Les complices de Central Park

What a great movie! With a great script, a pair of huge actors, and a beautiful scenery, this movie can touch anyone's heart. Don't miss it!

A couple of old codgers who were playing slightly beyond their actual ages make I'm Not Rappaport a really delightful film, especially for us senior citizens who can now identify with it. I couldn't much when the movie came out or Herb Gardiner's play ran on Broadway from 1985 to 1988 for 891 performances. Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little played the roles on Broadway that Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis do in the film.

There's a nice free flowing chemistry between Matthau and Davis. Matthau was literally born to play this role given his Lower East Side upbringing with family of the same general background as his Nat Moyer.

Matthau's discovered that the elderly can get away with just about anything and maybe helped by a bit of dementia he spins the kind of yarns that in old Hollywood westerns might have made him a Yiddishe sidekick. He's an old leftist from back in the 30s when it was most respectable. Bernie Sanders would have gotten this guy.

Davis has lived for 40 years as a building superintendent in a Fifth Avenue and the building is going co-op and he's about to be let go. Davis likes Matthau in his own way, but hasn't quite gotten the hang of laying it on the way Matthau does. See the two of them, especially Matthau take on the co-op president Boyd Gaines.

The play only had the one setting of the park bench in Central Park where these two commiserate. But with Herb Gardner adapting his own play, the beautiful fall vistas of Central Park makes the park itself a character in the film.

But you really have to see how Matthau and Davis play off against each other so well. That's what puts them in the seats and now renting the film on Netflicks.

Though I have worked in almost all aspects of the theater business, I do not agree with many of my colleagues when it comes to film tastes. I do not like film adaptations of stage plays because the origins are most of the times in evidence, but that seems to be what my friends enjoy more: to be remembered that they watch filmed theater. But this one (winner of New York's Tony award) I liked quite a lot, although it is also the case: in spite of the efforts to emphasize its outdoors setting, it is based on word interchange, and most of the action is verbal and static, depending mostly on criss-cross editing. This time though you have two exceptional actors, with the additional plus that they are not of the kind that goes around with a sign on his/her face or chest that reads "I'm the Greatest Actor" (and I can think of quite a few). You don't find plays everyday in which the main characters are a Jewish militant of the Left and a black janitor, both very old. These people are not glamorous, their lives were not full of heroics, and old age is not epic, but one spends a good time with these two folks, even if a couple of subplots could have been omitted. Perhaps, due to the fact that Herb Gardner the playwright adapted his work and also directed it, the film is overlong. But one day when you are not in a rush, and have time for Matthau and Davis, enjoy them. It is better than watching aimless young Germans in Portugal for two hours, in something called "Body Rice"...

A sensitive approach to the "getting old" problem on the big cities. The main character is a modern version of Dom Quixote, who tries to keep his ideas and principles alive assuming to be imaginary people which had more interesting histories than he had on his own life.

The movie is beautiful and amusing. Walter Matthau is splendid.

Actually, I not only smiled, I laughed out loud. I'm 70 and did not feel that this movie is sad, as some of the other reviewers have suggested. Those two old guys were making the best out of the time they had left,an encouraging message for us old folks. Unlike so many of today's movies, there was an engaging plot and solid character development. So many of the movies I see these days substitute visual effects,sex scenes,violence, and vulgar language for plot and character development. Also, although it was 130 minutes long,those minutes moved quickly.

Three cheers for Walter Matthau! Three cheers for Ossie Davis! Three Cheers for Herb Gardener!