Cartoon of Life Under Ayatollahs Infuriates Iran

Here we go again, with seething over cartoons (hat tip: Ron).

A biting animation about a young girl's life under Iran's ayatollahs screened at Cannes Tuesday despite protests from Tehran of Western bias.

"Persepolis", one of 22 films competing for the festival's top award, is based on the eponymous comic-book series by Iranian Marjane Satrapi.

"I like the film better than the books," Satrapi told AFP.

The movie offers a child's eye look at Iran from the age of eight, just as the Shah is about to be evicted by the Islamic regime still in place today.

And if the critics' enthusiastic response is borne out, the black-and-white feature -- jointly directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud -- could have a good shot at the coveted Palme d'Or to be awarded Sunday.

Iran has slammed it as "an unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution" and protested to France that the festival's decision to select it highlighted "the biased policies of domineering powers."

Well, isn't that just too damn bad. I just wonder whether this inconvenient truth will scare the judges away.

The only child of a politically-aware couple, Satrapi recounts her life in Tehran from 1978, when she was eight, to her years as a fiercely outspoken 14-year-old, when she was packed off to Vienna by her parents to avoid arrest, or worse.

She later returned to Tehran for art classes (where "nude" models wore chadors) and an unhappy marriage before emigrating to France.

Her work, full of wry humour as well as heartache, explores the split she felt between tradition and modernity, and details a life in which she was initially wearing jeans and listening to rock -- then forced to wrap up in a chador.

Brought up in a middle-class leftwing family, relatives and neighbours bring grisly tales of torture and whippings to the background of the Islamic revolution and the grinding Iran-Iraq war.

At an early age, Marji -- short for Marjane -- witnesses the social hypocrisy of the teachers and the neighbours who switch sides.

"How can you claim there're no political prisoners when, compared to the 3,000 detainees under the Shah, there're 300,000 under your regime?" she tells a religious studies teacher in the mid-1980s. "How can you lie like that?"

And, when told off by Islamist police for running down the street because it looks sexy, she quips: 'Well then just don't look at my ass!"

Moore Exploiting 9/11 Again

The disgusting slob Michael Moore is once again looking to profit off 9/11. Just how low can this degenerate sink?

Moore's 'Sicko' Stunt

Filmmaker Michael Moore's production company took ailing Ground Zero responders to Cuba in a stunt aimed at showing that the U.S. health-care system is inferior to Fidel Castro's socialized medicine, according to several sources with knowledge of the trip.

The trip was to be filmed as part of the controversial director's latest documentary, "Sicko," an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

Surely, it will be greeted with approval in France and Moore will be feted for his courageous views.

"He's using people that are in a bad situation and that's wrong, that's morally wrong," railed Jeff Endean, a former SWAT commander from Morris County, N.J., who spent a month at Ground Zero and suffers from respiratory problems.

A spokeswoman for the Weinstein Co., the film's distributor, would not say when the director's latest expose would hit cinemas or provide details about the film or the trip.

In typical Moore fashion, it's all about trashing America while while playing fast and loose with the truth.

Another ill worker who said he was willing to take the trip ended up being stiffed by Moore.

Michael McCormack, 48, a disabled medic who found an American flag at Ground Zero that once flew atop the Twin Towers, was all set to go to.

The film crew contacted him by phone and took him by limo from his Ridge, L.I., home to Manhattan for an on-camera interview.

"What he [Moore] wanted to do is shove it up George W's rear end that 9/11 heroes had to go to a communist country to get adequate health care," said McCormack, who suffers from chronic respiratory illness.

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