Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats (Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh)

First Hit:  An interesting beginning and then my interest faded as it became repetitive.

Negar (played by Negar Shaghaghi) and Ashkan (played by Ashkan Koshanejad) are musician songwriters who are looking to get a band together to play at an international music festival in London. They are to sing five songs; four in English and one in Farsi.

The film begins in a recording studio as Negar is looking for assistance in finding musicians. He is introduced to Nadar (played by Hamed Behdad), a want to be manager who is looking to help musicians. Nadar leads Negar and Ashkan on journeys to listen to many different Persian bands.

This is where the film gets tedious. Instead of making the music the bands play be the focal point, the search is the focal point and I lost interest in the story. I would have been more interested in the music but the film didn’t move us in that direction.

One of the things they have to do is get passports and visas to leave Iran. They meet up with an underground guy who will set them up with the proper credentials and the price list, when read off, is oddly funny. In the end it all falls apart.

However, the best part of the film was some of the bands which are featured. There is a heavy metal band, rap group, jazz singer and indie rock groups. Unfortunately the singing of Negar is hurt by Ashkan’s singing.

Shaghaghi is good as the ever hopeful singer songwriter wanting to find a way to get his music heard internationally. Koshanejad is poor as a singer but her muted female role was effective in a country where women have a very minor standing. Behdad was wonderful as the want to be band manager who can talk his way into many things and out of a jail sentence. Filmed in Iran it was obvious that most all women didn’t want their faces seen as the street scenes most every woman turns away from the camera.

Overall: Although based on true events, the film got tedious by not focusing on the unique music by all the different Persian Cats.

The Greatest

First Hit:  This film is about grief and has some wonderful moments but it is overly melodramatic and manipulative.

I’m not sure why Carey Mulligan strives to play a teenager when she is clearly not one. Once again, just as in “An Education”, her age and maturity level are out of line with the part. That doesn’t make her a bad actress, in fact she’s rather good but she cannot play teenage parts.

Here she plays Rose, a high school senior, who passes the same boy, Bennett (played by Aaron Johnson), every day as they each leave school. For four years they’ve passed each other in the hallway always timing it so that they meet each other but don't speak.

It is the last day of their senior year at school and this time as they pass he speaks to her. As they both suspect, they are immediately attracted to each other and end up going off somewhere to make love. 

While driving back; he stupidly (naive urgency) stops in the middle of the road because he wants to tell her he loves her. Just as the words come out of his mouth, their car is hit by a truck and he dies, almost immediately (this is an important point). She lives and is able to make it to the funeral and there we see the pain of Bennett's family. Susan Sarandon plays Grace his mother and she is clearly devastated.

Pierce Brosnan plays Allen his father who is stoic, holding things together but clearly not processing his grief. And, then there is his younger brother Ryan (played by Johnny Simmons), who is struggling with his loss through mind numbing drugs.

All of this happens before film name credit awkwardly hits the screen on Brosnan's chest. The name comes from what Rose told him about his first time as a lover and what his parents think of him, “he was the greatest”.

This film is set up for boo hooing and tears. There are scenes that really work, like dinner the first night Rose comes to stay with them because she is pregnant with Bennett’s child.

Mulligan, as I said is too old for her part and although she does a fine job, I think it would have been better if she were a college senior and not a high school senior, but then again the story would have had to change as well. Sarandon is not very real to me in her expression of grief. It feels a bit contrived, forced and over manipulative. Brosnan, at times, is extraordinary in his role. I actually felt the pressure cooking within him as he attempted to hold himself and his family together as his grief slowly envelops him. Simmons is rather good as the younger brother who is struggling to deal with his own sadness as well as being the son who wasn’t “The Greatest” but is the only one left.

Overall: The film feels manipulative in the way scenes and dialogue are set up to make you feel something. I’d rather have an honest story be told in a real way and let me find my feelings rather than be manipulated into having a feeling.

City Island

First Hit: Wonderfully written and acted film that’s filled with lies and truth.

I’ll believe that you are who you say you are, if you believe that I am who I say I am. This is general tacit agreement we humans have with each other.

That statement captures the first two thirds of this film. This is the film "Greenberg" wanted to be, introspective, well acted and funny. The Rizzo family is in full bloom in this picture.

Vince (played by Andy Garcia) is a want to be actor who has a long career as a corrections officer. He also has a son from a previous relationship which his family doesn’t know about. He is married to Joyce (played by Julianna Margulies) who is angry and is a telephone receptionist.

Their children Vinni (played by Ezra Miller) and Vivian (played by Dominik Garcia-Lorido) have their own secrets. He has an obesity fetish and hers is that she is a stripper and not in college as her parents think. They live in The Bronx but on a little island called City Island which has its own peculiar characterization.

The family is loud and their over dinner conversations are a riot of jabs and barbs. Everyone smokes cigarettes and everybody conceals their habit from one another. Vince says he is going out to play poker when in-fact he is taking acting lessons. He doesn’t tell Joyce about his lessons because he thinks she’ll laugh at him and thinks he’s a fool for trying.

Joyce is suspicious that Vince is really having an affair instead of playing poker and because no one talks to each other honestly, the illusion grows. Vivian is stripping because she lost her scholarship in college for smoking pot on campus. She’s trying to make enough money to go back to school.

Lastly Vince discovers his first son Tony (played by Steven Strait); the son no one knows about, happens to be in his prison. He gets him released under his supervision and takes him home to meet the family he doesn't know about. 

As the film reaches its chaotic climax, the laughs, truths, and realizations are vivid, well characterized and felt by the audience.

Garcia is absolutely great. This is the best I’ve ever seen him. Margulies is good as Garcia’s spousal foil. Strait is solid as the lost son. Miller and Garcia-Lorido fill their roles very well and keep the story alive and moving. Raymond De Felitta wrote and directed this film with perfect little touches which laid down the ground work so that each character was fully fleshed through scenes of interesting conversations and actions.

Overall:  This was a wonderful film about the truth setting people free.

Greenberg

First Hit: A mildly entertaining film with one wonderful performance and one mediocre performance.

Ben Stiller plays another version of Ben Stiller. Comparing this to Woody Allen, who tends to play a version of himself in films, I am more intrigued by Allen and am usually bored by Stiller. Seeing Stiller playing another version himself was disappointing because he came off as self absorbed and not intellectually stimulating enough to warrant this sort of exposure.

Here he plays Roger Greenberg a guy who has just been released from a mental hospital in New York and has decided to stay at his brother Phillip’s (played by Chris Messina) house in California. Phillip and his wife Carol (played by Susan Taylor) have a nanny Florence Marr (played by Greta Gerwig) who becomes Roger’s contact point while he stays in their home for a month or so.

Roger is prone to fits of defensive anger and rudeness. He thinks he’s right and expresses his rightness regardless of how it may affect others. Roger is alone, lonely and generally depressed. The problem with all this is there’s little to indicate how or why he ended up in a mental hospital or what created this self absorbed person.

Conversely we have a small number of scenes with Florence at the beginning which give us a very clear picture of who she is and how she operates in the world.

So is this excellent acting by Gerwig and poor acting by Stiller? Or is this poor story development? My bet is that it is a little of both but mostly because Stiller continues to be Stiller and he just isn’t that interesting and is unwilling to embody the character he is playing.

Stiller is mediocre as Roger. Gerwig is wonderful at Florence. She was totally believable and made this film worth watching. Noah Baumbach had a good cast (except Stiller) to direct and this might have as interesting as “Margot at the Wedding” and “The Squid and the Whale” but fell short.

Overall:  This is worth watching on video but only if you have some time to kill.

A Prophet (un prophete)

First Hit: Powerful film about prison life and how one can change their lot in life through shrewdness.

This French film is about a young uneducated immigrant man of Arab descent named Malik El Djeben (played by Tahar Rahim) living in France.

Although he has an ear for languages, he has spent most of his young life in youth prisons and has never gone to school. Now, as an adult, he has been sentenced to 6 years in prison for assaulting a police officer.

Malik has no family and no friends. He is a loner and is immediately singled out in this new prison environment as naïve and gets beat up for his new shoes which were given to him by the prison intake team because his original shoes were too ratty. Because he speaks both Arab and French he quickly becomes a bridge between French and Arab prison cultures although he is accepted by neither. A Corsican group of prisoners think he would be helpful with some of their problems.

His first assignment is to kill an Arab snitch for them which earn him protection from the other prisoners. But he soon learns he can make a profit negotiating between cultures. With his Corsican protection, willingness to take risks, and ability to take punishment, he grows his own business and becomes a leader to be reckoned with.

The final scene is absolutely crystal clear on what he achieves.

Rahim is outstanding as Malik and his ability to share the ups and downs of his character are wonderful. Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciani the head of the Corsican cartel is very strong and carries just the right amount of aged swagger to bring his character to life. A strong script by Thomas Bidegain and Jacques Audiard showed they did their homework on a prison’s hierarchy. Audiard directed this longish film with the right tint and purpose.

Overall: This was a very good film and captured my attention from the very beginning.