Rosewater (2014)

Excellent, smart action film.

A Brilliant Conflict

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I enjoyed this movie, as it humanizes both side of a conflict I knew very little about. The movie has a pretty direct and clear message, but it makes sense within the story. Social media being important, people banding together to stop oppression, these are all things that actually happened. The focus on popular culture being imported into Iran was a nice touch, reminding me of the book (and movie) Persepolis. The movie is also a good portrait of Bahari, who deserves recognition for what he does, and what he has been through.According to Stewart and Bahari, the movie has taken some artistic licenses. For some reason this bugs me more than it usually would - as this movie seems to do everything it can to put itself in the real world. Real life footage, some people playing themselves, etc. I do trust Stewart to take some "honest" artistic licenses though, and not misrepresent the underlying stories, or give a too unbalanced look.Sadly, Jon Stewart did not go for authentic language use, opting instead for "all English", meaning there does not have to be subtitles. The actors he found all did good jobs, but I wish he instead would have gone with Iranian actors and made it all in Persian.

Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari is detained by Iranian forces who brutally interrogate him under suspicion that he is a spy.In a sense, this is sort of the companion piece to Ben Affleck's "Argo". Another story involving Canadians and Iranians, only this time in the 2010s rather than around 1980. And we see that in some ways, things never change.More films on Iran need to be made, just as more films need to be made in Iran. No country is more misunderstood by Americans, I would bet. While the government may be draconian at times, the people are good, loving people. We must not blame a people for their government.

The book "Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival" by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy relates a true incident based on the imprisonment by the Iranian government of journalist Bahari who made an off hand remark against the President of Iran on The Daily Show and was considered to be a spy when he returns to Iran to cover the elections in 2009 and captures videotapes of the uprisings. The very keen screenplay was written by Jon Stewart who also directs.Gael García Bernal is excellent as Maziar Bahari as is Kim Bodnia as his interrogator Javadi (called Rosewater because of the cologne he wears that is the only identifying aspect the constantly blindfolded Bahari can recognize). The elections are between incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the friction and devastation of the Tehran following Ahmadinejad's narrow victory and it is this point that the film heightens and informs us of the fragile state of affairs in Iran. The supporting cast is quite fine – Dmitri Leonidas, Shohreh Aghdashloo and others. This is a very well made film that is part docudrama and part fictionalized history and Jon Stewart impresses as a director. Grady Harp, April 15

I really don't know how else to describe this film. The true story inspired a script of this sort that has success in finding some character rhythms but others that don't come off all that well. Really though, the problem here is in Jon Stewart's directing. At times it gets a bit too showy, too self- congratulatory. You can sort of tell that there's a sort of contradiction of tones happening. oh sure, one expects this sort of a film to be a downer, and in some ways the film has a certain dynamism in it that was probably not expected, but that doesn't make it all that good. It's not bad, but I have no passion for it whatsoever and I do think that Stewart needed to reel himself back in. Gael Garcia Bernal proves to be as strong of a protagonist as ever, though, and it's crazy that it looks like he hasn't aged a bit in ten years.