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Absolutely the worst movie.

A Masterpiece!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A Golden Bear nominee of the Berlin International Film Festival, The Song Of Sparrows is Majid Majidi's first entry into a film festival of such prestige. The Iranian director of critically-acclaimed films such as The Children Of Heaven (1997) and The Color Of Paradise (1999) directs another praiseworthy picture, though I regard this as a less than stellar effort as compared to his best works.Majidi directs Mohammed Amir Naji to a Best Actor win and deservedly so because his portrayal of the lead character, Karim, is remarkably and convincingly natural. He plays the father of a relatively poor family who loses his job as a worker in an ostrich farm. He has a deaf daughter whose hearing aid is damaged after she dropped it in a water storage tank. Struggling to make ends meet as well as promising her daughter a new hearing aid to help her to cope with the coming exams, Karim goes out into the city to find temporary jobs in his old but dependable motorcycle.The Song Of Sparrows centers on Karim and uses him as a lens to reveal the two different ways of life inherent in Iran's increasingly urbanized setting – the tight-knitted rural community and the fragmented urban society. In the latter, the pace is fast and at times unsettling. Everyone is in a rush and this forces Karim to adopt a more pragmatic approach to earn a living – offering rides to anyone to anywhere in the city and allow them to pay him any amount they like.Occasionally, he does the odd job of delivering goods. In one instance, he loses his way and is forced to bring home a small refrigerator for the night. This 'expensive foreign object' causes excitement in the household because they have never seen anything like it before. Majidi, once again, highlights the urbanization, or more precisely, the dawn of urbanization which may change the rural way of life within the next decade or so in Iran.The conservative and overly protective Karim suffers a serious injury which renders him immobile for quite some time. This frees his children, especially his driven son to chase his own dreams – to rear fishes in the water storage tank and sell them to become a millionaire. Reality says that his dream is improbable because the construct of Iran's society is such that it is impossibly difficult to succeed with a low-class background.In a brilliant metaphor which describes the harshness of this reality, Majidi directs a scene which shows Karim's son and his friends frantically carrying a heavily leaking barrel containing many live fishes to safety only to trip and fall and see their 'dream' spill away onto the pavement. The Song Of Sparrows features a beautiful score by Hossien Alizadeh, and some impressive cinematography juxtaposing the quiet isolation of rural life and the hustle and bustle of urbanity. It is at times heartwarming, but for a Majidi film, it slightly lacks in emotion and the climax is not as powerful as intended. Nevertheless, The Song Of Sparrows is a decent showcase of the richness of Iranian cinema.SCORE: 7.5/10 (www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com) All rights reserved!

Majid Majidi has gone and done it again. He has crafted a simple story of a loving family man (although not without some minor flaws)who has several humbling experiences in life. Karim (played very well by Majidi regular,Mohammad Amir Naji,here known as Reza Naji)has a cushy job working at an ostrich farm,keeping watch over the king sized birds. Trouble erupts when one of the birds escapes from the pen,resulting in Karim losing his job. Good fortune happens to drop in Karim's lap when he ends up becoming a taxi driver in downtown Tehran. Other plot elements are dropped into the mix in the form of his eldest daughter,Haniyeh (Shabnam Aklaghi)who is partially deaf,loses her hearing aid,because of her younger brother,Hussein (Hamed Aghazi),who wants to start a goldfish hatchery in an unused well,who loses the hearing aid in the well/muck hole that it is. Toss in an understanding & loving wife,caring neighbors,and others,and you have yourself a loving film that is a treat for the eye & other senses. Majid Majidi directs from a screenplay written by Majidi & Mehran Kashani. The cinematography by Tooraj Mansouri successfully manages to capture the rugged Iranian landscape,with momentary bursts of colour (check out the scene of Naji carrying a blue door across the bleak desert-like landscape of the Iranian countryside,as well as some other breath taking scenes that are a treat for the eye). Rated PG by the MPAA for some brief,rude language,but contains nothing else to offend.

'The Song of Sparrows' is at once a beautifully humanistic film in the tradition of Italian neorealism, and an aimless ramble whose perceived themes and moral lessons are hard to decode. The protagonist, Karim (Reza Naji), lives somewhere a motorcycle ride away from Tehran with his wife and three children. Karim is an industrious bumpkin, essentially goodhearted but given to moments of meanness and rage. He gets fired from his job as an ostrich wrangler when during a move of the ostriches to another pen, while he's screaming at the men who're trying to help him, one of the big birds escapes. In one of the film's arresting sequences partly shot from a great distance, he wanders high up in the hills disguised as an ostrich, trying, in vain, to lure back the wayward bird.One thing leads to another. Karim's deaf older daughter Haniyeh (Shabnam Akhlaghi) drops her hearing aid into the dank storage tank water where his son is playing and it won't work. And so, without money, he goes to Tehran to repair the hearing aid. A man jumps on the back of his motorcycle and gives directions and before he knows it he's one of the city's legion of cycle taxi drivers transporting men and merchandise around town and receiving what for him seem enormous sums for this work.A series of little vignettes of riders follows. People give him things they consider junk that he thinks are better than what he has at home -- a blue door, and a TV aerial more sophisticated than his neighbors'. He starts an accumulation of this stuff. Some of the men cheat him. Others give him bonuses. All are loud and self-absorbed.Reza Naji, a regular in Majidi's films, looks like a bedraggled version of Judd Hirsh or the Forties and Fifties Hollywood regular William Bendix. He alternates between moments of taciturnity and hysterical screaming, the latter often directed at his little boy Hussein (Hamed Aghazi), whose entrepreneurial efforts with the storage tank (he and a handful of identical looking boys plan to turn it into a fish farm) he strongly disapproves of, presumably out of pride and a will to dominate. He also brings his gentle, sweet-natured (and generally passive) wife Narges (Maryam Akbari) to tears by violently taking back the blue door when she's given it to a friend. This occasions another of the film's memorable images: Karim carrying the blue door back home across the barren country landscape, seen from high above. He quietly soothes his wife and eases her tears. He's a kind father after his fashion but much of the time his face expresses only blank weariness.Some viewers interpret the story as a contrast of corrupt city and honest country and see Karim as being tempted into misbehavior by the luxuries of Tehran, but that is an exaggeration. He continues his dogged, not very smart striving from first to last and never stints in his sometimes harsh, sometimes kind, efforts to be a good father to his family. The movie does convey a sense of the prosperity (and ugliness) of Iran's crowded capital. There are well-dressed men constantly on their cell phones rushing around with wads of cash. One of them is moving into a large house and makes Karim carry things. Later Karim is part of a caravan of several dozen motorcyclists sent from a warehouse carrying new appliances and gets lost from the group. He takes the fridge he's been assigned home and later returns with it and tries to sell it.Some are seduced by the cinematography and it has its moments. What's more engaging is the specificity of the incidents. You learn about motorcycle taxis, and how to move an ostrich (you blindfold it and push it backwards). Judging by the uplifting tone of earlier Majidi films (all shown in the US) like 'Children of Heaven,' 'The Color of Paradise,' 'Baran,' and 'The Willow Tree,' the director is concerned with faith (and the loss of it) but also with social realism, mostly focusing on the poor and the discriminated against but with occasional looks at the middle class.An accident involving the big pile of junk Karim has collected puts him out of commission and may restore his equilibrium. At least it keeps him at home. Haniyeh's hearing aid seems to have gone back to working on its own. Earlier, Hussein and his buddies succeed in buying a giant plastic "bucket" (the subtitles aren't very good) full of goldfish for the storage tank, which they've cleaned up. But the "bucket" breaks and the boys lose all their fish. The film's most touching scene comes when the boys are crying in the back of a truck and Karim sings a fatalistic, but also funny, song that makes all their tears turn to smiles. It's a totally sentimental moment that I was utterly powerless to resist.

Another movie that played at the Berlin Film Festival, this low-key drama has a very human side to it. The actors (some of which were also in Germany for the premiere and seem as down to earth, as the roles they played in this movie) are really good and have a simplicity to them that is very gorgeous.The characters are very down to earth and the story itself or let's say it's pace, might remind people of classic movies such as "Bicycle Thieves" (kind of neo-realism, if you want to call it that). If you don't have a problem with that, then you will enjoy this movie as much as the audience in Berlin did (including myself) :o)