“Cold Souls” is a great movie for the first half. The setup is fun–Paul Giamatti playing himself as a depressed theater actor. He learns of a place that helps out depressed people by extracting their souls and keeping them in cold storage for awhile. During this time, the “soul-less” person has some time without being burdened by emotional irrationality (sound familiar?). Not surprisingly, this doesn’t work out so well and Paul returns to have his soul re-infused in his body. His soul, it turns out has been stolen and now resides in the body of a vapid, but beautiful, blond Russian soap star. This set up is great, and I’m not going to feel too bad about giving this much of the story because the story crashes in ambiguity and senseless as if the writer had this great set-up, but no more.  The ending is pitiful. A fog simply comes over the land.  Caput.

For me, the highlight and end of watching came in the scene where Paul explains to his wife that the reason he’s been acting strangely is that he’s had his soul extracted and placed in cold storage, he’d rented the soul of a Russian poet for awhile, but that didn’t work out, he tried to retrieve his soul, but unfortunately his soul now resided in a blond bombshell Russian soap star… Now, can you imagine your husband sitting up in bed and giving you that story?