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mavisheh
Reviews
Chaharshanbe-soori (2006)
Beautiful.....
Chaharshanbeh Soori is a beautiful movie, directed with so much subtlety and refinement, bringing the best of the actors out of them. The superb narratives and very good filming are topped with great story telling, making it a must-see and a fresh blood in the Iranian cinema.
The complication of human behavior and psyche as well as the flow of the events, thoughts, and emotions, remind one of Milan Kundera's novels.
The character development is really flawless, and I have never seen Hedyeh Tehrani in a better and more touching scene than the one where she is in the bathroom with her sister in Fireworks Wednesday.
Great job and congratulations to Asghar Farhadi and Mani Haghighi.
Ma hameh khoubim (2005)
Excellent movie
While 'We Are All Fine' starts a bit slow and with bad acting, it evolves into a touching and heart-filling picture that leaves you with applause for the director and screenwriter.
This is best accomplished by the one-to-one interaction of each character and the audience through a hand-held video camera. Each character ends up in front of this camera delivering what seems to be an improvised delivery of their true emotions and frustrations. This mixing of 35mm footage and the hand-held video is what makes the movie a combination of a blog, an auto-portrait, and a voyeuristic penetration into other's hearts and minds.
Amid a portraiture of emotions and dysfunctional interactions of a family, you could also glean some of the problems of the young generation in Iran: love, unemployment, the desire to set free and leave the country, family ties, etc. Though, it is much less about these than about a good composition of emotions that comes through.
It is truly well done (although it has its shortcomings that should be overlooked) and a must-see.
Yek teke nan (2005)
A great idea that could be rendered stronger and with more criticism
Kamal Tabrizi's new feature has one thing in common with his previous movie 'Marmoolak (The Lizard)'. He is unveiling the true nature of organized religion again but from a different angle. This time, he is not blaming a body of hypocrite clergies, but revealing how the people and believers in religions are lost in their quest of finding divine.
While referencing to a lot of movies of the same nature (it is inevitable not to think of Bunuel's movies and some of Felini's while watching Yek Tekeh Nan), he tackles the concept of God from a philosophical point of view, but fails to bring the movie to a higher level and to add more controversy to the point he is making.
There is a lot of good spiritual references and lessons of self-awareness and finding one's path and following it, that could be read between the lines.
The ascetic and other-worldly scenes are a bit too obvious and could have been done more poetically and with more subtlety.
Tabrizi is as good as before in the use of colloquial language and street humor and in the character development.
He is a good filmmaker who was able to deliver 75% of his potential in this one.
House of Sand and Fog (2003)
A pot of un-original ideas yet overrated
Everything is overrated about this film. The plot being so uninteresting and poor, the characters not developed at all (the only one close to a good character development is Jennifer Connelly's, even Ben Kingsley's character is not consistent with a wife-beating-yet-sensitive Iranian husband, or a nostalgic-loving-responsible-retired army man).
It is just a pot of ideas never realized and yet so overrated!
The appreciation of the acting seems exaggerated to me (although I am very happy for Shohreh Aghdashloo's Oscar nomination). People who loved this movie and rated it so high have to explain to the rest of us who thought our $9 was a waste of time and money, and who were bored at the end of the first 30 minutes of the movie.
Strangers (2000)
Enjoyable
The movie influenced to some extent from the earlier (and some later) Abbas Kiarostami works, is a personal tale of an American born Iranian young man who travels in Iran in search of his family history and his identity. Poetic and philosophical at times, it has some very nice cinematographic shots, the long shots of the lake, the mountains and the roads with the silence accompanying them, are very calming and deep.
Having not lived the same experience as Bahrani and all the emerging Iranian directors who are at a certain age and phase in their lives discovering their Iranian roots, I really enjoyed the movie, especially that I felt Bahrani has indeed found his roots, and he actually is more Iranian than he thinks he is (as he was questioning it in the movie).
The last scene is very strong, and successful.
Irréversible (2002)
Good in style, over use of violence loses the point
The thing that I don't understand is that so many critics have compared Irreversible to Memento. I find that a simple comparison as all the two films have in common is the fact that the sequence of scenes is backward, which makes it not enough for comparing two films to each other.
The movie is very well done in style, the cinematography is good, and Vicent Cassel is a good actor as usual (Belluci is not good at all), altough he doesn't bring anything new to his performance.
The rest of the film fails. One can debate that we are saying this because we are closing our eyes to the violence that is so existing in our environment and that is one reason why people get raped and get killed more and more every year, because we are in denial of the graveness of violence.
I am a strong advocate of 'not closing your eyes to the truth and reality no matter how ugly and hard it is', but I think Irreversible exaggerates.
The very long scene of rape starts so tense and painful for the audience that it can have the strongest effect and can work best as an anti-violence message (if that is anything near what Noe tried to get to) but towards the end of the scene, you are not as touched as before anymore, simply because of the repetition factor. You can see through the scene, you can see that this is a "film", that they are "acting". It also makes you think of the motives of the director to include this scene in that length. Is it for testing the audience's tolerance, is it a test of going to extremes, or is it just pure masochism and perverseness? You wonder whether you are betrayed by the director and he is indeed the rapist and not the raped?!
That is where the movie fails and loses the point. If Noe had kept the violent scenes shorter and more subtle and had worked on the very weak and bad conversations, the film would have touched many more people on a different level (this holds for the cab scene and for the murder in the night club scene as well).
It is a big responsibility to recommend it to others, so be careful who you are recommending it to.
The Quiet American (2002)
Awful
I saw the movie and was shocked by the good reviews that it had received both by critics and on IMDB. I hardly walk out of the theatre, but this time I was able to walk out.
The soap opera nature of the movie, the very poor performance of the actors (which again I don't understand why it received good reviews and Oscar nominations), the very bad dialogues, the mistakes on presenting the period, the lack of emphasis on the powerful parts of the Graham Greene story, and more and more weaknesses, disappointed me to a great deal.
The movie basically has absolutely no value, it is not a historical movie, it is not a visually nice one (again shocked to see that a great cinematographer like Huu Tuan Nguyen has done a very basic and mainstream job), dialogues and character development are poor, and it doesn't touch any of the strong aspects of such a deep and condensed era. Nothing really on the war, hardly anything strong on the CIA involvement in Indochine, and not even one nice shot of such a beautiful country, and let's not even talk about the childish and un-sophisticated love story.
It is a great disappointment, more to the critics who gave it 4 stars and must-sees than to the film itself.
8 femmes (2002)
I saw the preview of "8 Women" last week...
I saw the preview of "8 Women" last week in Chicago and along with a group of my friends fell in love with it. It is witty, unexpected, funny, mysterious, and well done. Enough has been said about the great combination of actresses in this movie but it is still worth mentioning the fascinating acting of Isabelle Huppert as Augustine.
What surprises me is that a lot of the critics (so far) have taken the movie on first degree and rated it really low! There are comments such as these women are all miserable and Ozon doesn't know what to do with this group of great French actresses!!!!!! I believe the movie is a great entertainment, it is well done and Ozon has completely achieved what he wanted to do.
Don't miss it!
Roozi ke zan shodam (2000)
Great movie. One of my favorites of the last 10 years Iranian cinema.
What I like most in "The Day I Became A Woman" is the structure of it (3 tales starting with a 9 year old girl, moving on to a young woman and finishing with an old woman).
My favorite part is the last part, a dreamy, surreal tale of an old woman who goes to Kish Island to fulfill her dreams. It is the most humorous of the three tales too.
The style of the day I became a woman is different from other Iranian movies of this decade, and that is another reason that it makes it so charming.
Don't think too hard and try to enjoy the image. It is beautiful.
No Man's Land (2001)
Very Touching
I watched No Man's Land at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival this year and truly enjoyed it.
A war movie that tells the absurdity and uselessness of war, the frustration of the parties involved, and the chaos of outside help and the media, without using cliche scenes of blood sheds and fightings.
The scene where the Bosnian and the Serb soldiers debate about who started the war and the very last scene are extremely strong.
The Bosnian soldier laying on the mine, symbolizes the situation and destiny of the "people" and the "country" very touchingly.