Movie Reviews: Graham Norton in Soul with Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey and Angela Bassett
@PixarSoul Disney and Pixar's Soul is streaming on December 25 only on Disney+. Graham Norton has a role in it - he voices the character Moonwind
The most ambitious Pixar offering to date, (PG) opens with middle-aged jazz pianist, Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) — a diligent but frustrated music teacher.
Finally offered an opportunity to play with a quartet led by saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), Joe is over the moon — until he falls down a manhole, and wakes to find himself headed for the Great Beyond. Determined to get back to Earth and achieve his lifetime’s ambition, Joe slips through the celestial cracks into the Great Before, where he finds himself assigned the responsibility of giving Soul 22 (Tina Fey) the spark she needs in order to be born.
What follows is funny, profound and jaw-droppingly brilliant, and usually all at the same time. Co-written by Kemp Powers, Mike Jones and Pete Docter, with Powers and Docter co-directing, Soul has the audacity to venture into the realms of the ineffable, and employ animation to illustrate concepts such as souls, spirits, the Great Beyond and celestial travel.
Even by Pixar’s standards, the animation is next-level in terms of its attention to detail, and particularly when it comes to synching the sound and vision when the jazz quartet takes to the stage, but there’s plenty of humour in the way the animation is used too — the spirit guides of the Great Beyond, for example, are rendered as Picasso-like creations, while Graham Norton bags his fair share of punchlines as the hippy-dippy Moonwind the Astral Traveller.
Ultimately, though, Soul is a moving exploration of what it means to be human, and to be alive for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it instant that is life in the grand scheme of things, during the course of which Joe and 22 finally come to appreciate the myriad wonders to be discovered in everyday moments and things.
(Disney+)
Emer Reynolds’ (The Farthest) latest documentary, (12A), is a fascinating account of Lynott’s life, and especially because it eschews the format’s usual trope of trotting out celebrity talking heads for a more private, personal interrogation of who Phil Lynott was, and what he came to represent.
Thus we get historical footage of Lynott, playing live or in home movie footage, spliced into contemporary interviews with his daughters, Sarah and Cathleen, his ex-wife Caroline, his childhood friends and former band members Eric Bell and Scott Gorham, with a voiceover derived from interviews with The Rocker himself.
Dedicated Lynott fans may not find too much that’s new, but Songs for While I’m Away offers an unusually rounded and emotionally aware documentary of a rock artist, and one that does full justice to Philo’s complex personality in exploring the dichotomy between his private and public personas, and how a shy and sensitive poet became one of the most charismatic and extroverted rock stars in the world.
The snippets of Lynott live on stage are as thrilling as ever, but it’s in the quieter moments that the film really excels: Phil speaking about his formative experience as ‘one of the few black kids in the country’, or an ex-girlfriend talking candidly about his enduring sense of childhood abandonment when his mother sent him back to Ireland from London, which resulted in Lynott ‘always waiting to be betrayed.’
Emer Reynolds doesn’t flinch from detailing the less salubrious aspects of Lynott’s life – the infidelities, the drug abuse – but for the most part Songs for While I’m Away is a bittersweet celebration of a unique life that ended far too soon.
(cinema release)
A prequel-of-sorts to Peter Pan, (PG) opens with Alice Darling (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) reading WB Yeats’ The Stolen Child to her children, whereupon the story takes us back to her childhood, when Alice (now played by Keira Chansa) and her brothers David (Reece Yates) and Peter (Jordan Nash) led an idyllic life of fantasy adventures under the watchful eye of their loving parents Jack (David Oyelowo) and Rose (Angelina Jolie).
When tragedy strikes, however, the family is torn apart, thrusting Alice and Peter into the brutal realities of life...
Written by Marissa Kate Goodhill and directed by Brenda Chapman, Come Away is a paean to the importance of escapist fantasy that is as influenced by Alice in Wonderland as it is by Peter Pan. Here escapism isn’t simply employed as a diversion to while away the idle hours, but an essential coping mechanism for children confronted by a world more full of weeping than they can understand.
The younger cast members aren’t as persuasive as we might have wished them to be, but the story itself is a gorgeous confection as Peter and Alice struggle to transform their reality into the fantastical adventures their inventive minds are happier inhabiting. (cinema release)
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