How I knew I might be mistaken about Soul

No film in my top ten of 2020 has taken more of a beating since I anointed it than Soul.

Some films took a beating before then -- like my #1, I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- but only since I closed off my list a month ago have I become fully cognizant of the mixed response to Pixar's latest.

I'll get into the nature of that response later, though you are surely aware of it. Suffice it to say that I read none of the think pieces or heard none of the podcasts devoted to those concerns until after I'd already cemented for all time its place in my personal record books. This is not to suggest a person has to be swayed by think pieces or podcasts, but to disregard opposing viewpoints in one's analysis of a film is also pretty obtuse, and means you aren't really giving a favorite film the chance to weather the storm of reasonable criticism. 

There were signs I should have seen, however, that I might myself have been more mixed on Soul than I thought I was, and definitely not as confident in it as a #4 year-end ranking might suggest. And it has to do with the ways I've written about it.

Specifically, I wrote more than a thousand words on Soul when I reviewed it for ReelGood, and don't feel at any point that I successfully described what I liked about it. 

Any review that starts off this way is in trouble:

"When Disney lost the theatrical release of its 2020 tentpole Mulan to the pandemic, it scrambled to recoup losses by premiering the movie on Disney+ – but for a $30 rental price, even for the streaming service’s current subscribers. Less than three months after Mulan’s 27 March expected theatrical release, Pixar’s latest, Soul, had also been scheduled to debut. Instead of charging an arm and a leg to rent this one, Disney released it for free to subscribers on Christmas Day."

That's not a bad paragraph in and of itself, but it's not really talking about the movie, now is it? 

And then I make matters worse by expending another hundred words (actually, 66) comparing a movie I'm not talking about with the movie I am, for little other reason than I had to continue the review as I'd already started it. 

The change in strategy may have been learning the new pandemic landscape, or it may just have been a gross miscalculation of the respective quality of the two films. Though we’re certainly glad we didn’t have to pay $30 to watch the latest absolute gem from Pixar, it would have been worth $60 when measured against yet another perfunctory live-action remake of the studio’s animated IP.

The fact that I didn't start talking about Soul proper until the third paragraph suggests I was stalling, doesn't it? It may not have seemed that way at the time to me, but if a writer feels hesitantly about the thing they are writing about, it comes through. That's not the same as feeling mixed on it. You can write confidently while both liking and disliking things about a movie. No, I think this kind of dilly-dallying comes from being not sure, at a deeper level, whether the opinion you're about to espouse is actually correct. 

I won't keep excperting from the review, but I will tell you that there's a fair bit of plot synopsis, comments on what you might call "surface elements" (the appearance, the voice acting, the score), and not very much about what the movie is about. I think Soul is about a lot, some of it very good, some of it a bit muddled. But when you don't really talk about those things in a review, it's a problem.

The whole review is here if you want to see for yourself.

I don't look back proudly on every review I write, of course, but I do generally like the reviews I write about movies I love. Great movies almost always inspire me to at least one of elegant turn of phrase, some expression of my enthusiasm that is exactly what I mean to say. That never happened in my Soul review, perhaps because deep down, I was papering over flaws that I did not want to see.

I had another chance to write about Soul in my year-end post, in which I spend about 250 words blurbing on each of my top ten movies. Again I whiffed on Soul. I spent time talking about trivial, statistics-minded observations like this being Pete Docter's second time making my top ten after Inside Out, and Pixar landing two movies in my top ten. In fact, the number of times I've compared Soul to Inside Out should have revealed to me my reservations about it as a unique creative triumph for Pixar.

It's easy to see why my judgment was a bit clouded on Soul. I've mentioned it a couple times before. We watched it on New Year's Day, my son's seventh birthday, projected on the wall of the hotel where we were staying, with both his aunt and his grandmother in attendance. It was a triumphant execution of a perfectly conceived birthday surprise, and my son told me it was his favorite part of the trip. I was in a "good dad glow" as I watched it, and those enthralling surface elements -- like the appearance and the score -- made it easy to maintain that high.

But people have had a lot of legitimate complaints about Soul, and it's not just the racial ones. Though those are probably the most damning. Although the ways Soul is tone deaf are not, I think, as bad as the movie's most strident critics have portrayed them to be, you can't escape the fact there's something a little off about the way the movie's racial politics play. I do see a few of the blackface criticisms in the body swapping plot, and it doesn't matter if you can explain them away with unassailable talking points. (Like the fact that Kemp Powers was brought in to rework the script and gets a co-director credit.) What matters is the feel it has, and I agree, it is not always exactly the right feel.

I won't get deeper into the ways some Black audiences are put off by the movie, because there are plenty of places you can find whole pieces on that. I will say that none of these points sounded off base to me, and they have no doubt contributed to a shift in my perspective on the film.

But then there are more basic issues about the world, its rules, the way the story is structured, the ultimate message, and even the appearance of the film -- the part that shouldn't prompt any complaints from the world's most accomplished purveyor of computer animation -- that have been put out there. I heard one person say the ways the Great Before and the Great Beyond were envisioned were not particularly surprising, outside of the Picasso-like creatures that run the place, whom everyone seems to love. There are questions as to whose story this is, and whether the movie gets taken away from Pixar's first Black protagonist by a white woman (well, the voice of one anyway). Oops, I guess I said I wouldn't delve too much more into the racial stuff.

I think I really started to question by own enthusiasm -- don't forget, I gave the film a near-perfect 9/10, which translates to 4.5 stars out of 5 -- not because of the podcasters or think pieces, but when a friend of mine said: "Even if I saw only ten films this year, Soul wouldn't be in my top ten."

That comment really struck me because this guy is a huge Pixar fan, and fan of animation in general. His comment was a response to my placement of Soul within my top ten, so that was the inspiration for this particular phrasing, but he wouldn't have said it unless he really wanted to indicate how much the movie had failed him. 

What this all means is not that I don't like Soul anymore, or even that I don't love it. I might still love it. And that's where a second viewing will come in.

Not now, maybe not even soon. But sometime, when I'm not being biased by the look of exquisite joy on my son's face, I will need to wrestle with this movie again, given all I know about how other people feel about it.

I guess with Pixar, I get this feeling that if they are really going for something and mostly succeeding, it's a home run. Pixar usually has ambition on its side, and ambitious projects have served the studio well in the past. Even if it's a near miss, a Pixar near miss is another studio's home run. I feel like I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt than I would be for others, because I'm so in the bag for the majority of their work. 

A #4 year-end ranking is elevated enough for a film to warrant consideration among the best of the decade. Fortunately, we're a long ways off from that. I'll have ample time in the next nine years to figure out how good Soul really is. Maybe if I do confirm my initial feelings, at last I'll be able to write something profound about it. 

Animated colors that nauseate me

After all the to-ing and fro-ing about no one in my family wanting to see The Croods: A New Age (including me, I should say, but I would have gone in order to visit the little town theater in Mansfield, where we stayed between Christmas and New Year's), my wife ended up taking both my kids on Monday, the hottest day of the year so far and one of the last before they return to school tomorrow.

They liked it, of course. I'd say perhaps my wife especially, except that the younger one declared it one of the best movies he'd ever seen. The older one, the one more prone to movie-related hyberole (declaring a half-dozen movies the best he'd ever seen in the past year alone), said it was "okay" but then immediately upgraded that to "pretty good," as you could see him thinking he had been uncharitable, and trying to reconcile his disinterest in seeing it with the fact he'd actually liked it.

It got me thinking about my own negative preconceived notions about the movie that prevented me from wanting to see it, and it's put me on to a larger theory of why I do or do not anticipate certain animated movies. It's a phenomenon common to second-banana animated studios like Dreamworks and Sony, and has to do with the color palettes.

Simply put, when was the last time you saw these colors in a Disney or Pixar movie?

Answer: Never, because Disney and Pixar intuitively realize there's something unpleasant about those pinks and purples, especially when mashed up next to each other.

Oh, Pixar used pinks and purples in Soul, but please note the difference in shade:

Those are lighter, friendlier, more digestible pinks and purples. They don't slap you in the face like those colors used in Dreamworks' The Croods: A New Age or Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, the two images selected above.

I think it was the latter movie, which I really despised after loving the original, that first planted the seed of these pinks and purples nauseating me. My memory of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is that every scene is a gross mishmash of these colors, assaulting my corneas and turning my stomach in a metaphorical if not literal way. 

Sure, it's easy to find these pinks and purples in one shot of The Croods. But is that all you got, Vance?

Nope.

I better stop posting these images or I just might vomit.

Yes, I do find these colors displeasing, but this is not just me hating on pink and purple. You can do pink and purple right. It's the aggressive pink and purple, almost neon in its intensity, that makes me feel assaulted. 

It's a whole aesthetic approach to this and a number of other of what I would consider lesser animated films. These colors are prevalent in the Trolls movies as well, for example. And the thing that really sticks out about them is the extent to which they don't exist in nature. Yes, there are pinks and purples in nature, but not these pinks and purples.

See that sloth in the picture above? That sloth is pink. Have you ever seen a pink sloth in nature?

Now, the evidence of The Croods: A New Age -- as least as far as my family's opinons constitute evidence -- demonstrates that this color scheme is not fatal to the effectiveness of the movie. And my wife usually hates pink, like with a passion. She wasn't bothered by it here, which just goes to show you how caught up she was in the story. She really appreciated the female empowerment message of it.

But it's going to keep people like me away, unable to experience that storytelling for ourselves. And it's not because I'm a boy and I don't like pink. It's because something about that mashup of pink and purple has the effect on me that a strobe light has on an epileptic. 

You're stealing everything else from Disney -- or trying to, anyway -- so take a lesson from them and figure out how to employ a more muted color palette. 

Piloting into 2021

I'm done with all the year-end posts, so time to get back to pointing out coincidences, right?

This is a pretty good one: The first two movies I've seen since closing my year-end rankings were about World War II fighter pilots.

You could say I planned it, but you'd be wrong.

A Matter of Life and Death, the most prominent Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie I had yet to see, jumped to the front of my queue by virtue of it being discussed on the podcast The Next Picture Show, where they match a classic film with a new release to discuss the former's influence on the latter over a pair of consecutive episodes. I had already seen the latter, Soul, and figured I might as well whack out a viewing of the former so I could get something out of both episodes of the podcast. The film is not widely available, but it's on YouTube so I got to work.

Simply put, I loved this. Just a few days after the post in which I mentioned ten great films I saw in 2020 that weren't released in 2020, I'm pretty sure I've already got one of my entries for the corresponding post I'll write a year from now. 

The 1946 film is about a British fighter pilot (David Niven) who has a distress call with a female American dispatcher (Kim Huner) as his plane is engulfed in flames over the English Channel. Before he jumps, without a parachute, to his certain death, the two kind of fall for each other in the intensity of the moment. However, something goes wrong with the afterlife bureaucracy -- something about the heavy fog over Britain -- and he washes up on shore, unharmed, in spitting distance of where the dispatcher is stationed. As the two finally meet each other and forge a genuine connection that might be love, Niven is visited by representatives from that afterlife (which is pictured in black and white to the technicolor of the earthly settings), who try to correct the mistake. But Niven now figures he's got a case to be made about why he should stay on earth.

Connections to Soul pretty obvious, no?

I was flabbergasted not only by the film's great script, but by the techniques it uses, unusual in a film from that era, to create supernatural settings and images of other worlds. The film opens on an image of the universe before panning down to Niven's doomed plane, and the afterlife is replete with imagery of an otherworldly waystation involving fantastical architecture. The Archers (the nickname for this pair of directors) employ other fascinating techniques like freeze frame that were not regularly used at the time. The shot seen from behind the closing eyelid of a person going into surgery, which would have required the construction of a large papier mache eyeball, just furthers this film's sense of delightful creativity.

I could go on and on about A Matter of Life and Death, but we have a second film to get to. Which is also worth going on about.

The first trailer I saw for a 2021 movie was Shadow in the Cloud, and it struck me right away as the first film I might see for my newly launched list. It seemed the perfect example of the type of film that gets released early in the year to try to capture an audience, a wild genre mashup that might be too eccentric to compete with the big summer releases but could certainly carve out a niche early in the year. Of course, that's using conventional release logic, which certainly doesn't apply during a pandemic. Though it's starting out as an old-fashioned conventional year in Australia, considering that this movie did get released in January and I did see it in the cinema.

Shadow in the Cloud is a New Zealand production from a director I had never heard of, Roseanne Liang, a Kiwi of Chinese descent. It stars Chloe Grace Moretz -- whom I loved when she was a kid, but have not really liked for the past five years -- as a woman boarding a plane from New Zealand to Samoa during World War II. She's an officer with flying experience but of course she is derided and degraded by the sexist all-male crew who don't understand why there's a woman on board their plane. They have orders for her to be there and she's escorting a high-value package, so they reluctantly accept her on board but make her sit in the lower turret for takeoff. Where she gets stuck when a literal gremlin starts dismantling the plane mid-flight.

This movie is an absolute gas. It's set in World War II but has a driving early 80s synth score. It's got a CGI gremlin and also a lot of thrilling air battle sequences. But there are also parts of it that could be a stage play, in the best possible sense. Simply put, it's a jolt of adrenaline to start us off right on the new year.

I may step away from movies about World War II pilots for my third new-to-me movie in 2021, but you never know with these things.

Soul on the big screen

One of the movies it was most disappointing not to see on the big screen in 2020 was Pixar's Soul, which debuted on Disney+ at Christmas. (Without the $30 rental price they slapped on Mulan, though I would have gladly paid it.)

Unless, of course, you made your own big screen.

That's what we did on the night of January 1st, which was also the seventh birthday of my younger son, pictured here. (And no, I don't usually put up photos of my family or myself -- but since you can't see his face, I bent my rule in this case.)

Soul was the perfect way for my new projector to strut its stuff, in its third use since I bought it back in late October (fourth if you count a test run), and only the first time my kids were aware of its existence. Which made it an extra special great surprise for my son on his birthday, especially as he'd already been asking when we would watch Soul.

When you buy an expensive projector (mid-range expensive, not high-end expensive), you never really know what ROI you will get on it. Last night was the kind of ROI that goes well beyond dollars and cents.

Pictured above is the room where we've been staying since Monday at the Alzburg Resort in Mansfield, Victoria. We've been very lucky to be able to travel a bit this holiday season, if only locally, as COVID has been under control for more than two months now. As seems always to be the case with this virus, our luck has just run out, as there's been a (small) outbreak in Victoria just as of the past few days, whose parameters are not yet known. So who knows if we'd still have been able to make our trip if this outbreak happened a week ago.

But make it we did, as did my sister-in-law and mother-in-law. It's been a week of hiking and boating and swimming in the pool, and going in the hot tub, and playing tennis and shooting baskets on the normally coin-operated baseball game, and playing foosball, and playing ping pong, and barbecuing, and eating at an assortment of scrumptious restaurants. We've really had it all. I repeat, we are very lucky, though we can also credit one of the world's most stringent lockdowns back in July and August.

The movie last night was the cherry on top. (He says, as he eats the remainder of the yummy roadside cherries we bought for his final morning's breakfast.) After a birthday BBQ by the resort's pool, I hurried back to our room, where I rearranged the furniture, removed a painting from the wall and set up the projector. I also popped some microwave popcorn for the older one, who can't have family movie night without popcorn.

The big reveal was as impressive as I'd hoped, as the kids' grandmother might have been most impressed of all. As you might guess, the seven-year-old, who has not yet figured out tact or how to put things in perspective, had to mention that there was a hanger for the aforementioned painting screwed into the wall that represented a small flaw in our projection viewing area. It was a small flaw indeed, and, I assume, one we all began quickly to ignore.

The movie was loved by all, or at least I think it was. There was plenty of laughter, and some glistening on some adult cheeks as well. I'll find out over our final meal before we leave how much everyone really loved it, but I think the answer is "a lot." In any case, it was 9:20 when it ended so people scattered pretty quickly.

I of course loved it -- in about ten days you will find out exactly how much, which I myself am still mulling in my early days of having just watched it.

More than that I loved being able to see it BIG, to emphasize the beautiful animation and color of a film that was never meant to be watched on your TV. 

Fighting to preserve the sanctity of the big screen movie experience since 2020. 

Movies named like infinity stones, movies named like hurricanes

Unless something changes, Time will have been the last movie I watched in 2020. (I watched it last night, and thought the title itself was rather appropriate for the transition between years.)

Unless something changes, Soul will be the first movie I watch in 2021. (We're planning to watch it the night of January 1st for my son's birthday.)

Realizing this, I wondered, what other 2020 movies were named after the stones in Thanos' infinity gauntlet?

None as perfectly as that. However, there were films called Project Power and Color out of Space, so I think that's pretty good. Most years would probably not have films that had either of those bolded words in their titles. You probably almost never get a movie with the word "Reality" in its title, so that was never going to happen. "Mind" would have a chance, but there are only eight in the list of all the movies I've seen, so not a great one. (There's only one "Reality," that being Reality Bites of course.)

So I figure, the year after Thanos was finally dissolved from existence, his infinity stones were up for grabs?

While we're at it, I thought this was a good time to jam in another observation about 2020 films.

Have you noticed how many films released this year have had a woman's name as their title? Like, just the first name?

In other words, have you noticed how many films have been named like hurricanes?

I was planning to write this post when I finally see Shirley, which will be sometime before January 12th, but since my infinity stone observation was so brief, I decided just to piggyback on it with this one.

In addition to Shirley, we have the following this year, which either actually did come out, were scheduled to come out but were pushed back, or which (in one case) I saw at a (virtual) film festival.

In alphabetical order:

Annette
Becky
Clementine
Ema
Emma
Mulan
Rebecca
Wendy
Zola

And then there are two movies named after nicknames for female characters:

Babyteeth
Beanpole

And if you want to get into near misses -- or "missies," as the case may be -- you can consider also the following, which either consist of a woman's full name, or have a woman's name somewhere in the title:

Black Widow
Enola Holmes
The Glorias
Gretel & Hansel
Judy & Punch
Saint Frances
Selah and the Spades
Vitalina Varela
Wonder Woman 1984
The Wrong Missy

Incidentally, "Gloria" was the name of an actual powerful hurricane I experienced as a child. Hurricane Gloria whipped through New England in late September of 1985, according to Wikipedia, which also tells me it was the first significant tropical cyclone to hit the northeast of the United States since Hurricane Agnes in 1972. We all prepared for the worst and I can clearly remember the way it rained and the way the trees were blowing. We didn't evacuate and the only property damage we sustained was that a tree fell in our backyard, knocking down our "space trolley," which was kind of like the kiddie version of a zipline.

I guess I'd have to look at surrounding years to figure out if this is actually a significant number of movies named after female characters, but I can tell you that at one point, I looked down my Letterboxd Watchlist, and every other movie was one of these. 

Circumstantial evidence for the increased focus on women at the movies, maybe?

TIL: Trent Reznor is scoring a Pixar film

When a person gets his life together, funny things can happen.

Trent Reznor, the primary and sometimes only creative force behind the band Nine Inch Nails, spent many years languishing in addiction and suicidal thoughts. He made only about one album every five years. They were brilliant, but they took him ages because he had so much personal baggage on his plate. (Can you have baggage on a plate? I like mixing metaphors.)

Ten years ago he married another musician, Mariqueen Maandig, and started churning out children, four to date. Instead of sapping his time, fatherhood has made him more productive, as he has made several new Nine Inch Nails album as well as scores to approximately 73 films, working closely with sometimes NIN band member Atticus Ross.

I never thought I would say it, but the man who penned the lyrics “I want to fuck you like an animal” is now scoring a Pixar movie. A Pixar movie about jazz, at that – a genre in which he expects to be working on the score. (And may already have been for the new Watchmen series?)

That movie is called Soul, and it’s coming out next June.

Although I miss the tortured heyday of Nine Inch Nails, it does my heart good that Reznor, at age 54, is feeling so much better now.

The last decade of his career has been a lot more about movie scores than Nine Inch Nails, and there’s almost a perfect line of demarcation with the start of the decade. Two thousand ten was when he submitted his first (and still best) score for The Social Network. He had supervised soundtracks before, such as Lost Highway and Natural Born Killers, but never had he previously scored an entire film. He’s obviously loved it as I can barely count the scores since then, which have included several more Fincher films, Patriots Day, Birdbox, Mid 90s, and so on.

But this latest development of scoring a children’s movie is another watershed moment for him. It feels kind of similar to Ice Cube going from “fuck tha police” to starring in kids movies about long and arduous road trips. But I was also happy for Cube when he entered his “Uncle Ice Cube” phase. It feels like a fair tradeoff in artistic credibility if it means you are also a happier person.

Although I always liked Reznor’s lyrics – they can be fun to scream at full volume, even if you are only pretending you are as anguished as he is – I would never have counted Nine Inch Nails as my favorite band if it weren’t for Reznor’s sonic inventiveness. Granted, many of those sounds were dark and industrial, as you can’t have angry lyrics over music that doesn’t sound angry. But even in the midst of his darkest periods, he wrote songs like “A Warm Place” from The Downward Spiral, which had a lot more optimism embedded in them.

Soul seems like a particularly warm place, even if it involves souls separated from their bodies in a kind of afterlife – think a high concept similar to Inside Out. And clearly he’s not worried what fans who fell for his aggressive despair will think. I mean, if he’s not feeling it, he can’t really make it.

If things hadn’t started going right for him, though, he might not still be here. Again, I’ll take it, and on Thanksgiving, I’ll give thanks for it.