Author: Amy Diaz

A jazz musician winds through the life of a woman who loves him in Sylvie’s Love, an almost miraculously good romance on Amazon.

This movie is beautiful to look at, beautifully romantic, sweet and joyful. For whatever reason, romances that are this straightforwardly romantic without any dressing up of comedy or tragedy or whatever are so rare that it feels like something of a miracle that this exists at all, and that it exists in an accessible way, and not as some released-and-it-disappears indie.

Sylvie (an excellent Tessa Thompson) is a young woman who seems to just radiate energy and possibility, living in Harlem in the late 1950s. Her mother, Eunice (Erica Gimpel), literally uses Sylvie as an example of poise to the young girls at the etiquette school she runs, but Sylvie loves music and television and hangs out with her father, who goes by Mr. Jay (Lance Reddick), at his record shop where she can have access to both. She’s engaged but the movie suggests that the engagement was more a way to placate her mother when Eunice thought Sylvie had gone too far with a boy than the result of a desire to be married. What really gets Sylvie beaming is television and the desire to work as a producer, a dream that seems far-fetched for a Black woman in the mid-century, as her father says, but TV is her passion nevertheless. Well, television and Robert Halloway (Nnamdi Asomugha), a talented young saxophonist who takes a job at the record store to hang out with Sylvie. Though she’s engaged and he is friendly with a girl angling to be a girlfriend at the club where he plays with a jazz quartet, the two are drawn to each other.

The romance of Sylvie and Robert doesn’t go smoothly and part of what makes this movie work is that we can believe both in the depth of their love and in the reality of the things that keep them apart. The movie starts in the early 1960s and then jumps back five years and then moves forward. We see these two people love each other while pursuing life goals that they also love. It’s all so kind, gentle, sweet, beautiful — not words that maybe sound like you should be pumped to see this movie but it is such a warm and rosy story that it is a nice world to be in for a while. The movie has an almost old-fashioned romance movie feel, like something you might see from the late 1950s or early 1960s, but without the overtly stylized showiness of a Mank.

Thompson is one of those actresses I don’t think I’ve ever disliked in a movie but she really is a delight here. She is able to convey strength and confidence even in moments where her character doesn’t fully know the right answer. Likewise, Asomugha is able to sell us on both his character’s devotion to Sylvie and all the decisions the character makes that pull him away from her. And they create a kind of glow around themselves as a couple.

The movie also has some strong supporting performances, including from Eva Longoria, who seems to be having a lot of fun as the wife of one of Robert’s bandmates.

Sylvie’s Love is a bottle of Champagne, a box of chocolates and a bouquet of roses — a perfectly executed romance classic. A

Rated PG-13 for some sexual content, and smoking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Eugene Ashe, Sylvie’s Love is an hour and 54 minutes long and is distributed by Amazon Studios and available via Amazon Prime.

Featured photo: Sylvie’s Love

Soul (PG)

A middle-aged man hangs between life and “the Great Beyond” just as his dreams of being a working musician appear to be coming true in Soul, an animated movie from Pixar.

Joe Gardner (voice of Jamie Foxx) teaches band to high school students, who have varying degrees of interest in his instruction, but his real passion is to get a full-time paying gig as a professional jazz musician. He has chased this desire, to much disappointment, for years. His mom, Libba (voice of Phylicia Rashad), urges him to quit chasing this dream and accept the teaching position (and its pension and health care and steady paycheck) permanently. But then Joe has an audition with Dorothea Williams (voice of Angela Bassett) for a position as a piano player in her jazz band. He gets a chance to play a gig with her that night that could put him in as a regular. So delighted is Joe as he walks down the street contemplating this new future that he doesn’t realize there’s an open pothole in his path until he’s fallen into it.

He suddenly finds himself a bloop of glowy, vaguely person-shaped blueness, headed on a pathway through the stars up to what he’s told is the Great Beyond. Joe is definitely not interested in the Beyond; he wants to go back to the city and play jazz. Luckily, the afterlife doesn’t have the strictest security ever and he’s able to stumble away from the path to the Beyond and into the Great Before, a sort of nursery area for new souls. He’s mistaken for a mentor and is given new soul 22 (voice of Tina Fey) to mentor. His task is to help her find her “spark” and get her ready to go to Earth.

But 22 wants none of Earth and its whole “life and eventual death” thing. She’s had lots of mentors — all of whom have given up in frustration at her lack of a “spark.” Joe sees an opportunity; he’ll help 22 find her spark and earn the badge that lets her go to Earth and he’ll take the badge to return to his body and she can stay in the soft new souls land forever. Thus do they set off to find 22’s purpose.

Along the way, Joe and 22 do make it to Earth for a bit, though 22 winds up in Joe’s body and Joe winds up in the body of an emotional therapy cat. That cat, who (as Joe) can talk (at least to 22) and do things like push elevator buttons, is the most actively kid-like element of the movie. Similar to how Inside Out used personifications of emotions and personality traits rendered as physical spaces, Soul gives dimension to spiritual elements — for example, a place called “in the zone” where living people’s souls go when they’re playing a great basketball game or lost in a musical performance, and a variant of that location where souls go when they’ve lost connection to life and greater purpose. Soul is thoughtful and beautiful and I’m not sure I totally understand who this movie is for.

I mean, it really is beautiful — beautiful looking in how it blends the different visual ideas about an afterlife with the “real” world, beautiful sounding in its lovely score that mixes jazz and other musical styles. And it has some really beautiful ideas about life and what gives a person’s life meaning. I recently finished a rewatch of the series The Good Place, so maybe I am particularly susceptible to big-picture “what does it all mean” ideas rendered with a bit of cartooniness. I liked this movie and I think I would have liked it even more on a big screen, where I could have been even more enveloped in all the visuals. But where Inside Out was tethered to the kid-world by the girl the emotions operated in and the kid parts of her life experience, like imaginary friends, I’m not sure how kids connect to Soul. My younger kids saw parts and seemed to enjoy the music and the little soul blobs, but there is a level of zaniness missing here. (And the “lost souls” idea is expressed in a way that feels just disturbing enough that it would stick with younger kids, perhaps popping up in their brains at, like, 2 a.m.) I rewatched the movie with my elementary-aged kid and her interest seemed to wane as the movie went on. The idea that singular focus on your big break, the life milestone that will really “start” your life, will cause you to miss what your actual life is, for all its joy and heartbreak, is interesting to me. Do such concepts have any meaning to kids? I mean, my kid laughed at some of the butt jokes, so it wasn’t a total loss.

This doesn’t make the movie less successful as a, like, piece of film but as a PG movie on Disney+ it did make me wonder if when this movie goes on during family movie night, it will be the kids falling asleep and fiddling with an iPad while the parents are paying rapt attention. B+

Rated PG for thematic elements and some language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers with a screenplay by Pete Docter & Mike Jones & Kemp Powers, Soul is an hour and 40 minutes long and distributed by Disney. It is available on Disney+.

Featured photo: Soul

Wonder Woman 1984

Diana Prince suits up in her golden armor for an all-too-brief fight sequence in the otherwise extremely long Wonder Woman 1984, a sequel to the 2017 Wonder Woman available until near the end of January on HBO Max and in theaters.

Though we last saw Wonder Woman hanging with Batfleck and the other Justice League-ers in roughly the current day, this takes us back to 1984 when Diana (Gal Gadot) is working in antiquities (for the Smithsonian, I think?) in Washington, D.C., and trying to discreetly protect people from baddies and other danger on the side. Despite a full professional life, Diana has a lonely private life, still aching from the death of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) during World War I. Despite Diana’s inner sadness, her outer awesomeness has fellow museum science and antiquities person Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) wishing that she could be like Diana. Barbara makes that wish while holding an artifact that claims to grant wishes, though both Barbara and Diana initially have their doubts about the authenticity of the item. Diana has also made a Steve-based wish while holding the artifact. While they might not believe in the artifact, we see the little wind blow-y effect in their hair and so we are not so surprised to see their wishes come true: The formerly awkward Barbara can suddenly walk with ease in heels projecting sexy confidence and finds she has increasing physical strength. Diana is approached by a man she’s never met before — who then says and does the last things Steve Trevor ever said and did, and suddenly she can see that it’s him, returned.

After initially just giving in to the delight of having Steve back, Diana and Steve decide to go figure out how it is that he has returned. Unfortunately, by the time they start their quest, the artifact has been stolen by Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who had long been on the hunt for it. A large donation to the Smithsoneon and some flirting with Barbara gets him access to the artifact and he convinces her to let him take it to get it looked at by an expert. What he actually does is, essentially, wish for all the wishes by wishing to become the artifact (which at some point people start calling “the Dreamstone”). People wish on Maxwell to get their heart’s desire and in return he takes something — their company, their wealth, their henchmen, etc. Their wishes seem to take from him too; he gets weaker and sicker-looking with each wish. Diana and Barbara discover that their wishes have a cost for them as well. These individual costs, however, are minor compared to the mounting societal costs as more and more people wish on Maxwell for more — more nukes, more power, more money. Diana discovers that this may be a feature, not a bug, of the Dreamstone, which has a dark history and was forged by a god known as the “god of lies.”

The lies are seductive and the truth is often sad and bittersweet but the world has to acknowledge and live in the truth to save itself — I think this is the working philosophy of this movie, which I feel like would have played a little different in the alternate timeline of June 2020 (the movie’s original release date), where all anybody is thinking about is the election and we’re all seeing movies in the theater, than it does now. There are some choices made with Pascal’s Max (some of the elements of his character read pretty Trump-y) that make me feel like this movie, without being overtly political, is trying to say something about the state of discourse. I feel like that element is maybe one of the many “too many accessories” that this movie should have taken off, Coco Chanel “take one thing off” style. (I always misremember that quote as “before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take three things off” and I feel like three is the minimum number of things this movie needs to take off.) There is a lot to do with Max that takes away from the development of Diana, Diana and Steve, Diana and Barbara, and Barbara and her own sense of self. Somehow, this two-and-a-half-hour movie feels like it doesn’t have time to give us any relationship or theme in depth — and yet the movie does not fly by. More editing? Less story? More editing of fewer plotlines and a more consistent tone — this movie just felt all over the place and needed streamlining in all things.

That said, there are nice elements. Because we can, I went back to watch some of the highlights of this movie before I wrote this review. The scenes between Diana and Steve do a good job of capturing the sparkle of that pairing, even if somehow the sparkle isn’t sustained. There is a nice start to a friendship between Diana and Barbara but then there is just so much plot business that it kind of gets lost. And there are some fun action stretches, nothing quite as fun as the No Man’s Land scene from the first movie, but nice work, to include an intro that gives us little-girl-Diana in Themyscira and brings back Robin Wright and Connie Nelson. (Much like Thor and Asgard in the Thor movies, Diana in Themyscira feels like a stretch where the movie really knows itself and what it’s doing.) And we get the golden armor that has been part of this movie’s marketing, though not for nearly as long as you’d hope given the general coolness of it.

Wonder Woman 1984 is a sequel to maybe the best recent vintage DC Comics movie and one that had a lot of Strong Female Lead hopes-and-dreams stuff attached to it. Living up to that is a tall order, and this movie doesn’t quite. But that’s not going to stop me from watching it, or at least parts of it, again. B-

Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Patty Jenkins with a screenplay by Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham, Wonder Woman 1984 is two hours and 31 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.