Judas and the Black Messiah Preview

Judas and the Black Messiah is the latest film by Director Shaka King.  While this isn't exactly his directorial debut, this is only his second full length feature film and is certainly his most noteworthy.  Other than a spattering of TV episodes and a couple short films over the last 8 years, King's previous work as a Director was Newlyweeds.  He directed 5 episodes of the one-season sci-fi comedy People of Earth which I thought was a clever, witty, dark comedy and was disappointed it didn't get more seasons.  Now, seemingly out of nowhere, he brings us Judas and the Black Messiah that is nominated for 6 Academy Awards including Best Picture.

William "Bill" O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is caught stealing a car and assaulting a Federal Agent.  He is given a choice: several years in prison, or become an FBI informant.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) sees the Black Panther Party as the biggest threat in America and commands the FBI to take down their charismatic leader, Chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).  With his FBI handler, Special Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), keeping close tabs on him, O'Neal infiltrates the Illinois Black Panthers to keep tabs on Hampton.  

O'Neal is torn.  As he gets closer to the Panthers, he realizes they are not terrorists.  They are good people trying to do the right thing and stand up against racist oppression.  The FBI doesn't see it that way and he is told that Hampton must be taken down by any means necessary.  Things get tense as the Panthers suspect a rat in their midst and O'Neal struggles between his morals and his duty.

Daniel Kaluuya burst onto the scene in 2017 with his outstanding performance in the twisted thriller Get Out.  He is nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Black Messiah.  LaKeith Stanfield has been around, but this is definitely his most prominent role to date.  He is nominated for Best Actor. 

I honestly don't know what to expect from Judas and the Black Messiah.  I mean, I can easily deduce that O'Neal is Judas and Hampton is the Messiah from the title.  I can tell this will be an emotionally charged film about the racial tensions in the late 1960's in Chicago.  Malcolm X was shot and killed in 1965, only 100 years after the 13th Amendment officially ended slavery.  Martin Luther King JR. was shot and killed just a few years later in 1968.   I know that films like this are never comfortable to watch.  As a society, we never enjoy being reminded of how horribly we've treated people in our country's history.  Partially because it's such an ugly time in our past, and also because we still have a long way to go.

Like I said, I enjoyed King's recent work on the TV series People of Earth, but Black Messiah is neither sci-fi nor comedy.  I enjoyed Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, but this is not a thriller.  It's a heavy and relevant topic.  Now, if someone like Quentin Tarantino was directing it, you could be sure it was overly bloody and irreverently and uncomfortably funny.  But it's not Tarantino.  I will say that one of the things I love about Oscar season is that I push myself to see movies I normally wouldn't necessarily be inclined to watch on my own.  Trying to see all the Best Film nominees pushing me to explore just the ones I think I would personally find entertaining based on the previews.  That being said, it does make it a little difficult to predict ratings for these kinds of films, especially with how my personal rating scale works.

So, I am going to cautiously predict 3.5 Stars for Judas and the Black Messiah.  I think it will be powerful, emotional, well-acted and a tough look at our country's ugly recent history.  I have my doubts about whether I'll want to watch it again or add it to my permanent collection, however.  So, am I right?  We shall see . . . 

Soul Review

 

4 Stars

It's been a tough year for the film industry.  There were a total of 329 movies released in 2020 in the United States and Canada.  There were nearly 800 released the year before.  It's amazing that movies were released at all.  Ticket sales for movie theatres plummeted 80% to their lowest numbers in nearly 40 years.  Disney's animated release back then was The Great Mouse Detective.  That's also the year Pixar Animation Studio began, though it would be about ten years before they carved their name in the history books with Toy Story.

Soul is Pixar's latest animated feature film released by Disney.  From the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, music is all Joe (Jamie Foxx) thinks about.  He was born to play jazz and it's his reason for living.  Those are very carefully chosen words for this middle-school music teacher who feels he's missed his calling in life.  Joe gets a call from a former student and offers him a chance to play with the legendary jazz musician Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett).  Joe is so excited at the opportunity, he doesn't see an open manhole in the street in front of him, he plummets and doesn't survive the fall. His "soul" ends up in line with other souls on the great staircase to The Great Beyond.  But Joe isn't ready. He jumps out of line and falls to a place called The Great Before, where new souls get their personalities before they go to earth. There, he meets up with soul number 22 (Tina Fey) and embarks on a journey to return to his life on earth.  

Without giving everything away, Soul is deep and tackles some really intense philosophical, moral, theological and metaphysical topics in this animated film.  Before souls can leave The Great Before and enter their human form on earth, they must get a "spark".  Joe and 22 mistakenly assume the "spark" is your purpose in life.  For Joe, that's his music.  22 is completely happy where she is and has no desire to go to earth.  But she is inspired by Joe and decides to help him return to his human form.  In order to do that, they must enlist the help of free-spirited Moonwind (Graham Norton) in a place called The Zone.

Writer / Director Pete Docter, like every Writer / Director at Pixar, has strung together hit after hit.  He burst onto the scene with Monsters, Inc and followed that triumph with the highly acclaimed Up.  In 2015, Docter wrote and directed Inside Out, an animated film that introduced us to the emotional characters that drive us as individuals.  We met Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust within ourselves.  In Soul, he takes an even deeper look as we meet the Souls who are . . . us to our core.

Soul has been nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Original Score, Best Animated Feature Film and Best Sound.  Since the Animated Feature Film category was created in 2001, Pixar studio has won the trophy 6 times.  Many professional and amateur Oscar predictors believe Soul will give them their 7th statue.

It's Pixar and Pete Docter, so of course the animation was amazing and groundbreaking.  It would be a disappointing distraction to watch a Pixar film that didn't constantly advance the art of animation.   For me, in Soul, it was the realism of the musical instruments and they way they were played in the film that really struck me.  The story is original.  There are plenty of movies and stories about what happens in the afterlife: Heaven Can Wait, Defending Your Life, What Dreams May Come to name just a few.  This tackles the concept of our souls existing before they take on a human form.  It's a pretty heavy subject matter, especially for kids.  But Pixar has a way of telling these kinds of deeply thoughtful, emotional, imaginative stories in ways that touch and entertain children and adults alike.  Soul takes on so much more than The Great Before.  It touches on who we are as individuals, what our purpose is in life, death, what happens after death.  I said out loud a few times during the film, "This is so deep."  

One of the biggest draws of the movie is the music. Real-life jazz musician Jon Batiste was a key musical consultant for the film.  He composed, arranged and performed many of the songs featured in the movie.  To hear Batiste talk about the music in the film and the story that the music tells was emotional and inspirational, even without the movie.  You could hear the sadness, the joy, the pain, the triumph as Batiste described and played pieces of the songs during the interview.  And the movie did not disappoint.  The music was just as much a character integral in the telling of the story as was Joe or 22 or Moonwind or Dorothea.  

I anticipated a 4 Stars rating from Soul and I'm going to stick with 4 Stars as my final rating for the film.  Although I couldn't watch it in the theatre (which I miss tremendously), it would have been well worth the price of admission, it's certainly worth seeing again, and it has a great chance of making it to my home collection.  It's original, clever, witty, intelligent, thought-provoking, deep and fantastic.  The only thing slightly missing from Soul that has been almost a hallmark of Pixar films is the tear-jerking moment.  The opening sequence for the movie Up, Andy's goodbye in Toy Story 3, Woody saying goodbye to Buzz in Toy Story 4, Sully saying goodbye to Boo in Monster's, Inc. and Bing Bong's Death in Inside Out are some of their quintessential pull-out-the-tissue moments.  Soul didn't really have that.  But it dealt with so many heavy subjects through the entire film and just kept piling them on relentlessly that I don't think my emotions could have handled it if they did.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and can't wait to see it again.  So, what movie will be on my mind next?  We shall see . . . but it's most likely going to be one of the Best Picture nominations.

Soul Preview

 I'm back.  I apologize for the long hiatus, but, you know, COVID.  It's been a tough year for the film industry.  There were a total of 329 movies released in 2020 in the United States and Canada.  There were nearly 800 released the year before.  It's amazing that movies were released at all.  Ticket sales for movie theatres plummeted 80% to their lowest numbers in nearly 40 years.  Disney's animated release back then was The Great Mouse Detective.  That's also the year Pixar Animation Studio began, though it would be about ten years before they carved their name in the history books with Toy Story.

Soul is Pixar's latest animated feature film released by Disney.  From the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, music is all Joe (Jamie Foxx) thinks about.  He was born to play jazz and it's his reason for living.  Those are very carefully chosen words for this middle-school music teacher who feels he's missed his calling in life.  We see Joe fall through a manhole and he doesn't survive.  His "soul" ends up in line with other souls on the great staircase to the afterlife.  But Joe isn't ready. He jumps out of line and falls to a place called The Great Before, where new souls get their personalities before they go to earth. There, he meets up with soul number 22 (Tina Fey) and embarks on a journey to return to his life on earth.  

In 2015, Pixar released Inside Out, an animated film that introduced us to the emotional characters that drive us as individuals.  We met Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust within ourselves.  Writer / Director Pete Docter takes a look even deeper as we meet the Souls who are . . . us to our core.  And it makes sense since Docter is the one who brought us Inside Out.  He's also one of the creative geniuses behind Monsters, Inc and Up.  

Soul has been nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Original Score, Best Animated Feature Film and Best Sound.  Since the Animated Feature Film category was created in 2001, Pixar studio has won the trophy 6 times.  Many professional and amateur Oscar predictors believe Soul will give them their 7th statue.

It's Pixar and Pete Docter, so of course the animation looks amazing and groundbreaking.  It would be a disappointing distraction to watch a Pixar film that didn't constantly advance the art of animation.  The story is original.  There are plenty of movies and stories about what happens in the afterlife: Heaven Can Wait, Defending Your Life, What Dreams May Come to name just a few.  But this tackles the concept of our souls existing before they take on a human form.  It's a pretty heavy subject matter, especially for kids.  But Pixar has a way of telling these kinds of deeply thoughtful, emotional, imaginative stories in ways that touch and entertain children and adults a like.  Soul looks like it is right on par with their history.

One of the biggest draws of the movie is the music. Real-life jazz musician Jon Batiste was a key musical consultant for the film.  He composed, arranged and performed many of the songs featured in the movie.  To hear Batiste talk about the music in the film and the story that the music tells was emotional and inspirational, even without the movie.  You could hear the sadness, the joy, the pain, the triumph as Batiste described and played pieces of the songs during the interview.  That alone makes me excited to see (and hear) this film.  I'm anticipating a solid 4 Stars from Soul.  Although I won't be watching it in the theatre (which I miss tremendously), I think it would be well worth the price of admission, worth seeing again, and have a great chance of making it to my home collection.  Am I right?  We shall see.