More stuffs. Definitely a little light on the movie-watching until very recently. Finally settling into the new place, though, which bodes well for viewing over the next few months.
Hopefully I'll get back out to a theater soon, too. Anyway, a few recent films...
Waking Life
I appreciate the animation style, but I'd say maybe a third of the mini-monologues in the film are actually interesting or insightful. I was far more intrigued by the "free will" section of the film than any other, as it echos a point most of you guys have probably heard me argue for a million times before. I happened to see a clip of the film containing that section before seeing the film, in some blog entry about the topic in general.
Anyway, I always appreciate films about big ideas, but not if that's
all they are. The philosophy therein is a bit too light to be especially useful or especially insightful most of the time, and it certainly doesn't qualify as a story in the traditional sense of the word, either. It's kind of in no-man's-land. It's an experiment you'll either find noble and fairly boring, or noble and fairly entertaining, depending on how often you like to ponder this stuff and how many of these thoughts are fresh to each viewer. Didn't do a lot for me, personally.
One, Two, Three
Good stuff; a nice, old-fashioned farcical romp. Based on a stage play (though it wasn't, initially, as obvious as that fact usually is), it manages to bring a surprisingly lighthearted tone to the Cold War. Huge swaths of it are, of course, completely implausible, but it's funny and it's fast, even if it occasionally (and mistakenly) thinks that being fast
makes it funny. I think I might have queued this up on Mark's recommendation (correct me if I'm wrong, bud; didn't you say it was your favorite Wilder comedy?).
Visioneers
This film just doesn't really go anywhere. It takes about 5 minutes to figure out what's going on (in a general sense), and it spends the next 90 or so just staying there. There are developments, to be sure, but they don't have a lot of import. Feels very
Brazil-ian during some of its early stretches, and as lukewarm as I am on that film, at least it reached some kind of meaningful conclusion. The message here is the fairly common one about suppressing what it means to be human in service of technology, productivity, and society. But that's really all there is; it has no further insight or even much of an ending. I'm pretty sure I only heard about this film because Zach Galifianakis had a breakthrough performance in
The Hangover after it was released.
Cold Souls
Perfect twin-bill with the previous film (both characters even wear goofy goggles; see below). This is a little more like it, though it still feels like a wasted opportunity.
Paul Giamatti plays...wait for it...Paul Giamatti. The film would feel Kaufman-esque even enough without this little twist, and it feels like a downright knockoff at times with it. Giamatti is starring in a production of "Uncle Vanya", a depressing play. It's also Russian. But I repeat myself. He's finding it difficult, for whatever reason, and reads about a service that will extract your soul and store it for you, thereby lifting any abstract spiritual burdens you might be carrying with you. Giamatti goes for it, and then...some other things happen. They're not quite spoiler-y, but stop reading now if you're highly sensitive to this sort of thing.
Still with me? Giamatti's soul is stolen, and they can't find out who took it. He replaces it with one of the facility's anonymous donations; a Russian poet. Unsurprisingly, this makes his performance in "Uncle Vanya" fantastic. But eventually he misses his own soul and travels across the world (to Russia, fittingly) to get it back.
The premise is fascinating, of course, and as much as most viewers (myself included) want the mechanics of these things to be explained, it's probably wise that they gloss over society's general reaction to the idea.
There are some nice touches with some major implications here; most notably, that they can't extract the entire soul, and that fragments of each soul inside you are left behind. This has a great deal of relevance to Nina, who is essentially a soul "mule." She imports souls from Russia by storing them inside herself, and has built up a wide number of other people's fragments inside her.
Possible metaphors abound here. It could be about technology increasingly squashing what it means to be human. It could also be dramatizing the nature of acting, which is a just a little little like borrowing someone else's soul for a time. Ultimately, the film really doesn't seem to have a point beyond "your soul is your own and you'd probably miss it if it's gone."
The focus on Russia is all throughout the film and there are lots of little nods to this. It so happens that I'm smack dab in the middle of reading
Crime and Punishment right now, so they stood out as if higlighted in neon. Nina is not unlikely the desperate prostitutes in Dostoyevsky's seminal work, and one shot in particular makes the comparison clear. Ditto for the line of people either trying to sell their souls, or futilely buy them back, which evokes the ever present pawn shops in the same. And, of course, the general bleakness completes the trifecta.
Interesting enough film to recommend, though I think it's more fun pondering the implications of the world created here than it is actually watching the film, at times. As I pointed out to my significant other, the premise is so relatively unexploited that you could substitute Giamatti's soul for anything of significant sentimental value and the general thrust of the story wouldn't be altered much.
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). Fontaine keeps this an equal partnership with her presence though, and the lighting and framing form part of the strong supporting cast. 
