Abraham is a Puerto Rican single parent with two boys. He is becoming very worried about them living in their run down neighborhood when one day he notices that Cubans who escape are lionized and given exceptional benefits. He thinks up a plot to have his sons washed ashore as cuban immigrants who will be adopted by rich anglos.
Popi - Leben um jeden Preis, Татусь, Попи, Papi, 파피
USAG
Germany16
AustriaAA
Austria
Germany
USA
Watched in tribute to Alan Arkin.
It's not a great film but it's one I remember watching as a teenager on TV and I think his performance is pretty good. He plays a widowed Puerto Rican father trying to bring up his two kids in a dilapidated one-room apartment in the dirty and unsafe Spanish Harlem area of New York. He works 3 jobs but still can't make ends meet, so he comes up with a madcap (and very dangerous) plan to give his kids a 'better life'. This involves a lot of secret planning and a bus trip to Miami (I wonder if Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo were on the same bus?).
A modern audience would probably find some parts of the film 'inappropriate' but I kind of like the realism (even although it's softened by some sentimentality) and there's some great location shooting in the streets of New York.
R.I.P. Mr Arkin.
With Alan Arkin’s recent passing I decided to look into his less known work. Here he plays a Abraham, a widow of two boys living in a rundown Spanish Harlem tenement. He becomes determine to ge them out of what he predicts will be a life of crime. The scheme he comes up with is absolutely insane. Rita Moreno is excellent in a supporting role who tries in vain to talk some sense into him.
This is rated G but were it released today it would probably be PG-13. Heroin is discussed, pigeons are slashed and Arkin gets it on with Moreno. I would’ve loved this as a kid. Movies directed toward families in the late 60s and 70s were definitely more edgy. Since I didn’t come from a sheltered childhood, I would’ve appreciated it.
How in god's name was this rated G?
This is ostensibly a sunny, happy, comedy about a single immigrant father who wants to save his kids by getting rid of them, and dumping them on some unspecified "rich American parents". The catchy 60's theme song immediately gives way to horrific scenes of urban squalor and psychological abuse, not to mention the utter insanity of "Popi"'s plan. Decades of progress may partially explain some of the shit that goes on here; But "Popi"'s antics would've landed a real person in federal prison for life without parole, even in the 60's.
This "lighthearted comedy" is sometimes closer to psychological horror. "Popi" is raising his two small kids in a New York tenement…
Alan Arkin screaming "I'M GOING TO DO IT" 10 times in a row is such mood.
When we meet Puerto Rican Alan Arkin at the start of Popi, he’s already at the end of his rope — or thinks he is, anyway. His wife is dead, and his two boys (Reuben Figueroa and Miguel Alejandro) are growing up wild on the mean streets of Spanish Harlem. He’s working three different jobs and getting roughly five hours of sleep a night. Yet he and his sons live in one dingy room in a run-down tenement. Girlfriend Rita Moreno, who works in a sweatshop, suggests that, if they marry and combine their incomes, they can afford a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, but what happens if she gets pregnant? No, Arkin has come up with a hare-brained scheme to…
First half good. Second half not so.
The white writing team's limitations and paucity of ambition clearly re-route the drama into broad comedy with mawkishly patronising overtones.
An insane little gem my dad loved from when he was a kid. Alan Arkin in the GOAT Non-Puerto Rican playing a Puerto Rican performance where he could actually pass for one (except when his accent goes into Borat/Gru territory). My dad told me this was a comedy but it's about a dad staging a hoax where he makes it seem like his kids are refugees coming from Cuba so they'll find a better living situation than the one they have with him and they almost die in the process?
Bits of pretty great cinematography early on, great dirty gritty New York that reminds me of The Warriors (same DP) and even a little Cassavettes at times but it's not very consistent. On Amazon Prime
This is a film of two halves, the first showing this single Puerto Rican dad (Alan Arkin) raising two boys in the gritty world of Spanish Harlem. There was a palpable sense of realism in its on-location footage which was great, but the plots points were silly and rather tedious, e.g. Arkin struggling comically with a corpse. Then we have the second half down in Miami, which wants us to believe a guy would send his small kids out to sea on a small boat with no food or water so that they can pretend to be Cuban refugees, which is absolutely crazy, and disagreeable even if viewed as political satire. I just couldn’t get over this concept.
I think…
Popi estreava há 55 anos em New York.
Olha, estou pouco me lixando pro Hiller, mas AMO DEMAIS o Alan Arkin e só por ele quis assistir esse filme.
"This is a part of my past that I am not terribly proud of—my difficulty dealing with people in positions of authority, for whom I had no respect. If I was faced with a director who I thought was incompetent or cruel, I would become insufferable and I would not communicate. If he gave me an idea I didn’t like, I would dismiss it abruptly, often rudely.
This grandiose attitude of mine went on for a couple of years, during which time I was offered the lead in a film called…
Not sure really works as a whole--it has a really odd plot development in its second half, and you either go with it or you question what Alan Arkin's character is thinking.
Arkin plays a struggling dad to these two kids in Spanish Harlem--he really, really, really wants to move them to a better area but of course as a poor struggling immigrant who's already barely making ends meet on the two to three jobs he holds down can't seem to accomplish. So he comes up with this completely crazy hair-brained scheme to try and boost his sons into a higher social standing/better environment.
I don't want to give too much away--but basically if you remember the whole Elian Gonzales…
I found this film to be much too irritating to be offensive, but your results may vary. Alan Arkin himself tried to warn me and others off this in interviews he gave late and life in which he sounded profoundly embarrassed by this film's existence. I think it's more for the sake that he felt he gave a bad performance than for the Puerto Rican caricature he presented. You might chock this up to a product of its time, and the kind of accented performance that was commonplace in this era, but it's not even that his performance is inauthentic or insincere, it's just that he's surrounded by an actual latino cast who are clearly being directed to be wily…
The 1960s, Pt. II: 71/100
1969 Ranked
Ranked: Arthur Hiller
“Better to drown in the ocean than in the sewer.”
Abraham Rodriguez (Alan Arkin) is struggling. His wife died, leaving him to raise two young boys, Luis (Reuben Figueroa) and Junior (Miguel Alejandro), alone. They live in Brooklyn in an area overrun by chaos. Crime is, of course, an issue while every corner of their world is layered in grime. It is not an area conducive to raising two young boys, one where Abraham watches them molded by the streets and under the influence of their dangerous friends while he struggles to try to provide for their needs. He has a girlfriend, Lupe (Rita Moreno), with the pair on the…
