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Soul (2020)
Soul (2020)
2020 | Adventure, Animation, Comedy
The latest digital feature film from PIXAR has arrived and “SOUL” is another triumph for the studio. The story centers around a teacher named Joe (Jamie Foxx), who toils away teaching music to students at a Middle School while dreaming of getting a meaningful gig as a Jazz Pianist.

When the school offers Joe a permanent full time position with benefits he is depressed as while this is the stability his mother wants for him; Joe sees it as an end to his dreams if he accepts the position.

Fate steps in and Joe manages to land a gig with Dorthea Williams (Angela Bassett) which will give him his long sought shot.

Unfortunately for Joe he suffers and accident and ends up as a Soul on his way to the afterlife. Not willing to accept his fate; Joe escapes to a realm where new souls are assigned traits before being sent to Earth to start their lives. Joe is mistaken for a mentor and assigned 22 (Tina Fey); a longstanding resident who has resisted many mentors over the ages and has refused to complete the needed step to begin life.

Joe and 22 must work with one another to set things right and this results in several funny and charming incidents both on Earth and in the Afterlife which are both filled with some great supporting characters that provide laughs and wisdom along the way.

“Soul” is in many way much like the music that inspires it as it is not as linear as one might expect. It tends to at times branch off into new directions while staying along a central theme before the parts reassemble.

The animation is simply amazing as audiences have come to expect and Richard Ayoade, Graham Norton, and Alice Braga lead a strong cast of supporting players which makes “Soul” another winning entry for PIXAR.
  
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Thundercat recommended Nightfly by Donald Fagen in Music (curated)

 
Nightfly by Donald Fagen
Nightfly by Donald Fagen
1982 | Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Donald Fagen's solo album is another of those albums that kind of teaches you what it is to be a songwriter. I feel like Donald Fagen did Aja for the musicians, and The Nightfly is for the songwriter. It's very much a concentrated idea. I remember getting turned on to this album by my home girl at the time; she was very much a muso. I would spend a lot of time listening to Steely Dan, and I didn't connect the dots – sometimes you don't connect them on your own. I had to be somewhere between 18 and 22 – somewhere in those years – she played me that album and I remember again, whenever I heard somebody create progressional music that are not normal choices, it always would perk my ears up, if it was somebody that would tastefully do something different or make some really outlandish choices, and Donald Fagen is the king of that. The Nightfly is one of those albums that I can't live without, that is where I come from as a songwriter. That again definitively is what created the songwriter in me, as compared to the bass player. The choice of the covers, the jazz covers, they feel like they were his songs, the way that he's playing them on the album – he made them real special. It was like it told his actual story of who he was, and I feel like that's the way you're supposed to play standards, not the part where you just learn it because it's cool. I think that there's some emotional connection that Donald Fagen had to these songs that he chose, along with the ones that he wrote on this album, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can feel it. The Nightfly is a definitive album for me."

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Martin Scorsese recommended 8 1/2 (1963) in Movies (curated)

 
8 1/2 (1963)
8 1/2 (1963)
1963 | International, Comedy, Drama
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"What would Fellini do after La dolce vita? We all wondered. How would he top himself? Would he even want to top himself? Would he shift gears? Finally, he did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation—that of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name (episodes for two omnibus films and a shared credit with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights counted for him as one and a half films, plus seven), achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a follow-up—and he built a movie around it. 8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways—the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions (another great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl—again, shot by Gianni Di Venanzo). But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself. The picture has inspired many movies over the years (including Alex in Wonderland, Stardust Memories, and All That Jazz), and we’ve seen the dilemma of Guido, the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni, repeated many times over in reality—look at the life of Bob Dylan during the period we covered in No Direction Home, to take just one example. Like with The Red Shoes, I look at it again every year or so, and it’s always a different experience."

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Alan Tudyk recommended All That Jazz (1979) in Movies (curated)

 
All That Jazz (1979)
All That Jazz (1979)
1979 | Drama, Musical, Sci-Fi
8.5 (4 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"I’m going to go with All That Jazz for number one. It’s Bob Fosse directing a movie about himself; he changed the name to Joe Gideon from Bob Fosse. So he’s directing a movie about a musical choreographer/director who takes too many pills, sleeps with too many women, drinks too much; he’s a moviemaker who’s editing a movie while he’s doing a play and having hallucinations with musicals. It’s so unbelievable how he balances it all, and it’s Roy Scheider’s best performance, I think, ever. He’s amazing in it. It is so amazing. He’s a pretty despicable guy in the movie — I mean, he sleeps around on his girlfriend — but you love him. The doctors tell him not to take his drugs, but he does it anyway, and you still love him. You don’t blame him. And it’s sort of how Bob Fosse ended up dying, so he really forecasted his own death. I mean, he even put his girlfriend in the movie as his girlfriend — Joe Gideon’s girlfriend — and then cheated on her! Like, he had his character cheat on her. It’s so f***ing unbelievable. Just brilliant. That’s number one. That would be my, I have to say, overall all-time favorite. I’m just very impressed by that movie. It’s just really, really good. It’s got like four musical numbers in there, but they’re not like Glee. Some of them are in drug-induced hallucinations, and some of them are, he’s actually directing a musical. I’ve done plays; I’ve done one musical. But the first table read, when they’re going to put up this play, it is so like the table read on plays. I recognize so many things that they get right. Yeah, that’s my all-time favorite."

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The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
1973 | Rock
9.6 (22 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I'm reminded how great it is all the time. It's a weird record, it has passages that are just fucking weird bleeps out of a synthesiser. People dismiss it because it's so popular, and I would tell them if they heard pieces of it they would think it's some freaked out indie group with these great old synthesisers. It's just so well done. There are these strange, jazz elements to Pink Floyd that I think musicians notice. I don't think the audience cares - these neat little things they do that make it their own trip. These combinations of chords and notes that just aren't typical. I suppose to me, it's universal music. I think they do this reptilian brain version of universal, emotional music and they use these very simple build-ups and harmonies, and they nail it on that record 20 different times. And to know that they end on one of the great crescendos that they've ever done, that bit in 'Eclipse' where they sing "all that you touch, all that you feel"… the way that builds up, no-one is ever going to do it that perfectly again. Those simple words, those simple themes, building, building. And you've got to remember it's Roger Waters singing. He's not a great singer, but it highlights this thing - it's a motherfucker, you can't write a song that great. You just have to hope that something happens. For them to end on that [sings a spot on Waters impression] "the sun is eclipsed by the moon." Blammo! Then that heartbeat, it's fucking phenomenal. It's easy to dismiss it because it's so popular, but I would say to anyone they should secretly listen to it and then discover that 'oh my God, it's awesome'."

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