Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

PodBill Just what I expected

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

winopaul 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.

Mehdi Zouaoui After watching the documentary for about two or three times, it seems to me that Adam Curtis was in a mere stream of consciousness simulating what is going in our heads in real time. He tacitly promised that he will dissect what politicians and bankers have secreted away; however, he made the the truth truths by letting us in a tragedy of perspective where we look at the same object, Afghanistan, but with different eyes. Some will blame him for hyper-complicating the job of the viewer. I can identify this documentary with the canonical novel of Moby Dick where its canonicity comes from going against the grain and where what we have been taught or told is not the truth but a layer or mimesis. In his quest towards the East, Adam strives to highlight the idea that politicians are involved in this fiasco by letting it to bankers, bankers who would not let it go without any financial benefit taken from the commoners, commoners who believe in fairy stories more than in science. That is the world of Adam Curtis

philiprpercival Bitter Lake is an ambitious documentary that begins with some promise. But I soon lost patience with it and after 40 minutes I stopped watching it. The ambition consists in the breadth of the perspective it adopts so as to illuminate how the mess that is contemporary Afghanistan, and in particular contemporary Helmand province, came to be. It locates the roots of this mess in deals at the end of WW2 that Roosevelt entered into innocently enough--perhaps naively even--with the monarchs of Afghanistan (modernisation via energy and irrigation from US built dams) and Saudi Arabia (modernisation by dollars exchanged for oil). Unsurprisingly, both monarchs were also playing local power politics that Roosevelt probably knew or cared nothing about: the former aiming to consolidate the control of his family and more generally that of his fellow Pashtuns at the expense of Afghanistan's other ethnicities, the latter to consolidate the control of his own family at the expense of radical Wahabists who were opposed to a modernisation that threatened to dilute, curtail or corrupt Wahabism. The intrinsic interest of such information is enhanced by fascinating original footage. Unfortunately Curtis ruins it all by eschewing the linear narrative that is essential to a clear presentation of such complex material so as to indulge in frequent cross-cutting without rhyme or reason back and forth in time and space; moreover, instead of weeding out images irrelevant to his narrative he revels in them. This technique works well for thrillers or for director-centred explorations of the auteur's mind. But when it is adopted in a documentary it just creates noise. What a pity!

petermcginn-12575 There are a lot of very detailed and thoughtful reviews of this movie if you want more help determining if you should watch this film. I want to talk about how to watch it. Because you should, if you can stand it. I thought some of the information on the history of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia and how it affected Afghanistan to be interesting and relevant.But, as with a few other reviewers, I felt a lot of the footage was unnecessary and distracting. We learn that things aren't always as black and white as they presented to us in news stories - that the messages have been simplified to make it easier to grasp and perhaps to hide mistakes that have been made. But in this "experimental" documentary, the explanations are muddied with clips that perhaps are designed to make us think, but in my case a lot of my thoughts were, "What is the point of this?" "Bitter Lake" could be an important movie if it were a lean 80 or 90 minutes long instead of 2 1/4 hours.But if you try watching and find yourself losing patience at times as I did, or if you are hesitant to even start watching, I have a suggestion. Watch the screen only when the narrator voice-over is present. This will give you the bulk of the orderly, historical stuff. Look away when it shifts to people dancing, or a soldier balancing a small bird in his hand. Do text messages during the comedy movie clips, or when the camera focuses for 30 solid seconds on the death stare of a "freedom" fighter. Obviously, this will be more easily achieved watching at home than in a theater, and cost a bit less, also.