SOUL

SOUL is a deeply affecting and visually ravishing film from Pixar. It stars Jamie Foxx as a mild-mannered, warm-hearted jazz musician called Joe who never quite got that big break and has ended up teaching band class.  A grateful former pupil finally hooks him up with a big break but Joe has an accident and dies. He ends up quite literally on a staircase to heaven but fights to come back and play his big gig, meeting a little unborn soul called 22 on the way. So they get back to New York but end up in the wrong bodies - 22 in Joe, and Joe in a cat! And what ensues is your classic body mix-up comedy, along the lines of Freaky Friday or Big. The different perspective allows 22 to find joy in music and simply living, and allows Joe to realise that Jazz isn't what gives him purpose after all - it's acts of kindness and living each day. 

What elevates this film beyond the classic body mix-up comedy is its heart and its imagination. Speaking to its heart, I don't think I've ever seen a film portray the joy of playing music so beautifully, or the awe and joy that hearing someone lost in the moment can inspire. I'm not even talking about Joe here. The best moment is seeing a young girl called Chloe sit on Joe's staircase playing her trombone, and 22, in Joe's body, look on in awe. There's also something really wonderfully touching and joyful in how Moonwind (Graham Norton) is portrayed. Normally, hippies and kooks are portrayed as Goopy idiots, but here they are treated with affection. They also have a kind of wisdom and a part to play.

As to the imagination, this film pushes animation beyond anything I've ever seen before.  The beautifully re-created contemporary New York is sunlit and sepia toned and captures both its beauty and rambunctiousness - from the crazy soundscape of a New York pavement to the crowded jangling of a subway train. This would be achievement enough but it contrasts to brilliantly with the ethereal dreamworlds of the The Great Before, a strange in-between, and The Great Beyond. The Great Beyond is a stunning black and white abstract moving walkway with a strange electronic soundtrack that feels both odd and reassuring. The in between world is again monochromatic but drawn in 2-D and the most starkly abstract. And then we land in The Great Before which is all luminous pastels and fuzzy edges. I particularly liked the design of the wire-frame 2-D characters that shepherd the little souls. It's just amazing how much character and expression the animators managed to get into these simple abstract figures. 

The resulting film is a tour de force of visual imagination with a score as varied and wonderful. This is the best that Pixar has yet produced. 

SOUL is rated PG and has a running time of 100 minutes. It is streaming on Disney+.

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM

It's a searingly hot day in 1920s Chicago.  A black blues band is shut into a dank dark basement to rehearse for a recording session.  The session is run by rich white men.  The star is late. And she is well aware of the delicate power balance that lies between her - the moneymaker - and the men who control access to the record business.  She is Ma Rainey - the Mother of the Blues - a big butch black woman who wears greasepaint make-up and a horse-hair wig and sings and speaks with an authoritative growl. She knows what she wants - whether that's the complete devotion of her lover Dussie-Mae, or a cold coca-cola, or her stuttering nephew to speak on her track. She holds both her manager and the studio boss in contempt and with good reason. She knows full well how the North is just as racist as the South. Most importantly for the plot of this chamber piece, Ma Rainey has no time for the pretentious jazz stylings of Levee Green, or for his eyeing up her lover, or for any kind of destabilising of her core style when Bessie Smith is rising up as a rival.  Levee is, by contrast, a man who still thinks his talent will win him a fair shake by the recording studio. Although we realise as the film goes on just how angry, and damaged, and traumatised, and violent, he is. Because this is a film that does not shy away from describing and showing the most brutal forms of racism - whether rape and lynching, or the exploitation of black talent. Life is truly a brick wall behind a locked door.  Ma Rainey knows this from the start: Levee comes to a painful realisation during the course of the film.

The resulting film is good if you take it as it is - a filmed play.  As such the language (Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapting August Wilson) is stylised and the action largely confined to either the rehearsal room or the recording room.  We have moments of high drama in the form of powerful monologues by Ma Rainey and Levee, and a final act release of tension. If you take it as it is, this really is a powerful and moving drama. Viola Davis' Ma Rainey is an instant icon of queer and black cinema - a powerful and uncompromising figure who speaks honestly to the racism of her time. Kudos to the costume and make-up designers that gave her heft and sweat and revolting make-up - underlining the fact that she was not going to survive a more superficial mass marketing age. But it's Chadwick Boseman in his final role that steals the show, with his two powerful monologues. The latter is a violent indictment of an absent God, and given what we now know about Boseman's fatal illness, and can see in his thinner frame, it has an extra pathos. I suspect that he will be posthumously nominated for Awards and deservedly so.

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM is rated R and has a running time of 94 minutes. It is streaming on Netflix.

THE PROM

THE PROM is a ridiculous frothy neon-lit confection that perfectly fills our need for joy in this winter Covid lockdown. I know it's taken heat for a) not casting its original Broadway cast but upping the ante with big Hollywood stars and b) not casting an actual gay man but James Corden playing a very cliched camp gay man but I honestly do not care because the result is just wonderful! Meryl Streep and Corden are superb as an old down-on-their-luck, woefully un-self-aware couple of Broadway stars! Corden is just very good in this role! Despite their narcissism and delusion we root for them and their two friends - a similarly hapless chorus girl played by Nicole Kidman and a barman played by Andrew Rannells. 

This wonderfully kooky foursome cynically jump on a social media story about a teenage lesbian who isn't allowed to go to her homophobic small-town high school prom.  They swoop into town and lobby in her favour, but when the rest of the town cold shoulders her by not turning up, they throw her an inclusive prom of her very own. The dramatic tension comes from whether her girlfriend will come out, despite the fact that her mum (Kerry Washington) is homophobic; and whether James Corden's characters mum (Tracey Ullman) will finally accept him. But suffice to say that this all ends in a wonderful show-stopping tune with enough glitter and neon-light to banish the Covid blues.

This film is cheesy, predictable, progressive wishful thinking but damned if I didn't shed a happy tear by the end. Like SCHITT'S CREEK, this film shows us the world as it could be, and how joyous a thing it is to behold. 

THE PROM is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 130 minutes. It was released on Netflix on December 11th.

THE DIG

THE DIG is an incredibly earnest and prettily produced historical drama, but one that falls prey to lumpen dialogue, heavy-handed politics and cliched character development.  

It's a retelling of the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial boat and a cache of rare artefacts in an archaeological dig in Suffolk, in 1939.  The find is familiar to most British schoolchildren, especially if like me you grew up in the area, and many of us took school-trips to see the Sutton Hoo finds. They were revolutionary because of their rarity but also because of how they redefined how we considered the "dark ages".  Through the sophistication of the artefacts, historians could see that Anglo-Saxon culture was actually far more developed than had been presumed.  The film wants to tell us this too - and does so with Basil Exposition levels of clumsiness, usually taking the form of excited declamatory statements from Ken Stott's British Museum archaeologist. 

Archaeology being a fairly dull, painstaking exercise, the screenwriter Moira Buffini decides to add some excitement with a couple of action scenes and a hokey romance. The former take the form of a scene where the gifted amateur archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) nearly suffocates when the dig collapses on him, as well as a scene where a RAF pilot crashes into a nearby river.  The latter takes the form of Lily James' archaeologist Peggy Preston realising her husband (Ben Chaplin) is probably gay and at the very least frigid resulting in her having sex with Johnny Flynn's amateur photographer, Stuart Piggott.

Are these spoilers? No, not really. Everything in this film is so clearly telegraphed you can see the character arcs and plot twists coming as soon as the characters are introduced. Lest you ever forget, war is imminent! So we get RAF planes flying overhead at every moment, and this underscores the DOOM that overhangs Carey Mulligan's sick landowner. The inevitable battle between the amateurs and the institutional control freaks at the British Museum is, well, inevitable. And as soon as Lily James turns up in her scantily clad holiday clothes with her frigid husband you can see the affair coming a mile off. 

The politics is heavy handed too. There's a running thread of the Establishment not valuing outsiders - whether it's Mrs Pretty not being allowed to go to university, or Mr Brown not being given credit for the dig, or Peggy Preston being patronised by pretty much everyone except Cousin Stuart. And yet this comes up against an almost Downton Abbey-esque doffing of the flat tweed cap with Mr Brown and his wife grateful for any crumbs of praise from Mrs Pretty. 

What's so annoying about all this is that the film, directed by Simon Stone, is actually well made insofar as it has lovely lush British golden hour country landscape cinematography; a lot of care has been taken over period costumes and art direction; and the cast is first-rate (even in Mulligan is way too young to play Mrs Pretty). It's just all so wasted on such a twee pointless script. I would much rather have watched a doc on Sutton Hoo instead. 

THE DIG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 112 minutes. It will be released on January 29th 2021.

HILLBILLY ELEGY

J.D.Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was something of a publishing sensation and I very much enjoyed reading his biography.  It appealed to me as a tale of a young kid born into the opioid crisis that bred Trump's base, complete with a drug-addict mum, rescued by a a battle-axe of a grandma, who somehow gets himself into an Ivy League law school and the Marines. Along the way, Vance speaks sympathetically about the social circumstances he grew up in while also criticising some of the more feckless behaviour it breeds.  This willingness to not simply to blame structural issues but also personal choices made the book controversial. 

I was surprised that the book was inspiring a narrative fiction movie rather than a documentary.  Things that might pass as credible in real life seem broad and crass and worst of all patronising when fictionalised. And there's not a little poverty porn about Ron Howard's new film. Glenn Close stars as "mamaw" complete with frizzy afro, drooping latex boobs and stomach and hideous glasses and teeth.  It's all so patronising and broad as to be offensive. And then we have Amy Adams as the addict mum Bev - another broad performance in a thankless one-dimensional role. Speaking of which, I give you poor Freida Pinto as the protagonist's supportive college girlfriend who seems to exist merely to further his career. As for the hero? He just comes across as banal and forgettable. I didn't want him to succeed - I wanted the movie to be over. 

HILLBILLY ELEGY is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It was released on Netflix on November 2th.

REBECCA

Daphne Du Maurier's nasty little thriller, Rebecca, is both iconic as a short story and as its film adaptation by Hitchcock. It's a grim tale about a banal simpering middle class spinster who falls for an unattainable rich aristocratic widower.  Which is not to say she doesn't attain him. For reasons that are still murky to me, he marries her, maybe to protect himself from the ghosts of his first and titular wife.  But the new, unnamed wife will never really possess her husband because he remains obsessed by the cynical and manipulative Rebecca - a woman beloved by all including her obsessive and diabolical housekeeper Mrs Danvers.  At the end of the novel, there is no happy ending. The couple are trapped overseas in a loveless and frigid marriage. The only triumph is that the second Mrs De Winter realises her husband never loved his first wife. At the end of the Hitchcock version we get a slightly soupier Hollywood ending. Joan Fontaine's second wife has gathered some courage and supported Laurence Olivier through his trial. He clings to her like a parasite. But it's no marriage of equals. Nonetheless, both original novel and film are of a tone - sinister, nasty, dark, cynical, blighted, thwarted and corrupt. It is Rebecca who sets the tone.

In this new adaptation by a director I very much admire, Ben Wheatley, the tone is altogether different. The south of France is lush and sunlit and Mr De Winter and his second wife (Armie Hammer and Lily James) seem young, healthy, vibrant and jarringly contemporary despite the period setting.  He takes her home to a lavish mansion but instead of the gothic gloom of the original we have Kristen Scott Thomas chomping through the scenery in a high camp version of Mrs Danvers that made me laugh at it rather than shudder from it. I had to question whether I was watching a Ryan Murphy film. And so it goes on, bad casting and bad direction. Sam Riley is utterly toothless as Rebecca's nasty cousin. The thriller/drama utterly uninteresting. It winds on to its ending which is about as cynical and Hollywood happy as anything I've ever seen. All is happy and sexy and fruitful. Rebecca has truly been vanquished. Along with any credibility Ben Wheatley ever had.

REBECCA has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released on Netflix on October 21st.