Paul Giamatti plays a fictionalized version of himself, that we're supposed to understand as a composite of his more neurotic film characters. He's a successful actor, but anxious, deeply emotional — and he suffers. In what way Paul suffers, we never actually see; we're simply told flat-out that he does.

Paul's emotions have become an obstacle to his work. He's been cast in Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya, but Paul is somehow unable to separate himself from his character mentally, and rehearsals have not been going well. His director is sympathetic, but tells Paul that he's taking the role too seriously.

A possible answer comes one afternoon while Paul is screening his phone calls. His agent leaves him a message, mentioning an article in this week's New Yorker that could be the solution to all his problems. Paul digs out the magazine and spots an article about a company that extracts and stores human souls, subtitled "Are New Yorkers tired of carrying around their souls?" Paul hardly reads the article, but immediately and impulsively calls the facility and makes an appointment. After a remarkably awkward conversation with soullessness advocate Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), Paul enters the soul extractor (a retrofuturistic MRI that looks like it was stolen from a James Bond film) and soon has his chick pea-shaped soul (or rather, 95 percent of it; five percent of his soul is still in there) in a jar.

Cold Souls is practically begging to be compared to the sorts of films Charlie Kaufman writes. There is the actor playing himself, just as John Malkovich does in Being John Malkovich. Paul impulsively submits to a shocking medical procedure that fundamentally alters his being, much like Jim Carrey's character does in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Even Lauren Ambrose as Dr. Flintstein's pretty, unquestioning assistant seems to close a match for Kirsten Dunst's similar role in Eternal Sunshine. But it's an unfortunate comparison, as Sophie Barthes, who wrote and directed the film, has failed to channel Kaufman's gift for storytelling or Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry's visuals and sense of timing.

Barthes has the challenge of explaining what the consequences of losing one's soul are, a concept that isn't as straightforward and readily understood as erasing a person from your memory. We could have used a dose of Woody Allen here, with Paul hearing about the procedure at dinner parties with a measure of scandal and intrigue; rumors could fly that certain actors had enjoyed success after their souls had been removed; soul extraction could be the hot topic on NPR. But Paul submits to the extraction so early on in the movie that we must rely on Giamatti's not inconsiderable acting skills to convey the meaning of soullessness. Paul stages tests to figure out what's changed. He sniffs perfume, weighs himself, takes photos of himself and compares them obsessively to existing photographs. Eventually, it becomes apparent that, without a soul, Paul is disconnected from himself and from other people. It transforms him into a potential Tao master (an idea I get the sense Barthes longed to explore further), but it also makes him a sociopath, unconcerned with his friends, distant from his wife (a strangely underutilized Emily Watson), and incapable of imbuing Uncle Vanya with the proper emotion.

All this time, we've been seeing a second character as well, although her role in the story has not been apparent. She is Nina, a trafficker in human souls. Nina purchases souls from poor, dying, and emotionally overburdened Russians, and then functions as a mule, carrying the souls within her body to America (souls, we are told, are too volatile at high altitudes to travel outside a human host). Once in the US, she sells the souls to Flintstein's practice so that his clients can rent the souls. But, since we see Nina at work long before we learn that it's possible to rent a soul, it's not clear what she's up to, and Barthes doesn't make it clear when Nina is in Russia and when she is in the US.

The soul-renting portion of the plot, which we get to in the second act when Paul realizes he can't do Vanya without a soul, is the strongest bit of the entire film. Paul winds up renting a Russian soul, which changes him. It's a nice inversion of Dollhouse, examining what happens when you absorb the essence of a person without his or her memories, while looking at the exploitation of the foreign workers by affluent Americans. Are souls, after all, really that much more shocking than sweatshop handbags and shoes? And Paul finds that having access to a Russian soul can come in very handy when performing a Russian play.

Unfortunately, we get little of this notion of trying out other people's souls, before the pesky plot pushes us hastily along to the third act along to the third act, where there's soul stealing, a Russian mobster, and a beautiful but talentless soap opera star who wants to own an American actor's soul.

Cold Souls is a strangely linear film for one so bursting of ideas, with little in the way of subplot or texture. Paul is the only client of Dr. Flintstein whom we see more than in passing, and because the entire film is crammed with Paul's experiences with souls, there isn't room for anything else. We have no sense of what Paul's home life is like, who his friends are, what he's like when he does have his soul. At some point, Nina tells Paul that he needs more levity in his life. We can choose to believe that it's true, because Paul went through this soul extracting business in the first place, but we wouldn't really know; since we never see him in his own skin (or rather, his soul in his own skin), we don't know if he needs levity or not. Barthes tries to compensate for this thinness by adding small, self-consciously quirky moments, but the attempts come off as awkward attempts at Kaufman-esque eccentricity, wedged into a universe where they simply don't fit.

This isn't to say that Cold Souls is a boring movie, or that it doesn't show a lot of promise for Barthes as a filmmaker. Barthes' ideas are interesting, even if her insistence at squeezing every notion she has into the movie comes at the expense of the story, and there are a few moments that are genuinely and uniquely weird. And, when one character takes Paul's soul from Flintstein's storage facility, we see a reversal of the same shot we saw of Paul when he went to the facility in the first place — a brand of visual cue I would have liked to have seen more. But anyone hoping that Barthes has already revealed herself as the heir to Charlie Kaufman will be ultimately disappointed. Barthes has a voice in there somewhere, for explaining her strange ideas, but trying to borrow Kaufman's only keeps Cold Souls from heating up.

In the above clip, Dr. Flintstein explains to Giamatti, who's playing an actor named Paul Giamatti, that we have no clue what the soul is or what it does — but we can remove it, with a patented new technology. I love the part where he offers Giamatti the soul-visualizing goggles. (Incidentally, I think half of this movie's problem of appearing to be a Charlie Kaufman knock-off would have gone away if writer/director Sophie Barthes had named Giamatti's character something else.)

And then in this second clip, Giamatti's apparently had his soul removed, and now they're testing to see how much of it remains, using a "soul stimulator."

Giamatti has a fight with his wife, over his insensitive behavior and celery-munching. I'm just guessing this scene happens after his soul has been taken out.

So Giamatti goes back to Dr. Flintstein and (I'm guessing) finds out his soul has been misplaced. But he can rent a different soul, including one imported from Russia.

So when Giamatti finally comes clean and tells his wife about having his soul removed, he's borrowing the soul of a Russian poet.

Giamatti finally tracks down Nina, who tells him where his missing soul has actually gone.

And unfortunately the Russian gangster's wife who's "borrowing" Giamatti's soul doesn't want to give it back, leading to a debate about soul adultery. The wife thinks she's actually being inhabited by the soul of Al Pacino, and she needs it to act in a Russian soap opera.

This sort of movie is always a bit contrived, taking a ridiculous concept and seeing how far the film-maker can run with it. But it does create an opportunity to ask some of the same questions Dollhouse has been asking about what makes us who we are, only from a different angle — instead of the memories and skills being swapped out, it's the much more nebulous "soul" — and it looks like Barthes and Giamatti take full advantage of this thematic richness. Honestly, a lot probably depends on how much we believe in Giamatti's reasons for wanting to give up his soul in the first place. It seems like such a patently bad idea to begin with, let's hope his initial decision is set up well.

We'll all find out soon enough. Cold Souls hits theaters (in New York and L.A., anyway) on August 7. [Sci Fi Cool]

As derivative as Cold Souls is — and it looks very derivative, so far — it still may be awesome. For one thing, Giamatti is one of those actors who was born to do Kaufman-esque surreal anomie. I'd way rather watch a Kaufman clone starring Giamatti than one starring Will Ferrell, pretty much any day.

And Cold Souls, from writer-director Sophie Barthes, is clearly about something: At least, the trailer makes it clear that the "soul removal" thing is a blatant metaphor for anti-depressants, and our fixation with chemical solutions to psychological problems generally. And then it takes that fun right turn with the "soul trafficking" thing, before going fully surreal. So I'm pretty much down. And maybe having a better class of imitators will spur Kaufman to new heights?

(According to someone at IMDB, mentioning the similarities between this film and Kaufman's work is a good way to get Barthes annoyed. Sorry about that.)

Cold Souls comes out in "limited release" in the United States on August 7.

Tessa Dick's novel, which she's self-published, doesn't sound too similar to PKD's original idea, but it's still loosely based on her husband's life. In her novel, a third-rate composer, Arthur K. Grimley, discovers the universe is made out of music. And then Grimley travels through Dante's Inferno and Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, while discovering that an evil organization is working against those who want to enlighten humanity.

The Owl In Daylight is also the title of a new Philip K. Dick biopic, starring Paul Giamatti. [Guardian]

Souls stars Paul Giamatti as an actor called Paul Giamatti, who discovers a company that offers to transplant or store human souls, only to give his own soul up in favor of someone else's. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the movie — written and directed by Sophie Barthes — has "drawn comparisons to the work of Charlie Kaufman," which may be a polite way of saying that it sounds very like a couple of Kaufman's earlier movies.

The movie's US rights were purchased by Samuel Goldwyn; no release date has been announced.

Samuel Goldwyn warms to 'Cold Souls' [Hollywood Reporter]

If character actor-extraordinaire Paul Giamatti playing himself in Cold Souls didn't convince you to check out this film, these pictures certainly will. This incredibly interesting indie film features Giamatti struggling with a crisis and seeking solace in a New York soul extraction facility, where he's encouraged to lay down the burden of his soul. These pictures are stunning and I can not wait to hear more about the obvious buzz this flick will generate over at Sundance.

Meanwhile, a haunting still showing a clone standing over the body of its original astronaut body is from The Clone Returns Home, a new Japanese movie whose trailer we posted a while back. The story starts with the death of an astronaut, which leads to the activation of his clone. But faulty memory programming startles the clone and his memories immediately revert back to childhood, when the original's brother died. The clone panics and escapes on a journey back to his childhood home (or at least the original astronaut's home).

For more information about the festival explore the Sundance site.

Paul Giamatti starred in and produced the film, but was scared shitless by the rocket belt, which can send your ass up in the air for 30 seconds before it cuts out. "It's a real thing. But they only fly for 30 seconds, and they're incredibly dangerous, but they exist." While the belt in the film runs on compressed air and crossed finger, the belt in The Rocketbelt Caper hasn't been seen since the benefactor kidnapped the inventor and held him captive in a box after he refused to cough up the ten million bucks a judge awarded him in a court case. Lesson learned? Angel investors are stranger than science fiction.

Real-life rocket man stuns Giamatti [USA Today]