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.
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Woody Allen is the writer/director/star of “The Mighty Aphrodite” (1995), which means it’s basically 95 minutes of him talking and talking and talking. And there’s a Greek chorus, which probably sounded better in theory than it ended up on screen. The movie did win an Oscar. More specifically, Mira Sorvino won an Oscar for best supporting actress. She plays a B-list porn actress who is the father to Woody’s adopted son (don’t ask). I watched a godawful bootleg of this film on a weeknight after I had been out drinking. I wish I could have seen Ms. Sorvino more clearly.
I first watched “Scarface” in the winter of 1984 at a theater in Hialeah, Fla. It was very controversial at the time (the film, not the theater). For the f-bombs (Cher saw it with young daughter Chastity and counted 77 of them). For the way it depicted South Florida as a drug-addled crime haven (tourism officials were not amused). But the organized crime story with a Cuban twist plays out like a violent Shakespearean tragedy that will appeal equally to Shakespeare lovers and violence lovers. How violent? Just wait for Al Pacino to shout, “Say hello to my little friend!”
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