dollar baby, i though i am going to watch another solidly made movie by Clint Eastwood, but boy was i wrong. What was going through my mind most of the time during this movie was that how can this be? how can this movie be so bad? You could imagine how astonished i was when i came to vote for it here and saw that it has a 8.4 and is already in top 250!?! and I can not begin to understand why!?
The acting is down right bad, even Clint himself is far away from what you expect him to be. Dialogues are unimaginative, repetitive and plain corny and full of mostly unnecessary racial slurs, the characters are completely stereotypical and don't get much depth, many plots seem just pointless and don't lead to anywhere... and finally the directions is terrible. You see people waiting for their turns to say their lines, you see people looking into the camera and you see that the movie is seriously low budget, for example where presence of police is kept to the minimum necessary and the characters have to explain that police has already left... the whole thing looks and feels very cheap and amateurish.
I seriously hope that Clint did this just as a favor to someone (or lost a bet?)or for quick money, otherwise we might be losing a good director.