Author: captainjls

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Movies Review

REVIEW – The Substance

Demi Moore's character in THE SUBSTANCE vacuuming her apartment in the shadow of a billboard featuring her other self played by Margaret Qualley, from the film.

What a wild ride of a thing. Coralie Fargeat’s pitch-black horror-comedy has in it, appropriately, the DNA of a half-dozen things you might’ve seen before — off the top of my head, there’s the “seemingly arbitrary rules that will inevitably be broken, and woe betide those who do so” of GREMLINS and the central bargain for youth and beauty very much reminds me of Robert Zemeckis’s DEATH BECOMES HER — and hell, I’ve never even seen the flick, but the ending has me going, “CARRIE, right?” But this whole stew of riffs and ideas is in service of one central thesis: ladies, holding yourself to patriarchal standards of youth and beauty is a losing game. The only winners are the leering perverts who prop this whole system up, who, no matter what you do, WILL invariably start looking the other way in search of fresh meat. This is what happens to actress and TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, who spends probably two thirds of the movie in a state of visceral rage and/or horror, and has been getting some well-deserved kudos for it), cast out of her long-running TV program by the World’s Grossest TV Executive (Dennis Quaid, hamming it up magnificently as someone you’d REALLY like to see suffer some consequences at the end). The sight of her own face coming down off a billboard (not even for the show, it’s a TOOTHPASTE AD) so distracts her that she gets in a car accident, and while she’s getting a clean bill of health, a suspiciously handsome nurse (I literally said to myself before anything happened, “hold on, that man is TOO HANDSOME”) slips a USB drive in her pocket. On it is a video advertisement for the titular Substance. Once she breaks down and buys in, the deal is this: Elisabeth injects herself with this green stuff and a second person cooked up by her own DNA, uh, *emerges* (in a weird, gross way — there’s lots of things in this movie that can be described as “weird” and “gross”): younger, prettier, “more perfect,” but still tethered to the original “her” in multiple ways. Like, it seems clear this is very similar to (weirdly) how the last Doctor Who regeneration worked — both remember everything up to the point this process happened, but then they’re going about their own lives.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Transformers One

Orion Pax, the future Optimus Prime, from TRANSFORMERS ONE

Oh, like I *wasn’t* going to see this — and given how the trailers didn’t really impress me, and the early buzz left me skeptical (yes, even the strong praise from fellow Transformers fans), I was pleasantly surprised. The first domestically-released animated TRANSFORMERS movie since the original 1986 film, Josh Cooley’s TRANSFORMERS ONE winds the clock all the way back to the days before the Autobot-Decepticon war, where young Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) are non-transforming miner-bots extracting Energon from the depths of Cybertron. Pax is an eager dreamer, and D-16 the “oh boy, what are we getting ourselves into THIS time” best bud who always gets dragged along for the ride. A series of hare-brained plans going wrong, right, and then wrong again get the pair, along with a slightly loopy little yellow bot named B-127 (Keegan Michael Key) and their former mining crew chief Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), stranded on the dangerous surface of Cybertron, in search of the lost Matrix of Leadership that will restore their world — scarred by a long war with the alien Quintessons — to its former glory. The quest leads them, however, to uncomfortable truths: about the war, about current Cybertronian leadership in the person of Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), and about what has been stolen from their entire generation. The two friends’ very different ways of processing and reacting to these truths will reshape the planet’s future — and turn Pax into the legendary inspiring beacon of hope Optimus Prime, and D-16 into the cruel, malevolent Emperor of Destruction Megatron.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse in BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE.

There’s so many ways this could have gone spectacularly wrong. Decades-later sequels are a mixed bag, and before this I couldn’t remember the last Tim Burton movie I loved. So I’m happy to report this was an absolute blast. Thirty-some years following the events of the original ’88 film, former goth teen Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is the host of a cheesy ghost-hunting talk show and the mother of her own surly teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega from WEDNESDAY, also a Burton project). When Lydia’s father passes away (in spectacularly silly and horrible fashion, depicted in delightful stop-motion animation), she, Astrid, her artist stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), and her awful TV producer boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) head up to Winter River and the Deetzs’ house from the first film for the funeral. The funeral, thanks to Rory’s machinations, soon gives way to a proposed wedding, and in trying to avoid it, a once-skeptical Astrid finds herself ensnared in a trap that may leave her in the afterlife for all eternity without even being dead. With no other good options, Lydia summons skeezy bio-exorcist Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) to try and rescue her. He’ll gladly help out in exchange for the same thing he wanted last time — Lydia’s hand in marriage.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Alien Romulus

Cailee Spaeny in ALIEN ROMULUS.

Fede Alvarez’s remix of the Alien films so far and direct sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is a perfectly serviceable thriller, just as tense, creepy, and damp as you’d want an ALIEN film to be — but it probably goes maybe two or three direct references/callbacks/swipes too far, especially given that we had a theatrical rerelease of that original less an four months ago.

The story: ever-present evil mega corporation Weyland-Yutani extends the work contract of poor working class brunette Rain (Cailee Spaeny), who just wants to get off the godawful always-dark colony planet she lives on with her “brother” Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy android her father saved from the scrap pile. This sudden and arbitrary contract extension leaves her quite vulnerable to a proposition made by her ex Tyler (Archie Renaux): join him and his family as they investigate and steal a derelict Weyland-Yutani ship in orbit which can get them to more hospitable climes and a better life. The ship, however, turns out to be a derelict space station where experiments were taking place on samples of a very familiar hostile life form.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Deadpool & Wolverine

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE.

Somehow even more foul-mouthed and in-jokey than I’d expected, though by-and-large I don’t think it hurts the movie or its narrative? Not that I could actually tell, of course, steeped as I am in this stuff — when my mom asked why so-and-so was in this movie (filling in that blank would probably constitute a spoiler), I immediately had the answer, one that your average filmgoer, EHH, probably wouldn’t have. Though sometimes the profanity does get a LITTLE hat-on-a-hat.

Anyway, yes, let’s try the spoiler-lite version of the plot: Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has given up on the hero/merc gig, no longer romping around in the red suit and is instead wearing a toupee and selling cars with his pal from the 2nd movie, Dennis (Rob Delaney). But soon fortune smiles on ol’ Wade, sort of, when he is whisked away to the TVA — again, I *think* the movie imparts enough knowledge of how this works without watching the Disney+ LOKI show, but how the hell would I know for sure? — by agents under the command of Paradox (the extremely smarmy Matthew Macfadyen) and a choice is offered. With the life he’s been reminded he still loves, even if it hasn’t gone the way he wanted, threatened, Deadpool hops across time streams and grabs the first multiversal Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, in his TENTH live action appearance as the Canadian berserker) he can honestly get his hands on in order to try and prevent, let’s say, a great undoing.

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