release_date method

Hi, I've rewritten the method to get a release dates. I'm fairly new to ruby/rails and would appreciate if someone would refactor my code.
I really need to get release dates properly for my app. So, if this method is called without an argument, it returns the first date from a movie /releaseinfo page. If country is given as an argument, it looks up the first date for that specific country. Date.parse returns 1st day of month if only month and year available. And it can't parse only year to a full date.