Thanks for the nice comments, that means a lot. Great username, too!

I love those movies you mention, and all of Ghobadi's films so far are terrific. Check out "Marooned in Iraq" and "Half Moon" if you can find them on DVD. (The company, New Yorker, is now out of business, but Amazon sellers & Netflix should have them.)

Bahrani is such an interesting case, because by anybody's definition he is American, but he deliberately went to Tehran for 3 years to attend film school. So he's bringing some of that Iranian aesthetic to subject matter and settings that are distinctly American.

One of his mentors is a guy named Amir Naderi, who I hope to write more about soon. He was quite a well-respected director in Iran (not as famous as Kiarostami or anything) who immigrated to the US 10 or 15 years ago and has been making no-budget movies in New York, with little distribution or audience, ever since.

Come to think of it, I know that Kiarostami was at one point hoping to get a visa that would allow him to work in the US. Under the Bush administration this turned out to be pretty difficult, but it might well be a new era today.

If you could somehow convince Americans to watch a half-dozen or so Iranian films, their ideas about that country would be completely different than they are right now.

There's a lot of good stuff about the original production in there too, including excerpts from Bennett's original reel-to-reel tapes -- which reveal how much of the show was not "written" at all -- plenty of file footage, and interviews with original cast members Donna McKechnie and Baayork Lee, who both worked on aspects of the new production alongside director Bob Avian, Bennett's longtime assistant.

You know, it's more like in theory I don't like musicals. Mostly it's aesthetic. I mostly don't like Broadway music or Broadway singing, and don't much care for the brassy Broadway affect -- "Fame" would be the apotheosis of something I kind of can't stand. But of course I like a lot of old movie musicals (from Show Boat to Meet Me in StL to The Band Wagon), and when I see musicals in the flesh I have to concede that beneath the artifice, they're just as honest an attempt to confront the human condition as any other inherently artificial art form.

I think I would argue that beneath the up-with-people, let's-put-on-a-show aspect, the American musical often has a pretty skeptical or even cynical core message. Obviously true with self-consciously dark musicals like Chicago or Cabaret or much of Sondheim, but also true of many others.