A couple nights ago I went to a lecture from Marjane Satrapi, the author of the graphic novel "Persepolis", and director of the recent film which was nominated for Best Animated Feature in the same category as Ratatouille. I was pretty worried that we might lose the Oscar to her, as Persepolis was really reaaaaaally good. :) They are both tied at the moment on Rottentomatoes.com with 95%. Pretty awesome! :)
Anyway the lecture was really amazing, she was really funny, and had some very French mannerisms. She lives in France now, and the movie was in French (with English subtitles.) She was born in Iran and lived a very different childhood from anyone in North America. I think that's the beauty of the movie. She achieves - as Gary Goldberg said about his own work - "the generality in the specificity." She wants us to understand Iranian culture, the reason why things are the way they are, but most of all I think she just wants to put a human face on a nation that she feels is misunderstood, and certainly contains a majority of good, decent, human beings. She said that putting a human face on an entire culture is hard, so she just told the story of herself. And with the personal story of 1 person struggling in their childhood and their teen years with the culture around them, you really get a personal glimpse into what it might have been like to grow up in Iran rather than your country. Very interesting idea, amazingly well done film and it definitely deserved the Oscar nomination. I am glad that Ratatouille won, but I am a little biased about that. :)
So that was great. Also this week Shelley and her husband Josh came to visit me at work and have lunch. It was suuuuper awesome, they were really nice, and it's an example of the awesome glory of Facebook re-introducing you to friends from 15 years ago. So crazy. So I was looking through old stuff and Shelley's name and some other old classmates came up I decided to Facebook everyone... and little did I know that Shelley now lives in San Francisco too?!?!?!? What are the odds?!?!? So that was totally unexpected, and I figured we pretty much had to hang out. It was fun to hang out and show them around my work! We had lunch and caught up on the last 15 years or so. Hehe, so crazy.
Well it's getting later again and my buddy Alex comes tomorrow night, and I gotta get up early to go rent a car. So anyhow, expect a whoooole bunch of photos on here over the weekend!
Oh yeah, and The Office and Scrubs tonight were awesome. Glad those shows are back finnaaalllly.
Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi signing a Persepolis book for someone
Shelley visiting me at work
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