Soul might be his favourite film of the year.
Soul’s New York is heartbreakingly vivid.
Photo: Pixar
My favourite film of this compromised year is one of the last I’ll see before we shut the door on 2020 for good. (At least it will take a great one in the last two days to displace it!)
Pixar’s
Soul was supposed to be in cinemas now but Disney’s Covid release strategy is to direct people’s dollars towards the Disney+ streaming service rather than to struggling cinemas and it dropped for subscribers on Christmas Day.
Soul is the story of a jazz musician named Joe (Jamie Foxx). He’s talented but like so many in New York City, he’s getting by teaching surly teenagers in a high school band rather than wowing grown-ups in clubs. On the verge of giving up his dreams, he gets a surprise opportunity to audition for the great Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), finds himself in the zone and nails it!
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Were there any good movie released this past year? For months at a time, it seemed like no movies were being released at all, as we hunkered down in our homes and dealt with the new reality of differing ways to consume entertainment. But Hollywood did figure out how to get new movies in front of audiences (though a heavily balance of streaming, and the occasional branch out into safe-as-possible theatrical distribution), and a handful of them were truly great.
My Top 10 list for 2020 feels so very unusual, which is an accurate representation of the year, itself. There are traditional storytelling powers, major studio fare, some indie darlings, and the best films that I saw on streaming services. But because this year was so nontraditional, I couldnât think of any other way to capture, via snapshot in time, the bizarre year we just lived through. Looking back on 2020, these are the ten films that moved me, inspired me, spoke to where I was as a pe
As the old saying goes, hindsight is 2020.
And movie fans are among the throngs of people who want to see 2020 in hindsight.
It was a year in which COVID-19 brought movie theaters to the brink of extinction, causing many of Hollywood s expensive tentpole pictures to flee from their 2020 release dates to the presumed economic safety of 2021.
It was a year in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences scrapped its longtime rule that films must have a theatrical release to qualify for the Oscars.
It was a year in which film critics had to forgo their customary press viewings of major motion pictures at state-of-the-art screening rooms and settle for watching them on computers or big-screen TVs.
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Pixarâs latest film
Soul, which currently is streaming on Disney+ for the whole family, has as much to do with creativity as it does to do with the afterlife. Joe, the filmâs main character who is voiced by Jamie Foxx, is an aspiring jazz musician who dies on the day that he gets his big break. With the help of a reluctant soul named 22 (Tina Fey), Joe spends the rest of the movie trying to re-enter his body so he can achieve what he thinks is his lifeâs goal of being a successful jazz pianist.
In the process, Joe (and several others in the film) talk about something that is very specific for artists the âzoneâ of creativity. As portrayed in