you're getting and welcome to another thrilling episode of fistful of popcorn the movie discussion show out of princeton new jersey and i'm your moderator tonight everybody's out of tonight  and with me are two of our regular panelists carol welch and marilyn campbell and tonight we're going to talk about two films right now are in movie theaters don't know how much longer they'll be there but as these are want we're discussing movies that are not the big blockbusters but are nevertheless excellent films in our opinion tonight they're going to be jim latest effort which is about a poet and we're going to talk about an iranian film which is not about apartheid but which is about art yes and let's let's have a but what he really does is he's a poet so he writes poetry in his notebook during the day and he comes home to his wife at night she is what decorates their house in black and white she makes black and white cupcakes and she dresses and black and white and at some point she bust their budget by buying a black and white card because she wants to be a country singer and there's a quote in this film that's actually from william carlos williams no ideas but in things and that means that the minute we observed or the particularly is very much what  moments in life i'm not at all attracted to making films that are about drama a few years back i saw a biopic about a famous american abstract expressionist artist and you know what really hard find me all they did was reduce his life to the big dramatic moments you could make out of any biography that's supposed to be a portrait of somebody i just don't get it it's so weird octave just seems all wrong to me it's probably paying attention to his work and this if you think about is a good way to do it being a bus driver is a pretty solitary job but he does observe people on this bus and there's some us and they were all very interested and one of the things that one of them brought up afterwards when we went out for forced beer but it was interesting to him they don't go he you see him know i believe they were preexisting paul and i got more sense i heard an interview where padgett was asked whether he would contribute to the film so i think maybe some of them were written with that idea in mind but i don't know how i think it was it was interesting to me that his wife is a visual artist you know in a sense she said the performance artist visual artist she seems to be feeling her way she wants to be an artist but she's not exactly sure what form it's going to take so she tries music and she tries painting and she tries cupcakes and it's all going to be black and white yeah yeah well she has a visual style and it's it's interesting that inside their house it's always a surprise when you come in and say look she's done during the day she's always you know she's painted something new or she's got a new project whereas his he's a nice woman and and he's a little worried that she sort of sitting around there by herself so he said to down and then she says i'm a poet and you read her one of his poems which he's that i wanted to get back to the visual because i think the visual is also poetic in a way there's a lot of metaphoric visuals like you'd see a focus on two guys who are talking on the bus and the camera zooms down to their feet together it's you look at the front door of the house they live in and the color of that door is akin to flowers that are pink flowers that are on the front he hates the word quirky i've read you talk about wes anderson and people like that they're all quirky and he says it's overused it's true it doesn't it doesn't mean anything when you get right down to it the review  awfully cute the dog was a deus ex mocking them yes the dog was a film that we discussed on the show called a separation which is about a husband and wife who are having difficulties deciding what to do and similarly to this movie there are a lot of very ambiguous moral questions in a separation and also in this film you start out thinking one person is the good person and over time that sort of changes that i going to give a brief summary without spoilers but basically it's about a husband and a wife who are actors in iran and they are engaged in putting on a performance of arthur miller's death of a salesman the husband is playing william wellman and and the and the wife is playing the wife and in the course of this they're also going about their daily lives where they're in an apartment building that starts to crack and fall  apart and they have to quickly find another place to live in a friend of theirs at the play has an apartment which he's just a big concern when brown and he says they can move in there and they move in there and they begin to get involved in weird ways with the life of the previous tenant which causes a crisis and the marriage and the play think in the in a separation there's a plot with the wife wants to emigrate with their daughter to give their daughter a better life and a husband wants to stay because he has an elderly father with alzheimer's that he feels he shouldn't i banned and then th hit by a car while chasing the father who has wandered off and had a miscarriage and she doesn't want to tell her husband that she wants to tell her husband a different story and so all of this is sort of morally entangle of and it's also the sort of middle class intelligentsia class having relations with the working class and this film  class these actors who are putting on a play despite despite censorship and the fact that the prostitute in the play has to wear a raincoat and and boots  i'm not sure that's a spoiler i think that's pretty much all right the wife is salt yeah i think what the movies have in common is that there is very complex in his movies there's very in and it has parallels in the play they're putting on death nothing else made and i think probably the most parallels is is towards the end of the movie which we can't tell you about because that would  his movie is also very layered you know this is a very layered movie but with a lot more plot well i think it's also a lot more so socially and politically conscious because because not to go to the police their first reaction to it is somehow privately privately work out some sort of vengeance or compensation or something like that because the last thing you want to do is although the husband wants them to go to the police he's saying don't you want to go to the police and she said no it's not clear why she doesn't want to go place there there's also a big question in the middle of the movie and they tell me that that was the same in the imagine what this assault was now you don't know whether this is because of fear of censorship or whether this is he actually works with this in this ambiguity which loves anyway helps to make the movie more complicated i think it's i think when someone is put to their own resources to try to figure something out instead of instead of being told yes or pointing then the decision to the judiciary system or the police system it makes for more ambiguity because in both ones the husband tries to be a sort of a strong man right and and becomes something they both hate because because they're they're there they have these aspirations to being liberal sort of sort of westernized iranians are part of the intelligentsia and the artistic class and yet when it right down our way when it comes right down to it they are patriarchal to the core and and then in the separation he's willing to go to the husband of the woman that he's claimed he assaulted her to make some sort of make some sort of accommodation to discuss it and to you know yell at him and try to try to strong arm him into dropping the charges right and in this again the husband says well i have to do something i'm going to take care of this i'm going to take care of this he doesn't exactly know what he's going to do but he's got and his wife is not terribly on board she's not she's not excited about th she's terribly unexpected apparently i'm excited about it so that's where they are where it begins to switch where you are you start thinking oh he's a great guy such so good to his wife thank you such a right he's so artistic artistic it's creating them right and then he he becomes something that we we don't recognise and we just bought in the in the beginning of the movie when the buildings crumbling their apartments crumbling around them he save conscious right because everything that he that he thinks he has everything arranged and everything right under control right everything is suddenly out of control now because of this eruption of violence within his own family and he was i've read some accounts where people had thought it was was could have been shorter where was your sense of that no we stood motion well any movie could be sure  back and forth the rehearsals of death and the salesman and i did make make parallels in your mind between this very very american yes play this sort of quintessential american play of the day and pursuing the american dream who is who is doesn't succeed at pursuing the american writer eamon what that does to him and and this and the situation in iran which is entirely capitalist picture he is very funny yeah and the movie is funny and i thought adam driver who i seen in several of the things and he's a good actor pretty tends to play to play villains or though it always is as carol was saying both of them are have all kinds of layers of interest area that i had but i thought the salesman was was disturbing in that it stripped away our pretenses of whether or not we're good who is a good person who is not a good person and how can you make those judgments care like both movies some watching and both of them and i really liked the salesman i didn't think it was quite as good as the separation but very similar i think this director is fabulous and boy is he