Persepolis

[Photo taken off the screen at Minneapolis' Uptown Theater]

My daughter and I read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books a couple of years ago and loved them. We just saw the movie this weekend and it's amazing how true it is to the books without being identical.

Visually it differs from the books in that it is not just black and white line art -- the backgrounds are filled with textural grays and patterns. There are some scenes I don't recall from the books, such as the one where the child Marjane and her grandmother go to see a Godzilla movie.

But it brings across the feeling and all of the historical details from the book. I came away amazed that, while I remember the Iranian revolution and the "Iran Hostage Crisis" of the late 1970s clearly, I have almost no recollection of the bloody Iran-Iraq war that followed, and that plays such a central role in Persepolis and in Satrapi's life. When Marjane and her family emerge from their building after a bombing raid, only to find gaping holes in some buildings and others in complete ruins, I learned more about that war than I did from anything I heard contemporaneously.

I guess that war wasn't "news" in the U.S. in the 1980s.