The Substance (Sept 20)

The Substance had a lot of potential to be really fun, but it’s most a lot of blood, needles, and internal fluid sloshing noises. The trailer/commercial for the Substance makes it seem like the practice is going to be a lot more widespread than it actually is in the movie, so the societal implications of lots of people using it aren’t really there. Instead, it’s sort of a parable that gets stuck in the ditch pretty quickly with no real twists or reveals in the second or third acts behind shock value images. There’s some monster choices toward the end when we’re in the photocopy of a photocopy territory that verge on villifying genetic disabilities in ways that seem sort of like punching down. Qualley and Moore are an excellent duo/mono(?), whereas someone told Dennis Quaid (AKA “Harvey”) to talk and enunciate as slowly as possible while keeping his eyes very wide. There’s this side plot where Demi Moore, who is impossibly beautiful but supposedly an old ugly hag, feels like she has to date a random dude her own age which feels very Sixteen Candles I’m-the-homely-girl-oh-wait-check-me-out-without-glasses! John Hughes, along with the general weirdness of how the Sparkles character seems to acquire an eating disorder to cope with her own feelings of inadequacy. I don’t get why everyone I saw this with came out happy and if I had gone alone I would’ve left at several points in the movie without feeling like I lost out at all.