The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

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Audience Member George W. made a speech on Iraqi radio that he was going to help them. Yunis, an Iraqi journalist shares his experiences when he was captured and sent to Abu Ghraib for 9 months. An American soldier also describes living conditions of Camp Ganci. The terror described is comparable to that of Nazi concentration camps. The Geneva Conventions banned interrogation camps after WWII for a reason. "I don't care if we're holding 15,000 innocent civilians. We're winning the war." Comment attributed to Maj Gen Wodjakowski Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member I want to say this is a great movie, but two things are stopping me: the sound design and the direction. The direction, the lesser of the evils, is understandable but early on it is sort of bonkers. A lot of the decisions seem unnecessary. Why write the supposed significant phrases on the screen? If we really can't here what he's saying, maybe they should have thought of sub-titles...It gets better after a while, it's less obviously intrusive into the interviews and I do fully get and agree with the animation. It works and it's a good way of doing it. But in the first few parts its all more frenetic and unnecessary. The bigger issue is the sound mix. It's terrible. It's one of the worst mixed DVDs I have ever heard and worse there are no subtitles. Once you get used to the protagonist's accent it becomes more bearable, but still they drown him out in noise and music regularly. This is too bad because the story is very compelling (the more so for the guy filming himself and his family, just like Capturing the Friedmans) and finding the guard was a coup as well. This could be a classic documentary about arbitrary and wrongful imprisonment, but they really should have thought a little more about the design of the film, and maybe they should have watched the master DVD before they greenlighted it, you know? Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/19/23 Full Review Audience Member Didn't get to watch all at once, which kinda ruined it for me. I was pretty into it the first sitting though until I had to stop. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Another fine example of American Intelligence. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/11/23 Full Review Audience Member After seeing a plethora of Iraq documentaries that all seem to reiterate the same information in different ways (not that that's a bad thing because all that information still needs to get out there in any way possible), I found this to be a nice change of pace, focusing instead on the story of one individual to sort of allegorically explain the absurdity of the whole occupation. It sort of reminded me of a segment that might turn up on This American Life; it's literate, subtly humorous, sometimes quite morbid, and decidedly human. Yunis seems like a really decent guy and it's a shame that he had to experience such atrocities as a result of whatever bullshit reasons they took him (whether it be the fact that he is a journalist or the fact that they really did think he was planning on killing tony blair, most likely the former). Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/24/23 Full Review Audience Member Informative, but dull. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

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