Posted 11:13 AM by Scoobie Davis

Films
Last night I saw The Savages and Persepolis. I got a lot out of The Savages even though I thought parts of it didn't have the ring of truth. From a standpoint of acting, it's hard to beat a film with both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.

I'm not listing Persepolis as my favorite film of the year only because of No Country for Old Men. Persepolis blew me away. It's a coming of age story about a Iranian girl who experiences the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq War and who spends much of her teenage years in Austria. One of the things I loved about the protagonist is that after she returned to Iran as an adult, she and her friends risked arrest and persecution by Iran's morality squads by holding secret coed music-and-dance parties. As someone into comix and sequential art, I was familiar with the highly-regarded graphic novels but I didn't read them. I hope that word of mouth helps the film to gain a wider audience--a challenging task for a subtitled film in the U.S. I also hope the film does well because it ticks off the mullahs.

I also recently saw Charlie Wilson's War. There's something odd about the Washington Time's review of the film so I will write a post about it on the Sun Myung Moon blog later.

UPDATE: The post on Charlie Wilson's War is up.