This weekend was one for grown men and their problems. Which, of course, made for a sad but quirky look at the things that hold us back and but make us human.

In Cold Souls, Paul Giamatti gets himself. Turns out he's has a role in a Russian play and can't seem to get his act together. So when he hears of an organization that can remove your soul and "store" it, he feels like that would be the thing to free him from what holds him back. The movie becomes a bit of an adventure, though, when his stored soul is stolen. It's an interesting concept, really. And the first half of the movie is both quirky and thought-provoking. When the soul get stolen, though, the movie tends to trail away from the quirky philosophy that I sometimes like. Still, props to Giamatti and others for crafting a movie out of the mainstream but enjoyably thought-provoking. I'll be sure to show clips of it in my class one day.

The other movie that I caught was one of the weekend's big releases: Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!. The movie, which looks like it should be a comedy, is really something else entirely. Don't get me wrong: Damon is brilliant, Soderbergh's style is sharp, and everything works in a certain way. But the movie trails off, takes a twist or two that was hard for me to follow. It reminded me of Soderbergh's Ocean's 12, which was unwieldy and only salvaged by Julia Roberts' spot-on performance. It's a real story, which is fine enough. It's set in the 90s, but Soderbergh uses music and title fonts that seem off by a couple of decades. Mark Whitacre's story is a twisty one, one that I can't believe actually happened. His time as an informant for the FBI was only part of a much bigger thing going on. I wonder if it works better as a book, really.

You can check the Cold Souls trailer here. And The Informant trailer is here.