SHREK FOREVER AFTER and PERSEPOLIS - Movie Reviews
Funny that I should duck into a nearby movie house this afternoon to see the latest SHREK FOREVER AFTER movie, the day after I watched a DVD that J4 gave me for my birthday, the French with English subtitles movie PERSEPOLIS. Both were animated and both were about a character whose arc was that they didn't feel authentic or where they belonged.
Of course Shrek never lived in the real world, and Marjane Satrapi did. PERSEPOLIS, about her childhood in the repressive Iranian revolution, was done in an arty black and white style that owed a lot to the original graphic novel series she co-created with Vincent Paronnaud. She was outspoken and argumentative, so her parents sent her to Austria to go to school, trusting her to a friend who pretty quickly booted her to live with some racist nuns. Her crazy landlords, living on the street, unhappy love affairs, arguments with god, talks with her beloved and edgy grandmother, run-ins with crazy conservative nutcases, ... it made for some compelling story. It ended rather abruptly so didn't give a good catharsis. But it was impressive enough to be an Oscar nominee for best animated feature, plus represent Iran for the foreign film Oscar.
I enjoyed the extras on the DVD, where you saw skinny, twitchy Vincent and larger-than-life Marjane and how they wrote the screenplay, changing things for a more effective story, and ran an animation studio for two years to get the movie done. Amazingly, Marjane speaks and pantomimes almost every character in the movie so the animators can get the inflections right. But one scene, about her depression upon returning to Iran as a young woman and her attempted suicide, she says she got too emotional and left that all up to Vincent. They show Vincent's very moving depiction of the tailspin and fears that plague Marjane, but they ultimately didn't use that. They decided instead to have an argument with Marjane and God and Karl Marx. It was still affecting, but more about the theme of the movie.
Oh, and the fact that her family and her heroic uncles and grandfather, etc., were communists probably made some Americans uncomfortable, but the communists were the heroes in Iran. Her father's family was descended from royalty and still they firmly believed monarchies were corrupt, even more corrupt when they were backed by the West to protect oil interests, and especially corrupt when the CIA was training the repressive regime in the fine art of torture. She learned this directly from her uncles, one of whom was tortured for 15+ years. It's also impressive that Marjane speaks Persian (one assumes, though not in this movie), French and English.
As far as Shrek, well, this felt like a 15-minute movie stretched out to 90 minutes. They have spread the schtick of Shrek about as thin as it will go, and surely IV will be the final one. Surely! The story: His life as a family man is so stressful that, on his three homely kids' first birthday party, Shrek can't stand all the noise and the ogre-cute and the lack of fear. So he punches out a decorated cake and flees, only to have slimy Rumpelstilskin set up a con and entice him into giving up a day of his past. The result: the world never knew Shrek, so it's the same kind of terrible place Jimmy Stewart saw in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. We see Fiona as a Boadicia-type of woman warrior leading the ogre resistance. Mostly the theme of this movie was also the overt action of Shrek, which was to keep telling people, "See how compelling these previous stories were? Remember how much you loved these characters?" Just sort of limp and sad, though. And remarkably few jokes.
This came after a lunch gathering with women friends where we learned one woman finally left her very immature and inert husband. We'd just discussed that maybe women expect too much of men, but of the women there who'd been married, all had left a husband for that very reason. Their husbands abdicated 99% of the relationship and the homekeeping up to them, and then devalued the work they did and thought they were just whining when the wives said this has to change. Then were shocked, SHOCKED, when the wives shut down the marriage. I think this gender problem is being somewhat fixed now that mothers must work and insist their sons, not just their daughters, help with the household maintenance. But boo! to the previous generations; those moms were sending their self-absorbed, lazy darlings out into the world as marriage traps. And I hope that the first divorce shook the guys up enough they treated their next relationships better. I know when I lived with a divorced guy, he did some considerate things his ex-wife never or rarely saw, like making me breakfast almost every morning, and trading off weeks of grocery shopping and dinner making. So in the case of Shrek, him grousing about friends crowding around and his wife and kids cramping his style, I didn't have much sympathy.
Of course Shrek never lived in the real world, and Marjane Satrapi did. PERSEPOLIS, about her childhood in the repressive Iranian revolution, was done in an arty black and white style that owed a lot to the original graphic novel series she co-created with Vincent Paronnaud. She was outspoken and argumentative, so her parents sent her to Austria to go to school, trusting her to a friend who pretty quickly booted her to live with some racist nuns. Her crazy landlords, living on the street, unhappy love affairs, arguments with god, talks with her beloved and edgy grandmother, run-ins with crazy conservative nutcases, ... it made for some compelling story. It ended rather abruptly so didn't give a good catharsis. But it was impressive enough to be an Oscar nominee for best animated feature, plus represent Iran for the foreign film Oscar.
I enjoyed the extras on the DVD, where you saw skinny, twitchy Vincent and larger-than-life Marjane and how they wrote the screenplay, changing things for a more effective story, and ran an animation studio for two years to get the movie done. Amazingly, Marjane speaks and pantomimes almost every character in the movie so the animators can get the inflections right. But one scene, about her depression upon returning to Iran as a young woman and her attempted suicide, she says she got too emotional and left that all up to Vincent. They show Vincent's very moving depiction of the tailspin and fears that plague Marjane, but they ultimately didn't use that. They decided instead to have an argument with Marjane and God and Karl Marx. It was still affecting, but more about the theme of the movie.
Oh, and the fact that her family and her heroic uncles and grandfather, etc., were communists probably made some Americans uncomfortable, but the communists were the heroes in Iran. Her father's family was descended from royalty and still they firmly believed monarchies were corrupt, even more corrupt when they were backed by the West to protect oil interests, and especially corrupt when the CIA was training the repressive regime in the fine art of torture. She learned this directly from her uncles, one of whom was tortured for 15+ years. It's also impressive that Marjane speaks Persian (one assumes, though not in this movie), French and English.
As far as Shrek, well, this felt like a 15-minute movie stretched out to 90 minutes. They have spread the schtick of Shrek about as thin as it will go, and surely IV will be the final one. Surely! The story: His life as a family man is so stressful that, on his three homely kids' first birthday party, Shrek can't stand all the noise and the ogre-cute and the lack of fear. So he punches out a decorated cake and flees, only to have slimy Rumpelstilskin set up a con and entice him into giving up a day of his past. The result: the world never knew Shrek, so it's the same kind of terrible place Jimmy Stewart saw in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. We see Fiona as a Boadicia-type of woman warrior leading the ogre resistance. Mostly the theme of this movie was also the overt action of Shrek, which was to keep telling people, "See how compelling these previous stories were? Remember how much you loved these characters?" Just sort of limp and sad, though. And remarkably few jokes.
This came after a lunch gathering with women friends where we learned one woman finally left her very immature and inert husband. We'd just discussed that maybe women expect too much of men, but of the women there who'd been married, all had left a husband for that very reason. Their husbands abdicated 99% of the relationship and the homekeeping up to them, and then devalued the work they did and thought they were just whining when the wives said this has to change. Then were shocked, SHOCKED, when the wives shut down the marriage. I think this gender problem is being somewhat fixed now that mothers must work and insist their sons, not just their daughters, help with the household maintenance. But boo! to the previous generations; those moms were sending their self-absorbed, lazy darlings out into the world as marriage traps. And I hope that the first divorce shook the guys up enough they treated their next relationships better. I know when I lived with a divorced guy, he did some considerate things his ex-wife never or rarely saw, like making me breakfast almost every morning, and trading off weeks of grocery shopping and dinner making. So in the case of Shrek, him grousing about friends crowding around and his wife and kids cramping his style, I didn't have much sympathy.