Damn, that’s good.
Also, did you catch that the Tina Fey soul, finally prepared to get on with the dismal business of living, plummets toward earth to inhabit a fetus, she’s heading towards… is that China, or is that India? lol
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i don’t know that it would have fixed everything but casting tiffany haddish in that role instead of tina fey would have made it a much better movie
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For me that would be just another band-aid. There are surface level things to admire but it’s the core (conceived of by Pete Docter (Kemp Powers and the jazz angle were assimilated later (I don’t doubt sincerely) and embodying Pixar’s insipid, plastic ponderings re: the transcendental) that deeply bug my brain.
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oh yeah but it would have been funnier
That’s true I probably would have enjoyed it a bit more!
Sorry I didn’t mean to belittle your reading of the movie - more on that note, I did find the idea of an apple store afterlife to be weirdly comforting which is probably the worst part about it.
On the other hand, I did appreciate in a strange way that the movie still left some kind of concession to the great mystery of death by never even attempting to address what happens after you go into the light
That makes the cycle of life and death the movie presents as something a little more like literal recycling, the soul being just another substance that can be broken down and reconstituted to be used again, which both justifies the aesthetic and also seems like it might be something that is unintentionally actually kind of good.
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Love that the heavenpurgatory cops keep making shitty people and being like “oops haha”
Well they gotta come from somewhere and “cops” are a likely culprit
I didn’t take it as belittling, no worries. Looking at other reviews, it seems to have stuck in my craw in way it didn’t for the vast majority of people. I hadn’t seen a Pixar film since…Toy Story 3? And seeing this one was centering on people that usually aren’t at the centre of these kinds of films + Jazz convinced me this would be a good place to jump back in and there were flashes of things I liked and wanted more of. Glad I watched it in the end, something spiked in my brain which is kinda neat after watching a mainstream cartoon even if I hate it.
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Oh yeah it also totally fails as a movie about Jazz, I think it’s actually disastrous to think about screening this movie for like an audience of deep jazz heads. I think Disney is obsessed with Death lately because Coco is also about dying. I think I liked that one more, the music is better and the concept of the afterlife is a little more imaginative.
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I don’t remember why but last year I read half of the screenplay for Coco and liked what I was reading. Everyone I watched Soul with said if I watch one more Pixar film, make it that one so I’ll probably give it a go.
Disney and death…yes, I mean perhaps since the beginning, but what is kinda new (as far as I can tell, I haven’t watched a lot of these newer ones like Inside/Out) is this focus on the afterlife/anthropomorphosised existential matters which I’m all for it’s just that their glossy high-concept framing of these things reminds me of animation school shorts and storyboard meetings where all these novel and “clever” mechanisms are developed while there’s no…wait for it…soul in the machine. Or at least it doesn’t feel like soul to me but expertly crafted emotional manipulation (Disney, again, from the beginning) plus a particular suburban brand of cheekiness. Maybe this is where people will tell me that it’s a kids film, relax, but why even tackle this kind of subject matter if you have to Fisher-Pricify it? My cynical answer is, because these films are made by grown men who want to say something deep and resonant and meaningful but they’re also still making cartoons for Big Brodent to be slapped on backpacks and lunch boxes and proliferated across the globe to rake in cash with the least amount of cultural friction.
I kept thinking how they could have really conveyed soul by sticking to Earth and telling Joe’s story in a much more nuanced and empathetic way.
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i have never heard of the movie youre all talking about but its still some of my favorite movie discussion this year
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rudie i have bad news about
…movies…
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If you have Criterion Channel, and if you’re interested in the story about Christine Chubbuck, I recommend checking out Kate Plays Christine which they just added to the service. It is a film about Kate Lyn Sheil preparing to play Christine in a drama about her life, and has a lot to do with seeking answers and not having access to people’s interiority despite our strong interest in stories like this. It came out the same year as the movie Christine, which is just a dramatization about Christine Chubbuck’s life leading up to what she did, so this makes an interesting companion piece. I would say it’s the better film anyway.
What did you think of the Christine where Rebecca Hall plays her? I like that actress but as soon as I learned what it was about I knew that I would never watch it.
I really didn’t like Christine though Rebecca Hall was good and the film was clearly well made. I just thought it was kind of distasteful to dramatize Christine Chubbuck’s life. It played into entertaining the totally understandable curiosity that people have about why someone would do what she did, what sort of person she must have been, but by objectifying her depression and her banal life to be compelling for a movie. Kate Plays Christine comments directly on that sort of objectification, which is why I found it so compelling and funny that they both came out just months apart, with Christine getting quiet praise and KPC getting like no attention at all.
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Yeah that is exactly why I avoided it! I was hoping it might still rise above the choice of subject matter even if I would never experience that. Oh well… The other movie does sound more interesting
it’s wild both of those movies came out in the same year. Kate Plays Christine is interesting and I did not watch the other one.
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