Comments on: Critic throws ‘Stones’ at U.S.

By: Cole Smithey

Cole Smithey — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:48:40 +0000

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

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:35:29 +0000

Who are we to say that stoning is wrong when our President indiscriminately kills flies?

By: JohnFNWayne

JohnFNWayne — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:50:45 +0000

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 …

By: blackhawk12151

blackhawk12151 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:24:42 +0000

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.

By: cftoto

cftoto — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:15:48 +0000

Maroon is great … it’s what Bugs Bunny used to call his inferiors … ‘what a maroon,’ right?

By: Tink in Cali

Tink in Cali — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:30:36 +0000

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?

By: Jacquie Kubin

Jacquie Kubin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:16:36 +0000

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!

By: cftoto

cftoto — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:44:08 +0000

Readers,

I had a really lousy Monday … but the great/funny/pithy/withering comments attached to this post really boosted my spirits. Thank you.

By: EricP

EricP — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:26:49 +0000

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…)

By: Paula

Paula — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:59:45 +0000

Someone should tell Mr. Smithey that it’s “capital punishment” not “capitol punishment”, but we don’t want to be pedantic, do we?