Review of The Stoning of Soraya M. (2009) by Dema H — 01 May 2010

Great movie. I can't really put this movie into words and in many ways it would be disrespectful to the story if I tried to look at this strictly as a movie and not actually something that happened (and still happens to this day).

The one thing I can say, the movie is depressing enough, the eventuality of the stoning is there from the second the movie begins. And what I have to say towards that scene is that it didn't really need to be as gruesome as it was.

The mental image of a stoning is usually gruesome enough so was there really any need to show the impact of the rocks to Soraya's face. I just felt that it was very exploitative and it would have been enough if they just showed the people throwing the rocks but not showing the actual impact.

Not only that but the scene was way too long when, realistically, it could have and SHOULD have been shorter and basically proves my point that it was exploitative. I'm sure the people behind this film were trying to send a message and that's fine, whatever.

I'm sure they felt they accomplished their purpose, but I see a lot of people just turning the movie off after the stoning and that's not the reaction that I think the people behind this movie want.

But then again, in some ways, the movie worked. It made you disgusted at the fact that the people in this town actually STILL exist somewhere in this world and that's the worst part of all. It's not like this was the 1700s or the 1800s.

This happened in the latter half of the 1900s. I'm not quite sure when exactly because a specific date is never given, since the author must have been 61 at the time of the book's release and Jim Caviezel didn't look close to 61, so I'm not sure.

Anyways things like this shouldn't have happened in the late 1800s much less in the later 1900s and the fact that things like this still keep happening is absolutely appaling and it just really boggles my mind that women, somewhere in the world, are STILL looked as inferior and are used as slaves and are expected to do everything a man says.

Just appaling. What's saddest about this movie, and this is going to sound odd, is that this movie made less than $640,000 domestically, I'm not sure what the worldwide is, but I'm sure it's more than $1 million (it just HAS to be more).

If you take the three biggest movies of 2009: Avatar, Transformers 2 and New Moon. Domestically those three movies made a combined $1,446,000,000. $1.5 BILLION. You got all that?? This movie made $636,000.

That's 2.3% of the total earnings of the 3 biggest movies of last year. Yea, movies that if you really look at, are pretty pointless because what is the point? You can make an argument for EVERY movie in the world being pointless, but not everyone of them makes more than a $100 million domestically so it's a moot point.

And worldwide??? HA!!!. The percentage would be drastically lower. The point I'm trying to make is, that everyone should watch this movie at least once or buy the book and help raise awareness, and after you do so spread the word about the movie/book and so on and so forth.

I doubt it'll cause a change because the stubbornness of the people that do these kinds of things is such that they can never be re-educated to think otherwise, but people would be aware and maybe something can come out of that.

I'm gonna try and do my part and try to spread the word out about the movie/book, because I know that a lot of people are like "I want to pretend that stonings don't actually exist in the world because I can't see it right in front of me" and that's part of the problem.

..people just pretend bad things don't exist and clearly they do and the more people deny they exist, the more ocurrences you will see of young mothers stoned to death because it's "god's law" and who knows how many situations like this have happened that have never even been reported over here.

Like I said I'm going to try to do my best to help spread the word, hopefully everyone who has watched this movie will do the same thing.