Soul (a movie review post)

 

Pixar has not been my favorite production company of late. After spending more than a decade as Hollywood's golden child that could do no wrong, they ended that run with Toy Story 3. Their movies after that, with only a few exceptions, became formulaic and, well, boring. I've said previously that I believe that was due to the loss of John Lasseter as their creative guide. I still mostly stand by that. Since 2010, only three of their movies stand out as something more than ordinary. Two of those were by Pete Docter, this being one of them.

The first thing I'm going to say is how... wonderful... yes, wonderful, it is to have a movie "about" jazz that isn't made by fucking Damien Chazelle. There's nothing in this about how the white savior man is going to save jazz from... I don't know. It was never really clear what Chazelle thought he was saving jazz from. Itself, probably, since Chazelle seems to believe that jazz was made for the white man, and it can't be trusted in the hands of the people who invented it.

This movie isn't really about jazz and doesn't have a whole lot of jazz in it. Which is fine, because I'm not much of a jazz fan. I don't hate it or anything, but it's not something I'm just going to turn on if I feel like some music. In fact, the movie isn't about music at all. It's about dreams. Life dreams, not the ones you have when you're asleep and forget promptly when you wake up. Or, maybe, it's about inspiration. That's the word, or a word, they use in the movie. 

But that's not really right, either. The movie is about living your life and not just... drifting through it. It's about not letting fear get in the way of pursuing the things that spark you. From a casual distance, it's a beautiful movie. It has some endearing and some poignant moments.

It also has some issues, which I will try to point out without being spoilery.

Joe is a musician, a jazz musician. He's been chasing that lucky break all his life. His mother wants him to get a real job. A permanent one. Not that he doesn't work. He teaches music, but he's not, evidently, a permanent teacher or anything like that. The conflict at the opening of the movie is that he's been offered a permanent teaching position, and he's torn over whether to accept it or not because, for some reason, if he acceptd a position as a music teacher he'll have to, for whatever reason, no longer accept gigs playing in clubs and bars. Um... The dude's not married and has no kids. This is an artificial conflict. Do I give up on my dream of being a "musician" by taking the teaching job or not?

There is also the subtle implication that Joe has not been adequately pursuing his dream because he hasn't been successful at becoming a "musician." There are scenes of him doing other life stuff, like watching TV and doing laundry, which are there to suggest that these are times when Joe was failing to pursue his calling. What the fuck is that about? No one can spend 24/7 doing one thing and one thing only. That he has not "made it" is not because he has not adequately pursued his dream.

And there is the complete dismissal of the importance Joe has played in the lives of the students he's taught and their own inspiration toward music because of him. It's like those things, though important, do not actually matter because those things have come at the expense of Joe's own success. Or something like that.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I don't really think these are good messages to be handing out. Not that I think these are messages that are really intended, but the framework of the movie delivers them anyway. If you are not famous and "successful," you have failed your dream. You have failed to pursue it adequately. It's our cultural belief, and it's ingrained in the movie, which is too bad, because there could have been a deeper message.

All of which may sound like I didn't like the movie, which would be incorrect. It's one of the top three Pixar movies of the past decade, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It came close to bringing tears to my eyes. I would gladly watch it again. And I might, since it's streaming on Disney+. None of which changes the fact that I wish that Docter had gone just a little bit further with the movie and not relied so heavily on our societal views of achievement and success. It's a really good movie, just not a great one.

Coco (a movie review post)

This turns out to be a difficult movie for me to review. Seriously, I've been contemplating the review for two days and still haven't figured out how exactly I want to approach this.

The easy thing to do is just to say that it's a great movie, because it is a great movie. In fact, since Toy Story 3 came out in 2010, Coco is one of only two great movies that Pixar has released, the other being Inside Out. The story is well-told and heartfelt. Heartfelt enough that it brought a tear to my eye. The aforementioned Toy Story 3 was the last movie to do that to me, as far as I remember.

As per Pixar, even in their less than good movies, the animation was fantastic. And fantastic in a way that we really haven't seen before: It was fabulously colorful. Like a sugar skull:

In fact, there's not anything I can point to that I would say would make the movie better. No improvements necessary.

And, yet...

And, yet, I am uncomfortable with the message, the message that family always comes first and is most important. More important than anything. I just... well... That's just not true.

I could get into examples of why that's not true, but it's probably not really necessary. Either you agree with the statement or you don't and nothing I say is going to matter one way or the other. Besides, any examples I could make could be entire posts, and I don't want to get into trying to summarize things in a way that is succinct. For instance, I could say:

When my grandmother died, my uncle, through unethical and possibly illegal methods, stole all of  the land my grandparent's had owned, leaving my mother and my aunt with virtually nothing.

But, then, you're going to want me to explain that, and I don't feel like getting into it. The short of it is that family shouldn't get any special passes just because they're family.

However, my disagreement with the message doesn't detract from the movie itself; the movie is great, and you should certainly go see it. At the theater even. It's really a movie which should be enjoyed on the big screen.