i just watched soul and felt an overwhelming urge to go out and live but then i remembered it’s almost midnight here and we’re in the middle of a pandemic
2BEST FILMS OF 2020
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman)
Sound Of Metal (Darius Marder)
A Whisker Away (Jun'ichi Satô dan Tomotaka Shibayama)
Beastie Boys Story (Spike Jonze)
Possessor (Brandon Croneberg)
His House (Remi Weekes)
Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)
The Devil All the Time (Antonio Campus)
Soul (Pete Docter)
The Invisible man (Leigh Whannell)
1as much as i love the jerries and terry from soul, tbh my personal issue with it (beyond just not having much of an emotional reaction the first time i saw it) was how… once more pixar is back to the conceptualizing of a land before/after life, and……… once again it’s so dull
i mean the great before Looks beautiful, just as the great beyond looks great, too -and i would never say that the land of the dead in coco didn’t look amazing -but……
why is it that we can’t think of these places without assigning them some of the worst parts of life?
why does the great before have to work as a company? why do the jerries just wander around and not provide guidance to the mentors -what else do they have to do? why does the great before need someone to count all the people who leave? why does it need a “you seminar”, a specific number of traits for the unborn souls, why do the personalities have to be formed -and worse, chosen by others -before they are thrown into the world?
and (one of my biggest gripes with coco) why does the land of the dead need to have a “remembrance economy”? why does it have to have police, or slums, or concentration of wealth? why does it have a border? why does it take so many awful things from the living world and twist them so they become further awful things, now in the world of the dead?
i know the answer to all of these things, it’s for the sake of the plot. joe gardner needed to be a mentor and be unsupervised so the events of the movie could unfold, and having it work as a company is just way easier to present it. it’s for the sake of the plot, we need an excuse to why miguel’s skeleton relative couldn’t visit the land of the living, and a display of the wealth of the evil dude who stole songs from the good guy, and police to up the stakes and pursue the protagonists as they escape because they broke the rules. but none of this ends in the questioning of these established norms…
i know that people don’t think this is bad, like, having those things can feel familiar and “realistic” and whatnot. but -and this is probably just me -i really really despise having to even imagine that, even in death, even beyond what we see and know, we’ll have to deal with poverty, with inequality, with hierarchies and bureaucracy. and i despise the fact that children must continue to believe that the world is simply like this and that there’s no alternative.
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“ so what do you think you’ll do? how are you gonna spend your life?”
“i’m not sure. but i do know…i’m going to live every minute of it.” | soul (2020)
8So i watched “Soul”. Does anyone want to talk about new souls telling each other “see ya” right before going to Earth?
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