Mighty Aphrodite | | Cast : | Woody Allen, Mira Sorvino | | Director : | Woody Allen | | Studio : | Miramax | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned | | Released Date : | November 03, 1995 | | DVD Released Date : | April 06, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | May 07, 2005 | | Summary | Woody's Greek Fantasy. Warm and Funny. Buy It. | Content
 | `Mighty Aphrodite', written, directed, and starring Woody Allen seems to be the kind of movie Allen makes after he is worn out doing a strictly realistic, mostly serious movie such as `Crimes and Misdemeanors', `Hannah and Her Sisters', and `Husbands and Wives'. Unlike these excellent seriocomic works, `Mighty Aphrodite' flies off into a world of fantasy similar to the crazy / inventive situations in `Zellig' and `A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy'.
Allen brings along with him his usual band of big name actors taking off from more remunerative roles to have some fun with this lighthearted comedy. As usual, heavyweights such as F. Murray Abraham, Claire Bloom, Jack Warden, and Olympia Dukakis have such small roles that you hardly notice they are there until they are off screen. In the case of Abraham and Dukakis and Allen stock player David Ogden Stiers, this anonymity is heightened by the fact that they are playing masked members of a Greek chorus, filmed in a ruined Roman amphitheater, in Italy, according to the location credits.
This movie was done for Mirimax and a sizable number of new names appear among the film's executive producers, although I am certain Allen still has his hands firmly on the artistic reins for the filming of the movie. I have no idea which of these new names represents `Sweetland Films', but their only contribution seems to have been a slightly less austere credit crawl at the end of the flick.
Aside from Allen, all of the really heavy lifting on the screen was done by title character actor Mira Sorvino, and it is beyond me how she was nominated for the supporting actress Academy Award and not in the lead actress category, although I suspect it did improve her chances of winning in the lesser category, which she did.
Of Allen's two most important movie subjects, love and death, love is certainly the main issue in this movie, signaled by the fact that Aphrodite is the name of the ancient Greek god of love, represented in this flick by Sorvino's character who is a prostitute and pornographic movie actress who wants to get out of that life and settle down in a more normal setting.
Allen plays a successful New York City sportswriter who gets connected with Sorvino when he and his wife decide to adopt a baby boy, and Allen becomes obsessed with the identity of the real mother, who turns out to be Sorvino. While Allen tries to set Sorvino up with a farmer turned boxer turned farmer, his wife (Carter) hooks up with a business partner (Peter Weller) who threatens to break up their marriage.
While there are a few brief moments of apparent danger when Sorvino's pimp threatens Allen's life if Sorvino quits, the pimp is bought off with nothing more than a pair of courtside tickets to a Knicks game. While the main `realistic' plot is pretty improbable as it is, the real silliness is going on in asides to a full masked Greek chorus very similar to what you would find in productions of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Thrown into this absurdity is Jack Warden playing a modern blind man named Tiresius encountered on the streets of New York. The joke is that Tiresius is the name of a character in Sophocles' `Oedipus Rex' who makes the prophecy that Oedipus will kill his father. In Allen's version, Tiresius simply clues Allen into the fact that his wife is fooling around with her business partner.
The invocations of the Greek choruses get even more silly as the movie progresses, with the chorus appearing in modern New York near the end of the film, bursting into renditions of Cole Porter and tunes from other modern composers.
Like `Zellig', there is no attempt to avoid straining credulity. Near the end of the movie, Sorvino is rescued from her life of sin by a totally improbable `deux ex machina', which Allen glorifies by simply describing it as such in the voice-over.
This movie is about as close as Allen ever comes after `Annie Hall' to returning to the silliness of early movies such as `Bananas' and `Sleeper'. Unlike the early gag fests, you really feel for the characters in this movie. You don't want Allen to break up with his wife and you want Sorvino to get out of her sex business. And, we are much happier at the end of the movie than we are at the end of `Crimes and Misdemeanors' where a killer escapes justice and the nebbish gets cheated out of his girlfriend.
This is not one of Allen's very best movies, but it is in the upper half. Sorvino's performance is definitely worth the price of admission.
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| Rating | | | Date | May 01, 2005 | | Summary | Woddy Allen is bad BAD MAN | Content
| This is BAD BAD movei! IT SO BAD that my tooths huyrt!!! Too much pain... I cannot speaks very well englich because MIGHTY APRODITYE is like MIGHTY LOBODOMY to my brainbs!! Avoid! avoid! aviod!! And plese rate my review "very heplful" so that EVERYONE reads HOW BAD Mr. Woody Alan is!!! THanks you and god Blesses! |
| Rating | | | Date | October 23, 2004 | | Summary | Nice Try Woody | Content
| This movie is certainly not one of Allen's best but it does have it's merits. Allen's attempt to infuse a greek chorus and classical references is admirable and at times it is amusing bit frankly for the most part adds little to the movie and for some viewers will probably be an annoying distraction. Aside from that the movie has an interesting plot and Mira Sorvino is very funny as a ditsy hooker/porn star that happens to be the birth mother of Allen's adopted child. Allen's character becomes involved in her life trying to rescue her from the path she is on while his own marriage is apparently going down the tubes. The usual memorable lines from a Woody Allen movie are what keeps the film afloat and Allen and Sorvino provide most of the interesting dialogue. Their performances and the screenplay are what makes this one watchable. For Woody Allen fans it's definitely worth your time. Not his best but not bad. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 21, 2004 | | Summary | Mighty Awful | Content
| It has all the subtlety of a train wreck. Woody Allen is a clever man, and indeed there are several good zingers, but each one is repeated in such a juvenile manner that I fear Mr. Allen doesn't give his audience enough credit for getting it the first time. For example, there is a scene where Woody is matchmaking two idiots. He declines their invitation to join them by saying, "No, thank you. I'm superfluous." To which one idiot replies, "Oh, you're not feeling well?" What a great zinger! But then he belabors the joke by going on: "No, SUPERFLUOUS. Uh... superfluous means unneccessary... I'd only get in the way..." This sort of audience-coddling continues throughout the movie, right up to the end, where even the final scene is amended with a clumsy explanation for the dim-witted. The movie ends with the same gag (a Broadway-Greek chorus) that has already been done 3 times in the last 95 minutes. We got it the first time, Woody. Acting? You'll hardly notice. The characters are such obvious, stereotypical caricatures that they become entirely boring and predictable--if not offensive to Jews, women, boxers, hairdressers, husbands, wives and barkeeps. I was embarrassed for the lot of them. Unless you, too, are stuck in the sixties, you might do yourself a favor by skipping this one. Woody even managed to waste the incredible talent of F. Murray Abraham! |
| Rating | | | Date | February 02, 2004 | | Summary | Etu Woody! | Content
| Woody Allen at his funniest (and *raunchiest*--not for the prudish), particularly during his scenes with Mira Sorvino, who walks off with the film as a ditzy porn starlet. The only thing that prevents this from a full-out four-star rating is a baffling framing device in which characters from Greek mythology drop into the story from time to time to comment on the action. It's annoying and rarely funny. |
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