Bhutto

I saw an advance screening of this. I had remembered Duane Baughman producing a play on Robert Kennedy that was surprisingly good, so I checked it out.

There are no spoilers in these comments:

As a typical American unaware of most of what goes on in other parts of the world, I knew almost nothing about Benazir Bhutto. This is a fascinating story not just about her life as a woman in power in a Muslim extremist society, but her entire family history and the history of Pakistan play roles in this film and it's truly engrossing. I highly recommend it.

I was pretty excited when I heard that a movie called Bhutto had been made. But this film is extremely disappointing. I'm sure people who know nothing of Bhutto will learn something, and perhaps the movie will appear novel to them. But this movie is a cursory examination of Bhutto. Go read the Wikipedia article on her and you will probably learn more.

The film does take you through her life, but I found nothing of real interest there. There is no character analysis, so investigation of any controversy, no nothing. It's like its a high school students history essay on Bhutto.

I just had the honor and pleasure of attending the screening in Washington DC in the National Geographic Theater.

After opening remarks from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to a capacity crowd of 400+ made up of members of Congress, State, USAID, press and the Ambassador of Pakistan and Benazir's sister we experienced a a film that I think exceeded all our expectations.

Currently playing in London and Pakistan, it is about to be released nationwide in 70 theaters across the US.

Additionally, it will air on PBS in 2011 as part of a Women's Week series of programming.

Judy Woodruff held a Q & A with the Director and Producer and did a write up here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/06/bhutto-doc.html <---go see the trailer.

There is nothing to see in this movie. Benazir was a corruption queen who looted Pakistan. Stashed corruption money in Swiss bank accounts. She was equally involved in corruption along with her husband Zardari who is known as Mr. Ten Percent in Pakistan for his non stop corruption.

While I appreciated some of the basic information given in the film. I found it to be too one sided on the whole. The film is more about Pakistan's political history rather than Bhutto herself and politics are generally not well suited for documentaries because there will always be radically opposing views. The film did not give much more insight to who really runs Pakistan than a reading of wikipedia would have given - now that would have made for an interesting film. Going into this I knew little of her but those thoughts were positive but coming out my thoughts are actually negative - obviously opposite to what was intended. I can't see her role as more than a figurehead. She belongs to an elite class (attended Harvard) and is from a radically different world than the vast majority of Pakistanis - so I can understand the foundations of distrust against her. Yes, she was charismatic but that's not enough to be a political power - she seemed out of her league and her presence in such a position of power, forced, likely installed by the elite class in the world. I don't condone the actions of the opposing faction but I can understand their antagonism.