Monday Afternoon Entertainment

Okay, so I really should be doing, um, actual work, but I stumbled across a couple of things today that are begging me to post about ’em, even if ever so briefly. I’m not particularly up on what movies are coming down the pipe (I tuned out of the whole Cloverfield thing once I realized I couldn’t tell the real viral marketing sites from the fake ones), being as I only read AintItCoolNews about once every six months for a half-hour or so, just long enough to get good and mystified as to how those people have the energy to rant about things the way they do. So these two upcoming films came as a total shock to me (despite the fact that the first one won the Prize of the Jury at Cannes; boy, am I out of the loop…):

• Persepolis: I’m totally, utterly over the moon about this one. I really enjoyed Marjane Satrapi‘s first Persepolis graphic novel (need to get the second) about growing up in Tehran in those days after the Shah & the CIA took out Mossadegh and right when the Iranian Revolution hit; it’s a fascinating, soul-baring read, and I love how Satrapi doesn’t pull any punches with regard to her childhood viewpoints on things. Now, somehow, the books have been made into an actual movie, and thank whatever deity you look to, it’s a cartoon. Not that I didn’t like 300 or anything, but that kind of cartoon-looking-but-real filmmaking would’ve fallen utterly flat here. Instead, it almost reminds me of Madeline in its overtly cartoonish style, or maybe The Triplets of Belleville; check it out:

  
  
  

• War Inc.: First thought: “holy crap — they made a sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank!” Second thought: “uh, not quite…” I mean, there’s John Cusack as the amoral-but-uncertain hitman who offers pithy observations on life and death and all the rest, there’s sister Joan as his(?) assistant, and there’s the inevitable black humor you get when an assassination attempt takes a surreal turn. There’s no Martin Blank this time, though, but “Brand Hauser,” which is one of the dumbest names ever handed to a character, and the film’s set in a “fictional” country called Turaqistan that’s pretty much totally controlled by a company called Tamerlane. Whose logo, I should add, looks a heck of a lot like a certain bright red corporate logo I used to see a lot of during my day. Anyway, I’m not sure how this’ll go — it could be great or it could really suck. Either way, I think it’s worth a look…