The surprise on this PIXAR animation isn’t that it’s a mess (and a miss), but that no one called it out as a mess (and a miss). Instead, modified critical rapture and end-of-the-year awards. Cowed by PIXAR’s rep for deep-think Pop Philosophy? (See UP/’09; INSIDE OUT/’15.) Cap-doffing at Le Jazz Mystique?* Jamie Foxx tamps down vocal prowess as a music teacher/unsung jazz pianist who lands the club date he’s longed for/long deserved, only to miss his chance at a career reboot when fate whisks him off on that escalator to the AfterLife, his bucket list not even made up! Hopping off the express line, he lands at the Young Soul Nursery, hiding out as mentor to Tina Fey’s obstreperous human-phobic Life Spark. It’s HERE COMES MR. JORDAN/’41 (or A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/’46) meets the ‘unborn’ children’s chorus of Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN. (If opera librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal couldn’t make sense of this idea, why expect it from co-writer/directors Pete Docter & Kemp Powers? And they must have known something was off, overloading on visual fillagree like Gil Evans spinning out empty piano tapestries on an uninspired day when all he needed to do was wait for Billy Strayhorn to show up on the next ‘A’ train. Best are the afterlife staff, drawn in ‘50s single-line style, all breezy empty volume. The rest, far too corporeal and oddly flatfooted. Disappointing, even for those who expected it.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *The lack of overreach in PIXAR’s downsized LUCA/’21 part of that recent film’s refreshing charm. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html
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