Paulie
Life from a parrot’s point of view.
- Director: John Roberts
- Genre:Adventure / Comedy / Drama / Family
- Runtime:88 minutes
Cast
Gena Rowlands : Ivy
Tony Shalhoub : Misha Vilyenkov
Cheech Marin : Ignacio
Bruce Davison : Dr. Reingold
Trini Alvarado : Adult Marie Alweather
The film is a picaresque tale about an intelligent talking blue-crowned conure named Paulie and his long quest to return to his owner.
Misha Belenkoff (Tony Shalhoub), a Russian immigrant and former teacher of literature, is living in America and working as a janitor at an animal testing lab. There he encounters a blue-crowned conure and is astonished when it speaks to him in perfect English. The bird does not talk when Belenkoff brings witnesses.
Misha persuades the bird to tell his story with pieces of mango after reading about the diet of conures. Paulie tells Belenkoff about his real owner, a little girl named Marie (Hallie Kate Eisenberg) who was a stutterer. Paulie is shown in flashback, first as a baby bird. As Marie learns to speak, so does he, and he learns well, understanding the meaning of words and learning to construct complex sentences. Marie’s father does not like the bird, and gives him away after a dramatic event in which Marie falls off the roof of her house in an attempt to teach Paulie to fly.
Paulie is passed from one owner to another, eventually ending up in a pawn shop, where he spends his time insulting the customers, until he is purchased by a widowed artist, Ivy (Gena Rowlands). She befriends him and agrees to take him to find Marie, who has moved across the country to Los Angeles. Ivy loses her sight and Paulie decides to stay and take care of her, but this is cut short when Ivy dies one day and is taken away while Paulie, having finally learned to fly, continues his journey.
In East Los Angeles, Paulie joins a group of performing conures owned by Ignacio (Cheech Marin), but is kidnapped by Benny (Mohr) and begins a life of crime. In a botched jewel theft, Paulie flies down through the chimney of a house, but is trapped inside and abandoned. Read more
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