Drama

Soul

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  • Title: Soul
  • IMDb: link

Soul movie reviewPixar tackles the meaning of life in Soul. Jamie Foxx stars as Joe, a lifelong struggling musician who dies on the very day he earns his big break. Refusing to walk into the Great Beyond, Joe finds himself trapped in the Great Before where young souls are prepared prior to their journey to Earth. Joe’s fate will depend on helping a troubled soul (Tina Fey) find her one true thing.

Soul marks both Pixar’s first African American lead character and its director in Pete Docter (who also worked on much of the film’s development and screenplay). It’s a fun film, which will remind you of a number of body-switching comedies once Joe and 22 (Fey) make it back to Earth (many of those developed by Disney). The film also confirms that beaurcracy doesn’t end at death and Joe finds an entire new world to explore (and escape) if he wants to get home and claim his big break (while also teaching 22 about life).

Despite dealing with life and death, Soul lacks the emotional weight of previous Pixar films such as Up or Toy Story 3 due to how goofy much of the film becomes after Joe’s death.

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The Midnight Sky

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  • Title: The Midnight Sky
  • IMDb: link

The Midnight Sky movie reviewWhat went wrong here? Based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Midnight Sky is a mess of mishmashed themes from other films such as The Martian, The Road, Gravity, Apollo 13 and others (all of which work far more effectively than what we’re given here). George Clooney directs and stars as the last man on Earth, a dying scientist in the Arctic who remains after the rest of humanity has fled to the stars when “something” happens to the planet (other than it being bad and having to do with radiation, the film never bothers to explain). I’m usually a fan of Clooney, particularly when he steps behind the camera, but The Midnight Sky never quite works.

Apparently none of the fleeing spaceships fare much better than those wiped out by radiation as our scientist turns his attention to one ship returning from a long mission on a moon of Jupiter. While most of the story takes place with Clooney is full grizzly mode, we get flashbacks to his past (where he provides the voice for Ethan Peck in some seriously disjointed scenes), and other sequences show life aboard the returning spaceship.

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Tesla

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  • Title: Tesla
  • IMDb: link

Tesla movie reviewTesla is a lesser version of The Current War, which itself was far from a great film. Narrated by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson) in the present (despite the fact she died in 1952), Tesla covers the career of inventor Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke).

Writer/director Michael Almereyda makes some odd choices here, both in a narrator using an Internet that was developed decades after her death and in some pretty cheap greenscreen techniques the culminate in a bizarre music video that closes out the film. While some of these make the film memorable, they don’t do much for the quality of the final product. Nor does the plot’s choice to largely skip over important events of Tesla’s life. Those with even a cursory knowledge of Tesla won’t find much here, and the film’s meager budget doesn’t offer the opportunity to showcase the scale of his inventions and aspirations.

Hawke is hit-and-miss in the title role and Kyle MacLachlan is entirely forgettable as Thomas Edison (who it waffles on as a villain). If the film has any real star, it’s Hewson whose absence is felt in any scene in which she is not featured.

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Memories of Murder

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  • Title: Memories of Murder
  • IMDb: link

Memories of Murder movie review17 years after its initial release, Memories of Murder finally earns worldwide exposure. The film only received a token release in the United States a couple of years later. Given both the critical praise of writer/director Bong Joon Ho‘s Parasite and new revelations on the real-life events Memories of Murder draws from, 2020 becomes the perfect time to revisit the film (or, for so many, to get a first look at what some praise as the best Korean film of the century).

Bong Joon Ho’s tale examines the search for an elaborate South Korean serial killer targeting young women in the rural city of Hwaseong in Gyeonggi Province. The film’s two main characters are the local detective in charge of the case (Song Kang-Ho) and an investigator from Seoul (Kim Sang-kyung) who don’t think much of each other’s methods.

The film weaves the pair’s antagonist odd couple dynamic into an old school detective story that ratchets up the tension with each new victim who is found. It also coyly uses misdirection and more than one red herring to keep the audience guessing about what will happen next.

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Black Bear

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Black Bear
  • IMDb: link

Black Bear movie reviewA filmmaker (Aubrey Plaza) facing writer’s block travels to a remote house in the Adirondack Mountains hoping for inspiration to strike. What happens next is subject to debate as any or all of the events could be nothing more than the actress turned director’s dark musings and may or may not have any connection to reality. Written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine, Black Bear is primarily a vehicle to showcase Aubrey Plaza who owns the screen playing two different versions of the same character each trapped in a situation spiraling out of control.

In one version, Allison (Plaza) is greeted by the house’s owners (Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon) who are stuck in a failing marriage with a baby on the way. Allison’s arrival only further exacerbates the couple’s problems by introducing an attractive unknown variable into their lives. In the second storyline, Allison is an actress starring in her husband’s (Abbott) small independent film. With shooting nearly complete, he uses Allison’s jealousy towards her co-star (Gadon) to force the best possible performance no matter what his psychological games to do her emotional state.

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