Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike
ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!
StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
ayesham34 Benazir Bhutto-The Iron Lady of Pakistan was a daunting personality all by herself. She was the first Muslim lady to become the prime minister of a Muslim nation not just once but twice. She was assassinated while she was running the campaign for the third term in Dec 2007 when she returned home after being held in exile for seven years.
Bhutto-A documentary on Bhutto dynasty starts with the India-Pakistan partition in 1947 and leads to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's ascendancy to the presidency in 1971.
The focus of the documentary swiftly shifts to his elder daughter, Benazir Bhutto, a magnetic yet beautiful person who was studying in Oxford carrying no passion to pursue politics ever in her life. But fate had decided the other way. Her father's reign was overthrown by a military coup Zia Ul Haq in 1977 and he was put into jail and later was executed on the charges of murder. This was the time when Benazir Bhutto came into politics and ran a campaign to save her father from the conspiracy charges but she failed to save him. Before Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's death, he passed the mantle of his political party (Pakistan People's Party) to her daughter who later became the heartthrob of her people and got elected as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988, following the legacy of her father.
She was also ousted by another military coup just to be re-elected in 1996. She was forced into exile after two years when she faced corruption allegations against herself and her husband Asif Ali Zardari who was arrested and put into jail for eight years.
She later returned to Pakistan to run PPP for the third term which ended in her assassination on Dec 27, 2007. Benazir Bhutto anticipated her murder even before her return to Pakistan and she blamed it on the hands of General Pervaiz Musharraf. She was a true demonstration of courage with the mixture of unyielding that people in third world countries find hard to comprehend.
ZenShark 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.
njmollo Bhutto (2010) is a frenetically overly edited documentary. The title suggests a study of the woman but it is rather a broad and omissive overview of the political history of Pankistan. The documentary begins with a sound bite from one of the most important and controversial interviews with Benazir Bhutto conducted by David Frost on the 2nd of November 2007. This interview is never referenced again possibly because it is too revelatory and against the establishment point of view. The omissive nature of the documentary mainly concerns US activity in Pakistan and Afganistan. Outright misinformation concerns Bin Laden and what is known as al-Qaeda.The best and most moving moments of the documentary are the interviews with the Benazir Bhutto's daughters and husband. It is of course true that Benazir Bhutto was a member of the elite establishment, in much the same way as John F. Kennedy but that background of privilege should not take away from their efforts towards peace and basic human rights. The result of their courageous struggle for peace and a better world resulted in the same fate.Pervez Musharraf living in elite comfort in the UK should be seen for what it is, state protection of a criminal.
Yxklyx 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.
