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hyped garbage

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It was an IMDb reviewer that commented on the horrible Dungeons and Dragons movie, "This is what happens when your mother owns a production company." Bitter Lake is what happens when you have access to the BBC film library and a lot of stock footage. It reminds me of an Ed Wood movie. I would call this a drive-by documentary.Reverend Ike used to shout in his sermons, "Throw your money to the wall, that what sticks is for god, that what falls is for the church." Curtis is throwing a lot at the wall, hoping some of it just has to stick. After all, its two hours and sixteen minutes of throwing.Curtis is a bit of a throwback, espousing turn-of-the-century platitudes (that's 1900, not 2000). He is slathering on the stock footage and art house sensibilities to shroud the basic fact that his analysis is a re-hash of Max Weber: WASP good, Orientals bad. And of course, jolly old England is just peachy, despite being buffoon incompetents. I really loved how he lays the troubles as being due to Roosevelt, when it is Britain's incompetent attempt to seize the remnant of the Ottoman Empire that made a mess of the Middle East, not to mention WWI. I am 38 minutes in, and still no mention of British Petroleum. OK, I will suffer a few more minutes.Breathtaking specious arguments. "Collapse of Western economies sent leftists to Afghanistan" Oh really? Collapse? I guess he hopes in 100 years no one will remember that there was no real collapse, maybe just a slight economic contraction. "Manufacturing was decimated" Another common lie. Manufacturing has grown in dollar terms for decades. What has fallen is manufacturing employments, since we invented automation.Curtis cherry-picks events and facts to support his hackneyed thesis. He did remind of things I forgot, like the oil embargo was triggered by an Israeli war. Too bad when Jimmy Carter got America off imported oil, we just didn't tell Saudi Arabia to stuff it and let Israel conquer everything between Libya and Turkey. It would have a saved a lot of blood and treasure for the whole world.He accuses politicians of oversimplifying the world into good and evil, 20 seconds after he uses the word evil to characteristic those pesky orientals. Pot calling the kettle black.OK, 1:45 and he claims Afghanistan has taught us all our beliefs and wrong, and now we believe in nothing. Ahhh nihilism, I guess this is a follow on to The Big Lebowski. He also rags on banks, like any good English elitist socialist should. Yawn.One man's bribery and corruption is another man's economic and social stability. Saddam was corrupt and brutal, but no one can argue that Iraq is worse off today, for both Sunnis and Shias, than it was under his rule. Its like this whole documentary is an apology by someone who understands nothing, for Western societies that are equally clueless. Synecdoche.A few nuggets but mostly blather-- politicians "gave" the banks power-- ha ha. I learned more reading the comments here than watching the video.

Even for an avid documentary lover this film manages to take the interest out of one of the most relevant topics of our time. I tried watching it twice but abandoned it 1.5h into the spectacle both times, because it was just annoyingly biased, simplistic content with a lot of predictable art school type 'look at my meaningful composition of clips' faffing. Incredibly hard to follow rambling type of story telling that does nothing to keep and peak the viewers attention at reasonable intervals.However, I guess it is noteworthy that at least someone is pushing the boundaries of narration and film making here.

This is one of the most radiant documentaries that I've seen in years. It deals with how Afghanistan was built-up by a US company in the 1950s, where dams were implemented in order to modernise the entire country. Loads of money was pumped in, but to little avail. The dams didn't work apart from generating insane levels of salt, that only allowed poppies to grow. And that's how the opium and heroin started flowing.Anyway, from the get-go, the documentary shows reality, and - lo and behold - treats the viewer as a thinking being. I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw the start of the documentary, but it's literally plastered with images from reality, and far from only shot by the film makers.The viewer is served a metaphor of Tarkovsky's "Solaris", where the protagonist - spoiler alert! - at the end of the movie no longer knows what to trust.Spoiler off! Anyway, thanks to imagery like this, we know what to know: the banks, the corporations, the governments have created the mess that Afghanistan is currently left in, a state of near-anarchy and corruption, due to its "liberators", who rather are its captors and the reason to why organisations such as IS and cliques like al- Quaida exist.See this. It's eye-opening and commendable. It breathes and lives humanity.

Bitter Lake is for the most part a history of interventions in Afghanistan by the US, the UK and also Russia since halfway the 20th century.The film follows the extremist Islamic idea of Wahhabism. It was transported east through the Arabic world, influencing the formation of the Taliban, Al Quaida and ISIS. All because the US accepted the idea in the partners they dealt with while looking for oil.It's an interesting documentary, told mostly chronologically. This allows Curtis to compare events through time, for example the Russian invasion to the more recent western occupation.A lot of the footage that is shown is filmed in Afghanistan and this stresses the constant violence the land has to witness. Because of the many groups involved in each area, enemy is a diffuse term there.The film is advertised as epic on the BBC Iplayer but could have been shorter. In the first half there were shots in between the narrative that could have been left out. But all in all Bitter Lake offers a perspective that is great at telling us something about the modern world and a lot about Afganistan.