Flutterby™! : Movies of late

Noting a couple of movies we've seen over the past month:

The Persian Version — pitched as a comedy, it had some moments, but mostly it was more a good "someone telling a personal story about their cultural background" intergenerational trauma and reconciliation/daughter comes to understand her mother movie.

Thunder Soul — A Reddit post that I can't find right now described this as something like "Mr Holland's Opus but real", it perhaps had a bit more reminiscence than music, but follows a bunch of former students of music teacher Conrad O. Johnson in the Kashmere High School stage band as they put together a reunion of the band to honor the teacher. Warning, rental of this film may lead directly to buying something like the Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 album from Now-Again music (which I haven't yet listened to, but I did buy).

The music is rousing (could use more of it), the critique and celebration of an educator and the culture and administration he worked in is worthwhile (albeit a little light), I really want to now see a documentary on some of the students who put this whole thing back together, and how they got to where they were. This one left us wanting more on pretty much all of the fronts that it tackled.

The Cuban — we were looking for something to wind down with last night, looked for a movie tagged music, and I wouldn't call this a musical film, but Louis Gossett Jr. turns in a fantastic performance as a dementia patient in a nursing home, against Ana Golja as the very compelling 19 year old caretaker and daughter of an Afghan immigrant who goes above and beyond to reach him. Don't think too hard about some of the setting/medical issues, it's a neat look at Afghan immigrant culture meets Toronto meets Cuba, with some fun music, but it's not a story about the music. Though Golja does have a voice which really supports the music that there is.