terrible... so disappointed.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This movie underlines the fact that a movie belongs to the director, How he treats the theme and narrate the story. This movie is about a very ordinary man living in the outskirts of Teharan, Finding it very difficult of get the income sufficient for the family, But happily living with them.The struggle of a common man is beautifully enacted by Mohammed amir Naji. He really deserve an applause for his splendid performance throughout the movie.All other characters in the family also given very good performance. The first few minutes of the movie is in a ostrich farm where the protagonist is working. Those who have not seen ostriches in real life this is visual treat. Similar is the way in which two wheeler's are used as Taxi in Tehran.The silence of Desert is beautifully captured in this movie. The background music is also very apt. Overall this movie is a pleasant experience , thanks to the care taken by majid majidi in each scene.

I don't know if this movie is considered a comedy, but soooo many funny things happen it's hilarious from start to finish. The main thing that comes to mind is murphy's law (if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all; or, if anything can go wrong, it will.) I also really enjoyed seeing the Iranian landscape and their way of life. Everything that can be used or fixed is utilized. This movie is serious, funny, heartwarming, and good clean family type of entertainment. I thought the acting was great, and the characters endearing. This has got to be one of the best foreign films I've seen. Best thing since Slumdog Millionaire. Too bad it wasn't in English, but than maybe that added to the overall sense of the movie.

'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.

Iranian director Majid Majidi is known for sweet and often sentimental films that contrast with the more acerbic films of his countrymen Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. Though no Iranian film has made much headway at the box office in the U.S., films such as Majidi's Color of Paradise have found their audience on DVD and he has received numerous awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for Children of Heaven. His latest film, The Song of Sparrows, which appeared at several film festivals last year, has now opened in limited release in New York and Los Angeles and it carries on in the same tradition of simplicity, warmth, and a substantial dollop of sentimentality.Reza Naji, who portrayed the blind boy's father in The Color of Paradise, is Karim, a poor man who works on an ostrich farm in rural Iran. Karim, a devoted husband and father of three, loses his job when one of his birds, a symbol of nature, wanders into the hills. Though he chases after the bird, putting on an ostrich costume in a comic attempt to capture the bird, it is to no avail. Compounding his misfortune, his oldest daughter Haniyeh ((Shabnam Aklaghi) drops her hearing aid into the water-storage tank so that it now requires expensive repairs, money that the family does not have. Traveling to Tehran to try to fix the hearing aid, Karim inadvertently finds that people, some with considerable means, mistake his motorbike for a taxi, giving him a new and lucrative line of work as a cabbie.Clearly visible, however, is the contrast between Karim's wealthy customers and the poor beggars who wait at the side of the road and the job exposes him to the seamier side of big city life and the ugly grey face of crowded Tehran. As a taxi driver, Karim is bilked out of his fare, threatened with reprisals if he does not find another spot to wait for customers, listens to men shouting at each other on their cell phones, and gradually succumbs to the allure of accumulation. Every night he brings home another piece of useless junk that he finds on his route and they begin to pile up in his backyard.Slowly he begins to lose his generous and honest nature and even his children become corrupted. His youngest son Hussein (Hamed Aghazi) makes plans to become a millionaire by cleaning out a sludge-filled pit and using it to breed and sell goldfish, unaware of what is involved. When the fish are accidentally lost, the boys are overcome with grief but Karim, who has been forced into self reflection by an accident, reminds them that "the world is a dream and a lie," forecasting the family's return to sanity and joy, exemplified by an exquisite ostrich dance that brings a note of light-hearted grace.