Persepolis
Expectations play a larger role than they should in my appreciation of a movie. How else to explain how much I enjoyed the forgettable “Wild Hogs” than that I was expecting a terrible movie and found myself laughing at the goofy gags instead? Persepolis, on the other hand, is an example of a good movie that disappointed due to elevated expectations. Publicity for the movie left me cold, but rave reviews and an Academy Award nomination prompted me to see it. The movie brings to the screen the autobiographical graphical novel (okay, it’s really a “graphic novel”, but how often do you get to have “graphical” twice in a row?) of Marjane Satrapi. And “autobiographical” is the key and sufficient adjective to describe this movie, which follows Marjane from the age of eight in Teheran Iran during the final days of the Shah’s rule. It follows, episodically, her life through the revolution that toppled the Shah and instituted a repressive Islamic regime. Had I been ignorant of the events that marked that tumultuous period in Iran, the movie would have been fascinating on a historical level. As a story, the movie exhibits the characteristics of real life: it is complicated, messy, and without a clear resolution. This is not necessarily a flaw in a movie (which usually simplifies life to arrive at that clear resolution), but in this case it left me unaffected.