As I watched “Isle of Dogs” (2018), I was reminded how much I used to enjoy “Samurai Jack.” There’s a zen-like inner calmness at the center of these two pieces of Japanese-flavored animation that I savored. This film is loaded with metaphors for all kinds of stuff I didn’t have time to try to discern (it’s a dark story about the potential for a doggie holocaust, and there’s heavy – perhaps too heavy – political symbolism). I was too busy either trying to make out the tiny writing on my normal-human-sized television or I was simply enjoying the calm, deliberate, confident storytelling.
Archives for posts with tag: Bob Balaban
With his fair hair, pale skin and faint voice, Truman Capote cast somewhat of a ghostly appearance. So does the stark winter countryside portrayed in “Capote,” the 2005 film that examines the creation of the novel “In Cold Blood.” The spectral nature makes sense, since the novel, and the film, deals with a quadruple homicide. As Capote becomes infatuated with the murderers, the rural Kansas setting, painted in long-distance shots and moments of ambient sound, harbors the ghosts of the murdered, so that we don’t become too infatuated ourselves. It’s a brilliant device, moments of art within a creepy story.
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