Fresh onto the art house circuit comes Perspolis, a French (with English subtitles) animated version of the two autobiographical comics by Marjane Satrapi. We follow Satrapi’s story from her childhood years in the Iranian revolution of 1979, through teen years in the developing fundamentalist regime in the early ’80s, to flirtations with trendy Euro-nihlism at a Vienna school in her adolescence, and finally back to the repressive radical Shiite regime of Iran in her college/art school years before she leaves for France. Like the book, the story is told as a series of related episodes, much of it centered around her relationship with her equally rebellious grandmother, which mirrors the way in which Satrapi struggles to come to terms with her Iranian identity when that identity, like her country, has been hijacked by the oppressions of the Mullah regime.

While there are moments of humor, the overall story is very sad – we see the fear, damage & casualties of the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s through the eyes of a child, we see the ways in which the modern & educated within Iran go from being under the thumb of the Shah to being under the thumbs of the Mullahs in episodes that evoke elements of 1984, the Khmer Rouge and even The Pianist. Set against all of this, Satrapi’s coming-of-age story, including disastrous romances and the emotional roller-coaster resulting, show us how this young woman survived everything she has been through, and how her combative personality gave her enough strength to tell us her important story. It all made me wonder – I put myself in her shoes, and thought: what do you do when your country goes crazy? Then I was back to being me, Jimmy the American Jew™, and thinking what can we do to prevent the very same people who arrest people for playing cards and listening to music from getting the bomb? Every idea put forth by politicians ranging from sanctions to ka-boom! relies on making the Iranian population angry enough to revolt, but this movie reminds us, tragically, how much they are suffering already. If after taking all this shit they haven’t revolted yet, will they ever? Oy. I can’t think of an answer, and I did the Sunday crossword today in about twenty minutes, so therefore, I am a GENIUS!

The animation follows the style of Satrapi’s art, and is in black and white, except for a colored framing device around the movie which is all told in flashback. It’s simple, hand-drawn, and with minimal dazzle – and it’s perfect for this material. Sometimes the simple captures character much better than the flashy, and strength of character is what this one is all about. Thumbs up!

I’m not quite sure how to review this particular film. On the one hand, I can talk about it purely as a film and discuss its sets, the staging, the costumes, the make-up, the lighting and filters, the casting, and so forth. I can also review the source material itself, the Broadway musical of Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim that the film sticks to fairly faithfully. There are things I like and dislike about both, really, and I’m not sure how they really add up.

The source material is an exercise in darkness, a revenge story wallowing in madness, lust and blood violence, with a dash of sick humor thrown in, but not enough to transform the piece into a satire. What we’re really left with is an elaborate exercise in unrelenting ugliness in the form of an opera. Some songs are sad, some amusing, but none of them are particularly memorable to me, neither by being pleasurable or haunting. The revenge is sought, acted upon and leads to the expected formulaic price – there are no surprises here.

So let’s move on to the film, which creates its own particular record of a single interpretation of this source material I find rather thin. Tim Burton creates an atmospheric nightmare Victorian landscape to hold his action – the narrow dark streets and seeming encroachment of the slightly surreal buildings adds to the feel of it all – and he puts enough white zombie makeup on his leads (Johnny Depp & Helena Bonham-Carter) to give us the constant presence of death every time we look at them onscreen. Depp’s hair and make-up seem to evoke the evil flipside of Edward Scissorhands at times, and though he’s mostly playing the entire film with the exact same affectations and emotions, he manages to define his albeit limited character well and sing his songs adequately. Alan Rickman makes a good villain (no surprise there) and Sascha Baron Cohen chews some scenery as some comic relief. Once you get past the bigger names, however, there are some excellent performances turned in from well-cast minor players, such as Timothy Spall as the Beadle and Ed Sanders as the boy Toby.

This may be the only movie I can think of in recent memory to properly utilize the blue-gray tinted filter throughout, making everything look like an endless twilight nightmare and perfectly setting up one of the best segments of the film where Mrs. Lovett sings of a day at the beach which is shot in bright picture postcard colors in contrast to the majority of the film and juxtaposes Depp as a sort-of monofocused monochrome zombie. I get tired of seeing that filter used as a lame attempt to add “realism” to battle footage or action sequences as if we’re supposedly watching some news broadcast – it looks flat and self-consciously arty. But here it works, and works well since the entire universe we’re watching is unreal and largely representational, whether of the soul-eating price of revenge or of some half-assed comment on the nature of industrial capitalism. But Burton can’t resist going over the top when trying to gross us out, whether it’s by the creepy crawlies scampering around Mrs. Lovett’s pies in her opening solo, or by repeatedly showing us the drawn-out blood flowing details in Todd’s slashing and slicing of the poor saps who come in for a shave. It’s one thing to see the Sam Peckinpaugh’s “Salad Days”-like fountain of stage blood (Geesh, there’s my second Python reference in this review…) gushing from the prosthetic throat of an extra before the rubber double is dumped down a chute to land on its head so we can see the neck broken as well – but do we have to see it a half a dozen friggin’ times in a row? Do we need to see characters literally covered with flowing blood by the end of this thing? I thought I was watching something by Herschell Gordon Lewis by the time it was over.

So I really don’t know what to think. I was interested in watching the film, I thought it was well-made and clever in parts, but I have no idea if I’d recommend it to anyone, and no idea if I’d tell them to stay away. Everyone I saw it with seemed to like it a lot, but it just left me cold. Perhaps it somehow drained all my blood as well.

This one started out annoying me, with far too much indy-film formula hitting me over the head, and overwritten hip language dialogue from wall to wall during its first twenty minutes or so, but once the story developed and the characters developed, Juno grew on me, and basically won me over.

The story of a cynical smartass of a girl (Ellen Page, doing a great job) who gets preggo by Bleeker, a dweeb would-be boyfriend (a charmingly schlemiel-y Michael Cera) gets far more interesting once her father (a wonderful JK Simmons) and stepmom (Allison Janney, also good here) are portrayed as caring and intelligent when dealing with her situation, as opposed to giving them moments drawn from formula dealing with this subject matter. The character of the dad especially rings true in that he’s someone who could conceivably raise a daughter with the personality of Juno and also know his daughter well. While Juno deals with her disappointment with the adult world’s hypocrisies with endless (though often very funny) gallows humor, she has also used this posture as a way to separate herself from her own emotions and trust in herself to be a different sort of adult, and a more successful one if she ever gets there. Her journey towards being honest with herself as far as her feelings for Bleeker pretty much becomes the center of the story, with that journey comprised of her (and our) changing perspectives towards the upmarket yuppie couple (Jason Bateman & Jennifer Garner) who arrange to adopt Juno’s baby.

I thought that a logical problem with the premise of the movie was that a girl as smart as Juno is portrayed would not be dumb enough to get preggers via being the aggressor in first-time sex with a passive but emotionally-safe dork, but if the point of the film was that she was graduating from clever to smart via being educated by her (literal) fuck-up, then I guess it works. While not the ringing endorsement of humankind that my last indy foray Lars & The Real Girl was, this little film manages to celebrate life and to celebrate it not only despite its insanities but by basking in those insanities. So, thumbs up!