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Skadian
Reviews
Cold Souls (2009)
Full of souls and holes
After seeing how "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" use their sci-fi premises to enhance and extract romantic or existential story-lines, I found "Cold Souls" to be lacking in dramatic consequence and over-flowing in technicalities surrounding it's particular sci-fi premise.
In this film the actor Paul Giamatti plays the actor Paul Giamatti, who decides to have his soul stored away for two weeks, while he works on a difficult theater role. When his soul is stolen from the soul storage company, he ventures out to find it, thereby meeting a Russian woman, Nina (Dina Korzun), who works as a soul transporter.
This plot results in bizarrely funny scenes, for example when Paul accidentally drops his soul on the floor, and the manager crawls around nervously to search the carpet for it as if he were looking for, while afraid to step on, a contact lense.
The film also contains many suggestions as to the consequences of separating yourself from your soul. However, the film is inconsistent in these suggestions - do you have feelings or not, when you are without a soul? Do you have a conscience or not?
After having spent many scenes throughout the first half movie on Paul's rehearsals in the theater, director Sophie Barthes leaves this theme altogether for the second half.
Whereas the two above-mentioned movies keep the technicalities of their premise in the background, this movie spends many lines explaining how souls leave residue etc., without adding to the story.
I was entertained by this movie and it inspired a somewhat soul-searching conversation with my co-viewer. I found Giamatti's performance pleasant and was quite fascinated by Dina Korzun's quiet, almost cool humbleness as Nina. But when it came to the story's personal and existential development, I was left with too many blanks.
I Love You Phillip Morris (2009)
Surprising, funny and unique movie
This is the story of Steve Russell (Jim Carrey), who after a car accident decides to leave job and family behind to live a life more true to his homosexual, flamboyant self. However, the new life includes more lies than ever, and in prison Steve meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor). He now lives to be with Phillip, no matter how many lies it takes. This set up will bring you to watch as far from each other scenes as Jim and Ewan dancing romantically in the cell and Jim giving himself a good reference over the phone while wearing only speedos.
Reviewers have complained that the movie doesn't know which genre it wants to fit into. Is it a gay romance drama or is it a rambling swindler comedy? They have also criticized that the gay element is too cliché and the romance too shallow.
For me, however, all of these elements made the movie wonderfully unique. It is based on a true story and maybe that's why it doesn't fit the boxes that reviewers want it in. The story is full of surprising turns and told to the audience in a way so that we can never be sure what we just saw. The fact that the love story involves two men is treated as something that the movie can simply not be bothered with. Some scenes have a delicate, intimate atmosphere, others are pure high-speed comedy. I was never bored, I laughed a lot and even if the movie gave me no reason to believe in a happy ending for the two main characters, I sure hoped for it.
As a Carrey-fan I loved Jim Carrey's calmed-down and balanced, yet extremely intense performance. For Ewan McGregor's sweetness I am soon to become a McGregor-fan.
My one-star-reduction is for a lack of message. I may ask myself why the movie was made? It is hardly a commercial movie, yet it is too absorbed in fraud-based action to send me a proper love-conquers-all-message. I will settle for the motive being simply a wish to tell me the true story of an unusual man.
As far as I understand the movie has a distribution problem in North America. That is a shame. I strongly recommend it to anyone more open minded than an average film reviewer :-)