This will not be about the President’s presser. My feelings on the man’s policies are fairly clear. I only mention it here because everyone else is mentioning it and I have to jump on that train. But I’m jumping off now…

When I write, whether here or an article, or whatever, I have the TV on as background, quite literally. The volume is down around 9 and I suppose if you really concentrated, you might hear what some of the people say–about 40 percent of the time. But as I say, I don’t really pay much attention–it’s just there.

Once in a while, something will come on and catch my fancy. I try not to miss Top Gear, even if I can barely hear it, which I know is a shame because that show is the best on the airwaves IMHO. Well, that and The Deadliest Catch. I don’t watch shows–I cannot follow dramas or comedies. Occasionally, I’ll catch an old Seinfeld episode or maybe King of Queens–that’s about it, though.

A lot of the time, I have on the Food Network and tonight is no exception. Here again, I don’t like many of the shows and honestly don’t know them well except two: Diners, Drive-ins and Divesand Good Eats. Both of these shows are fun, funny and interesting. The rest, I can do without.

Yet, as near as I can tell, these two shows aren’t on all that often. The ones that FTV runs most often are the inane “Unwrapped” and she who must not be named.

Alright, I know many of you like her show and truly, I’ve naught against her. Its just that her show doesn’t interest me. In the end, I actually think the food makes things interesting. And her show isn’t really about food at all. It’s about her. This is true for Rachel Ray and it was true for Emeril Lagasse, too.

Food Network seems to have three sort of denominations, if you will. The first one is the food itself is the star of the show and really, the personalities are interesting because of what they know about the food. Alton Brown’s show as well as Guy Fieri’s show are both good-but while each has unique and fun personality traits, their shows are not specifically about those traits.

She who must not be named is nearly all about her personality quirks traits. That’s the second denomination–shows that are a cult of personality, Ray, Lagasse, Flay–all those “A” listers that seem to command attention. Finally, there’s their “reality show” section with “The Next FTV Star,” “Chopped,” and all that other nonsense. Not even linking to them. If you cannot find them by now-well, you need Internet lessons.

But Unwrapped is kind of, well–a mangled bit of all three. Its host, Marc Summers, is a bigwig producer and all, but his personality is rather—mmm….shallow. His show tries to be all about the food, but the food isn’t really interesting. Sometimes it’s fun, but mostly it’s just ghastly concoctions of crap that have been foisted upon the American public for so long that it’s part of our psyche. He did a whole 10 minute segment on Manwich for Gods sake. That’s sad and depressing.

So, I don’t know if I’m a representative watcher or not. After all, I only have the channel on for less than an hour and I don’t have the volume up enough to hear it well. When the commercials come on, I concentrate wholly on my writing task and ignore the box altogether. So, I don’t expect the programming to change on account of me.

But when I first started watching FTV, they had some pretty cool shows and the point of all of all of them was that you learned something. Whether you learned how to cook or how to present, or little nuggets of wisdom to help in all kitchen situations, all the old guard shows were about education and that was actually a fairly powerful thing.

As I write this, Unwrapped is explaining the exciting process of putting a McDonald’s Big Mac together–as though any of us want to. I’m not anti-Big Mac. Heck, I actually ate one not too long ago. I’m just not all that interested in how they make them. In fact, it may actually make me not want to eat them.

Where was I going with this? Oh, right. Nowhere special except to say—if she who must not be named can get famous and her own show—anything can happen. Anything.

Author’s Note: I saw this film a few months ago as Cyrus Nowrasteh is a friend of mine, father to a former student of mine, and a one-time guest speaker in my Composition class. It is why I refer to him by his first name here and so I come at this with intimate knowledge of the making of the film and having written about Cyrus previously. I just finished another interview with him and that piece will appear in the Ventura County Star Thursday or Friday. Link will follow when it appears.

The richness of the images of The Stoning of Soraya M. caught me well off guard. I know the director of the film, Cyrus Nowrasteh and know his work as a screenwriter mostly. I’ve seen his HBO film called The Day Reagan Was Shot starring Richard Dreyfus. It was a fine movie and while I was teaching American Studies, I used it in my class. I saw and helped to promote (not professionally) the film The Path to 9/11 that Cyrus wrote and produced. These docudramas are excellent film-making and extraordinary in their ability to relate complicated and nuanced moments. But “Stoning” is something else entirely.

To begin with, the recent press attraction to the film is because of what is happening in Iran right now. The true story based on the book by journalist Freidoune Sahebjam (played by Jim Caviezel in the film) is one that Cyrus says he knew he wanted to make, but his cynicism told him that it would never sell.

The story is simple. A young woman in a small village in Iran just after the 1979 revolution is accused of marital infidelity and “conduct unbecoming a wife and mother.” None of the accusations are true, but they are forcefully pushed by the young woman’s husband who is looking for a way out of the marriage and knows that if she is convicted, she will be killed by stoning. The rest is inevitable and powerful and so incredibly moving and sad that as I watched it for a second time, I couldn’t hold back tears.

The direction in the film tilts toward nuanced and beautiful patterns that arise not out of the simple social injustice that is taking place, but out of the relationships that each of the main characters have to each other and how they deal with their own obligations and senses of right and wrong. The most conflicted character in the story, the Mayor of the town, is ultimately the arbiter of Soraya’s life and he seems to take the job quite seriously. In the end, however, the absolutes of Sharia law leave him no choice and in a film dominated by boorish, chauvinistic and even murderous males, one cannot help but feel pity for the Mayor.

The musical score, a work of art in its own right, captures the tension, the grace and the tragedy in the story. Cyrus took pains to paint the film with the landscapes of the Middle Eastern desert and though he cannot say for practical and security purposes, it is rumored that the film was made somewhere in Jordan. This combination of landscape and sound, desert and mountain, add to the emptiness one can only feel when faced with the injustice that Soraya faces.

Mozhan Marno plays Soraya and it is her grace and beauty that carry her through a heart-wrenching portrayal. Shoreh Aghdashloo, the Academy Award nominee for her work in House of Sand and Fog, plays Zorha, Soraya’s Aunt who tells her story.

Through memory, reflection, tight scene direction and a sparse and elegant script by both Cyrus and his wife, Betsy, The Stoning of Soraya M. is a film that transcends entertainment and moves into the best of what film, and even television when given a chance, should be – and that is a vehicle for transmitting important and timeless lessons about humanity, the human spirit, justice and ultimately, love.