The smartest film critic on earth has spoken …
Cole Smithey, who according to his online bio “writes for more than 50 national, international, regional and online outlets,” has filed his official review of “The Stoning of Soraya M.”
The new movie, coming out in limited release June 26, tells the true story of an innocent Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for the sin of adultery.
The title says it all, but Smithey found a curious problem with the movie.
Fasten your seat belts, folks. The moral relativism is about to get chest deep.
But there is something condescending and judgmental in the filmmaker’s subtext that seems to exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike. With American police tasing, beating, and shooting women, children, and men to death every week, the film could have been made with a less pedantic approach, as a more inclusive indictment of any form of capitol punishment and authority-endorsed violence.
Can’t. Make. This. Stuff. Up.
(Photo: Soraya M. (Mozhan Marno), speaking her last words to the crowd that has gathered in “The Stoning of Soraya M.” Also pictured: Ali (Navid Negahban, center right) and Ebrahim (David Diaan, center left)
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Notice how he doesn’t name any of the publications he writes for. I bet they’re all pretty obscure.
Allow me to draw your attention to this line from his review of Terminator Salvation:
By this point, it shouldn’t come as a shock that he seems to be a truther as well. I’m not sure if I should use the word that best describes this guy on your blog, but it refers to a personal care product used exclusively by women.
I’m as “libertarian” minded about police force as just about anyone. That said, this guy’s hard-wiring isn’t quite right. To debate or to counter-point would require the assumption that the opposition is somehow based in reality. It’s clear that isn’t the case.
“With American police tasing, beating, and shooting women, children, and men to death every week”
Every week? Wow. The press really isn’t doing their job. I had no idea. Neither does he. Anyone remember the last time the American police killed people for standing on a sidewalk and/or protesting the outcome of an election? Me neither. It sounds like he needs to pay a little more attention to current events at home and abroad, especially since those current events pertain directly to the movie he is supposed to be reviewing. jic: I’ll say it – what a douche.
Someone should tell Mr. Smithey that it’s “capital punishment” not “capitol punishment”, but we don’t want to be pedantic, do we?
Pardon the sucking up, but is it any wonder the only movie critics to whom I pay any kind of attention anymore are John Nolte and Christian Toto. Good God, what a maroon this Smithey.
Cole? Cole?!?! That isn’t even a name, it’s a major appliance! (As it dawns on me it’s also my nephew’s name…)
Readers,
I had a really lousy Monday … but the great/funny/pithy/withering comments attached to this post really boosted my spirits. Thank you.
And that, I shall use the term loosely “critic” is thrilled that you are all spelling his name right! Lets ignore him and maybe he will go away… or we can just abuse him for being the idiot he is and have at him… hard choice!
Thanks to EricP for providing us with the latest in insult technology. What is a maroon anyway? Not fully formed and lame enough to be a macaroon?
Maroon is great … it’s what Bugs Bunny used to call his inferiors … ‘what a maroon,’ right?
He is criticizing the film because it doesn’t draw some kind of shaky parallel between the events and violence by the police in the Western world, but that isn’t what the writer or director set out to do. They wanted to make a film about Iran and thats what they did. That’s like criticizing Jurassic Park because it was about dinosaurs instead of robots.
So the reviewers’ advice – don’t take anything in the Middle East at face value, because something bad may have happened sometime in the West.
Everybody must get stoned …
Who are we to say that stoning is wrong when our President indiscriminately kills flies?
In fulfilling its blatantly exploitative title, director Cyrus Nowrasteh crafts a prosaic telling of the brutal 1986 murder of an Iranian family woman, as orchestrated by her own husband in the interest of avoiding divorce payments and running off with a teenaged girl. Shohreh Aghdashloo plays Zahra, the caring aunt to Soraya (Mozhan Marno), a wife and mother to four children. Zahra catches the attention of Sahebjam (well played by Jim Caviezel), a French-Iranian journalist passing through her dusty village on the day after the public stoning of Soraya by nearly every friend, neighbor, and family member. Zahra retells the events into Sahebjam’s tape recorder as the film switches to flashbacks leading up to, and including, the promised sequence wherein Soraya is buried up to her waist and stoned to death like a bad animal. Based on Freidoune Sahebjam’s best-selling book, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” overreaches with maudlin slow-motion shots to dramatize the gruesome violence of the terrible event to ostensibly bring global attention to the primitive practice of honor killings in the Middle East. But there is something condescending and shoddy in the filmmaker’s subtext that seems to exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike. With American police beating, tasing, and shooting women, children, and men to death every week, the film could have been made with a more honest approach, as a more inclusive indictment of any form of capital punishment and authority-endorsed violence. The disjointed shift from a flat soap opera approach to a slo-mo ballet of violence announces the film’s unjustifiable grab for shock value and backfires as a fetishized celebration of the violent act that the title predicts. Here is an example of on-the-nose exploitation filmmaking at its most unsophisticated level. Anyone with a BS detector will know it when you see it. It’s one thing to illustrate social injustice, and quite a different thing to reward it.
Cole Smithey