Cold Souls (2009)

hyped garbage

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Well, the reviews made this sound fun.Apparently there is supposed to be humour in this film and some reviews suggest that it is even supposed to be clever.It's a long, grinding bore. If there is anything funny about it, then it must be for people who tell jokes to appear funny and have a sense of 'humor' - nothing to do with humour.It might help, I suppose, if you've some sort of notion that 'souls' could be real - I was expecting that it would be exposed as a silly medical/hey-wow/rip-off scam to make people think that they'd got souls. Apparently, though, this silly idea was supposed to be taken seriously.Avoid. This is compared to the 'Being John Malkovich' film - it is equally deliberate, trivial and boring - but somewhat less annoying.

Cold Souls (2009)This is a concept movie, in a way, though the concept--that you can have your soul extracted and stored in a jar so that you can live without its weight--is actually a bit thin after awhile. What drives it is not something actually heavy or surreal, about having and trading real souls, but more the idea that your soul also affects, very slightly, your personality, or your talent. So really what happens is people begin to trade or borrow souls, and they acquire a little bit of the owner's qualities. And that carries along a few consequences. naturally.Everything is presented in a deadpan comic way. The souls stored in their foot long glass jars vary greatly, some looking like creative sculptures and others like, well, a jelly bean. Or in the case of our hero, Paul Giamatti, a garbanzo bean. (The Russian half of the cast says in joyful astonishment, "a chick pea!")Giamatti is not my favorite actor but all my friends think he's terrific and I like the type he plays, a schlumpy everyman with Homer Simpson eyes. And Giamatti, who plays a character named Paul Giamatti, makes this movie. It isn't a tour de force, an Al Pacino or Cate Blanchett jaw-dropper, though I think it's meant to be (he even has roles within roles, with his character rehearsing a stage play). To some extent his willingness to succumb to the movie's simple, clever plot is one of its charms.There are echoes of the absurd and the playful of two earlier (and better) movies, the incredibly inventive "Being John Malkovich" and the cinematically engrossing "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Both of those are written by the astonishing Charlie Kaufman. Here the writer Sophie Barthes is working almost solo since she is also directing, and if it's solid it's also short of its potential, which unfortunately is so obvious. It's a great idea. And a rather good movie.

Apparently, losing your soul makes you act like William Shatner.In COLD SOULS, brilliant actor Paul Giamatti plays brilliant actor Paul Giamatti, who is so psychologically stricken playing Uncle Vanya in the Chekov play of the same name, that he stores his soul at a soul storage agency, only to have it stolen by the Russian black market.A darker journey than ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and a blacker comedy than BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, COLD SOULS is a disturbing, unique gem of a movie. Crafted by writer-director Sophie Barthes.The real Giamatti - as game as the real Malkovich - plays himself, who approaches the soul storage issue not without a realistic amount of skepticism. Emily Watson plays his confused wife. What sells the movie's touchy premise is that everyone plays it dead straight. They live in a reality where soul extraction and storage is possible, so it is like any other new medical procedure involving a big futuristic machine that looks incomprehensible.Giamatti is sold by the expertise and straightforward sincerity of Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who shows him a range of souls in small glass canisters, all manner of amorphous shapes, but, as he explains, though we imagine the soul to be colorful, they all surprisingly come in shades of gray.Giamatti's soul looks like a chickpea.When his soul is removed he is asked, "How do you feel?" Other than "hollow" he says he feels great, albeit saying it in a blank way. (Still, I was just wondering, as per the Christian Handbook, don't you need a soul to feel anything?) He goes back to his stage play, and though not in anguish any more over emoting, he is not ANYTHING any more. His "dead face" assumes prominence between rehearsal takes that sound like Shatner on ice. Giamatti is such a great actor that he can actually act like he can't actually act. Or at least act like Shatner can't act.Meanwhile, in a parallel story that provides the darkness and disquietude of this experience, Russian Nina (Dina Korzun) illicitly assumes Paul's soul, transporting it to Russia in her body. In the trade, she is called a "mule," a "soul train," if you will, who loads up a soul in America and brings it back to Russia at the behest of her boss. The boss's wife (sexy Katheryn Winnick) wanted the soul of a "great American actor like Al Pacino or Johnny Depp." The gag, of course, is that those guys are famous for being "great actors" while Giamatti is undoubtedly on their creative par. Just not famous for it.Giamatti realizes the soulless Shatner Method is only useful to one person in the universe, so must take on the soul of a Russian poet to put the heart back into his performance; then embarking on a quest to Russia to put the soul back. But first he must convince the blonde who thinks she is imbued with Al Pacino.Hoo-ah!

Yes, it is a comedy, but not just a black one, but a very bleak one. Bleak, like a bleak landscape, with very few features. The funny parts are few and far between. Bleak, also as in very dark. The situation that Paul Giamatti finds himself is is more dramatic than comedic, although there are some funny scenes. Funny in the way "Being John Malkovitch" was funny, but without that actor's egotism. In fact, Paul Giamatti's persona and performance are the opposite of egotistical. This really is Paul Giamatti's film, with the other actors, including the excellent David Strathairn and Emma Watson, merely foils. There is also an actress who is the "spitting image" of Scarlett Johansen. I thought that it was Scarlet playing an uncredited role - like Bette Midler in Get Shorty.