ffreemon I will give my opinion first. This is the greatest film ever made with one proviso: I don't understand it. The failure to understand is, like the film itself, difficult to understand. As one watches, trying to get the gist, one first realizes that one is not understanding, next, that one is not getting the gist, next that you (not the change from one to you), are unlikely to ever understand it, next that I will never understand it, next that I do not even want to know what it is about. One thing I know for sure: the section on IMDB that lists "awards" fails to list "Best film Welles wrote about Redbud".

SnoopyStyle Paul Giamatti is preparing to play Uncle Vanya on Broadway. After reading about the new soul extraction procedure, he finds Soul Storage in the phone book. Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) takes out his soul which looks like a chickpea. Paul struggles to connect to his work and starts fighting with his wife Claire (Emily Watson). He tries a Russian poet soul but that comes with bleak memories. When he tries to get his own soul back, he finds it has been stolen by Nina who is a smuggler of souls from Russia. Her Russian mob boss Dimitri wanted a famous actor's soul for his wannabe actress wife Sveta.Writer/director Sophie Barthes is tapping into an interesting, surreal idea that has a fair bit of Charlie Kaufman. It fails mostly by comparison. The black market for souls could have been more compelling and more surreal. The quirkiness fails to be quirky funny. It's a good idea that could have something really interesting.

tedg This is depressing, because it is not merely bad, it stomps on some very precious ideas.The fault is in trying to be Woody Allen; even he fails most of the time. There is a deep concept here, but it is obscured by the attempt to wrap it in humor.The thing worth noticing:This is a film about performance. Actors have a cursed life in that they have to fill themselves by emptying themselves. The full life is the life committed to potential waste. We are all actors. These concepts first appeared in drama in the famous Vanya of Chekhov. "Vanya on 42nd Street" changed that into a layered folding, making the connection to life outside of the theater explicit.Here, Giamatti plays the role of Wallace Shawnin "Vanya on 42nd." David Strathairn plays the same role he did in the similar "Limbo," while Dina Korzun adapts the Audrey Tautou role from "Dirty Pretty Things."Even the secondary characters are pulled from cold storage with Lauren Ambrose asked to stand in for the Alicia Witt role in "Liebestraum." All of those referenced films repackage Vanya's notions which are deep and disturbing, as suicidally disturbing as they were for the uncle. There is a way to handle this with humor, I am sure, but Barthes does not find it. She empties and does not fill.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Imdbidia Cold Souls is a comedy of the absurd with some surrealist and existentialist touches, and a philosophical query on the nature of the soul. The film departs from a quote from Descartes that says that the soul is located in a little place in the brain, a premise that leaves out one of the most interesting aspects of the nature of the soul. The script is more interested in asking and answering the following questions: What exactly is the soul? What does the soul to our self and how it defines who we are? What would it be not having a soul and being just a corporeal being? What would it be living with the soul of another person? Why would anybody want to empty out his/her body from his/her soul? Paul Giametti plays himself, better said, a version of himself - an actor in crisis, burdened by the weight of role he's playing on his mood and spirit -even though this is just created by his job-, who goes to a clinic where the soul can be extracted and stored, restored and exchanged, whatever you like. What happens Giametti in his quest to be soul-lighted without his soul is the core of the story.Giametti shows once again what a great actor he is. Russian actress Dina Kurzun, who plays a "mule" of souls between Russia and the US is OK in her role. The other actors are all mediocre, that's the truth.The tone of the film is somewhat depressing and gray, which goes well with Giametti's character. In fact, all the characters in the movie are very serious and gray, as if all souls in the world had that same defect. I think that's the best part of the movie, the depiction of a world of gray souls, always unsatisfied about being human, always wanting to be perfect. Humans avoiding everything that makes us humans. The unwillingness of humans to see within, to deal with our emotions, feelings and problems, our past and present. The soul as a product of trade, like our society, in which everything is for sale, and bogus people are everywhere. These elements are openly and clearly presented, in a successful way through Giametti's dialogs and part of the storyline.On the other hand, I see a contradiction, a deep one, between what the director wants to portray and what actually the characters in the script portray. If the soul is undeniable linked to our emotions and feelings, and their weight makes us what we are, how is possible that a person without soul, empty, can be aware and suffer from not having a soul? If your soul is not yours but that of another person, how do you know (from an emotional point of view) that the soul is not yours? If the soul is located in a part of the brain, how can the brain work normally after the soul has been extracted? The movie does not success at offering response to these questions, and in fact mixes things up a little bit.Despite the serious tone of the film, the main concepts that the movie deals with are examined superficially. Perhaps, a lighter story an characters and a deeper analysis of the philosophical elements of the script would have produced a more engaging film. I am thinking, for example, in The Truman Show, which did just that without losing any depth, and being an entertaining movie at the same time.There is a problem with the music too, at least to me. A couple of songs in French appear from nowhere halfway the movie. They are beautiful and very much of my liking, but they do not fit with the rest of the music and the general music ambiance of the film. In fact they were a shock and a distraction from the scene that they were paired with.The film has an excellent starting point and some very original ideas, but the tone of the film is too serious on one hand, and too descriptive in the other. It's not a drama or a comedy either, an ambiguous mix instead.I think that, still, is one of those films you have to see because it is daring, different and original.By the way, I love the movie poster. It's great and pretty much sums up the main concept of the film in just one shot.