Rosewater

In 2009 an Iranian-Canadian Newsweek reporter named Maziar Bahari appeared in a spoof segment of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” pretending to be interviewed by a “spy.” What he didn’t count on was the motherfucking degenerate Iranian Islamic State’s total lack of a sense of humor. He was picked up and imprisoned for six months, physically beaten and mentally browbeaten—tortured, in short—by two men who demanded he admit to being a spy. He was in solitary confinement, and every time he was interrogated he had to wear a blindfold. He never saw the degenerate motherfuckers, and knew one of them only because he always smelled of rosewater. It took a lot of international pressure, but he was finally released, and was free to repudiate the obviously phony confessions he made under torture.

Jon Stewart must have felt bad about it. He wrote the screenplay from Bahari’s book, and directed it himself. Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal plays Bahari, and does a good job of it. The film is necessarily a bit static, but just imagine how static it must have all looked to Bahari.

Totalitarian governments just never really get it, do they? There are the phony “elections,” like the one the scumbag Ahmadinejad stole and Bahari covered. There are the phony “confessions” that no one believes, probably not even the ones who beat the confessions out of some poor slob. There is the extreme paranoia, with spies lurking under every bed. Whether it’s North Korea or Iran, it’s always the same.