Soul: It has serious chops!

Soul (2020) • View trailer

Five stars. Rated PG, for mild thematic elements

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.20

This isn’t the first time I’ve observed that some of the sharpest, wittiest and most perceptive scripts belong to animated films.

 

An impressive percentage of them come from Pixar.

 

Joe Gardner's soul, right, tirelessly tries to find something that might inspire the cynical,
world-weary — and yet oddly childlike — Soul 22.

Pete Docter has been one of Hollywood’s most innovative writer/directors for well over a decade; he’s also one of the most savvy collaborators. Although he shared scripting credits on WALL•E, Up and Inside Out, all three possess an inventive point of view — a shrewd analysis of the human condition — that bespeaks Docter’s guiding influence.

 

This is even more obvious, given that he directed — and won well-deserved Academy Awards — for the latter two.

 

I figured Inside Out would remain his career masterpiece. I should’ve known better.

 

Soul — directed and co-written by Docter, with scripting assistance from Mike Jones and Kemp Powers — is another animated tour de force that ingeniously blends humor, pathos and social commentary with a wildly imaginative take on what makes us who we are.

 

Whereas Inside Out cheekily proposed how our workaday behavior varies according to the influence of (primarily) joy, sadness, fear and anger, Soul — available (ahem) solely via Disney+ — offers a fascinating theory for how our personalities are shaped, and the unalterable degree to which that influences who and what we become.

 

But the film doesn’t initially seem that way, and that’s another clever touch: An equally strong secondary story beats at its heart.

 

Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a gifted pianist with wicked jazz chops, has tirelessly gigged in an effort to get the one big break that might ignite a career. He’s a constant disappointment to his mother (Libba Gardner), who wishes he’d abandon such dreams and be content as a middle-school music teacher … particularly since he’s just been offered full-time employment.

 

Ah, but Joe lucks into an audition for world-renowned sax legend Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) … and nails it. She makes him a member of her quartet, currently headlining at the Half Note (the absolute epitome, as visualized, of an intimate New York basement jazz club).

 

Giddy with delight, oblivious to his surroundings, Joe has an accident … and winds up — now a much smaller, ghostlike presence that represents his soul — on a moving sidewalk leading heavenward into The Great Beyond.

 

(This whiplash assault on our emotions and expectations — giddy with joy, sharing Joe’s success, to sudden whattheheck??? — is typical of Docter’s films.)

Elysium: District 10?

Elysium (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for profanity, gore and strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang

Based on the evidence thus far, filmmaker Neill Blomkamp has only one story to tell.

Elysium feels much like his previous film, District 9, writ larger: another saga of oppressed “aliens” seeking a way to rebel against their cruel and privileged overlords. The setting and opposing teams have changed slightly, and Blomkamp clearly has a bigger budget this time at bat, but the key plot points are essentially the same; even the hardware and weaponry look familiar.

His impulsive plans having failed yet again, Max (Matt Damon) finds himself trapped on
a medical table, while the coldly arrogant Delacourt (Jodie Foster) orders some
purloined computer data stripped from his brain ... not at all bothered by the fact that
this process will kill him.

That said, political oppression has been a big-screen sci-fi staple going all the way back to 1927’s Metropolis, and it often produces great drama. So we can forgive Blomkamp the familiarity ... this time. (He would be wise, however, to move in a different direction henceforth.)

The South African-born filmmaker has a solid eye and ear for social strife — no surprise, given his homeland — which contributed, in great part, to the narrative power of District 9. Now embraced by the seductive lure of Hollywood, Blomkamp has turned his disapproving eye on the United States, and its dysfunctional immigration policy; the results aren’t likely to be embraced by red staters.

The year is 2154, and the entire Earth has become an environmental wasteland, ruined by industrial excess, land mismanagement, resource depletion and various other unchecked global horrors we currently practice, with no eye toward future consequences. Every country, in turn, has become part of a planetwide ghetto, the 99 percent left to scrabble and squabble among themselves.

But not entirely. Movement and behavior are monitored by android peacekeepers that employ computer-chip tracking to maintain a veritable police state bereft of basic human decency. And humor: Just as it isn’t smart, in our here and now, to crack wise when stopped by a traffic cop, it is sheer folly to act smug with one of these gun-toting “law officers.”

George Orwell’s influence weighs heavily, and his vision has come to pass: Big Brother really is watching, and doing so from a massive orbiting space station dubbed Elysium, where the very wealthy have fled in order to enjoy a life of pleasure and privilege among lush gardens and sparkling architecture. Automated med-bays can repair, reconstruct or eradicate anything, from broken bones to cancer.

Blomkamp knows his science-fiction, Elysium being a verdant cross between the domed forests of 1972’s Silent Running, and the technological wonders of Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels.

The Rite: All wrong

The Rite (2011) • View trailer for The Rite
Two stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, sexual vulgarity, violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang


You’d better be careful, Sir Anthony, or your career will take the downward trajectory that turned Rod Steiger into such a cautionary tale.

Steiger garnered three Academy Awards nominations during a little more than a decade, and took home the gold for his starring role in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night. His moving supporting performance in 1981’s The Chosen proved to be his final truly respectable role; from that point forward, he was reduced to self-parodying comedy cameos and trailer-trash exploitation flicks along the lines of American Gothic, The Neighbor and (words fail me) Captain Nuke and the Bomber Boys.

Don't ever address the demon directly, Father Trevant (Anthony Hopkins, left)
warns Michael (Colin O'Donoghue), and don't ever look it in the eyes. But of
course the younger man does both those things throughout this laughable film.
This problem crops up repeatedly in The Rite, which routinely ignores or
violates the very "rules" established by its own narrative.

It was a grinding, embarrassing 20 years before we lost Steiger in 2001, by which time a new generation had grown up believing him nothing but a second-rate hack with – so it seemed – the worst agent in town.

Consider the uncomfortable parallel to Hopkins: a four-time Oscar nominee and winner, for 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, who is much too content, these days, to deliver throwaway, self-parodying performances in dead-on-arrival projects such as Slipstream and the ill-advised remake of The Wolfman. And whatever the fan expectation for the upcoming big-screen version of the Marvel Comics superhero Thor, the discovery that Hopkins has been tagged to play the All-father Odin elicits nothing but snickers. And deservedly so.

All of which brings us to The Rite, a “January stiff” in every sense of the term. We know we’re in trouble, right from the top, when an opening crawl claims that Michael Petroni’s screenplay is “inspired by” actual events, and “suggested by” journalist Matt Baglio’s serious effort to document a controversial topic in his nonfiction book, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist.

In other words, Petroni’s script doesn’t even try for authenticity, and this film lacks the honesty to call itself fiction. And when the final scene (mercifully!) fades to black, a final text crawl “informs” us what these “actual” characters are doing in our real world.

Yeah, right.

Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom, who did a reasonable job with the 2007 big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “1408,” gets full credit for an unsettling mood. Hafstrom has the Swedish sensibility for stark tableaus and gloomy establishing shots: abandoned playgrounds, dilapidated hotel courtyards and darkened, dusk-like skies.

And rain. Plenty of rain.