Photo caption: Giacomo Gex in Richard Melkonian’s UNIVERSE 25. Courtesy of Slamdance.
The thoughtful, ever-surprising and mysterious Universe25 embeds a fable of self-discovery in a dystopian sci-fi framework. Mott the Angel (Giacomo Gex) is sent to Earth, essentially on a cleanup mission, by a Creator (Andre Flynn) who is ready to pull the plug on our world. Mott dutifully searches urban Britain for the planet’s sole remaining saint until he happens upon an unlikely Everyman, the hardscrabble Romanian immigrant Andrei (Dan Socio). As Mott careens from Britain to Romania, he questions just what/who he aspires to be.
The gritty, noirish contemporary world is juxtaposed with Biblical references and imagery.
Photo caption: Giacomo Gex in Richard Melkonian’s UNIVERSE 25. Courtesy of Slamdance.
Hilariously, the story is revealed when the scroll that Mott writes for the Creator ends up in the lost mail bin, where it is read by a bitter postal clerk.
In a singular and impressive feature debut, writer-director Richard Melkonian has imagined a look at humanity from an space alien’s point of view. It’s an imaginative and witty blend of themes and genres.
Photo caption: Demi Moore in THE SUBSTANCE. Courtesy of MUBI.
Wow, this movie sizzles with originality and it’s a showcase for an emerging female filmmaker, but I’m not sure if you’ll want to watch it. In The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat comments on all the perversity around the unrealistic ideals of female beauty by reimagining the classic Faustian bargain – what would you give up to restore physical youthfulness? Fargeat has made a sharply funny movie that melds the science fiction and horror genres. It’s absolutely brilliant, but some viewers may not be able to get past the body horror.
Elisabeth (Demi Moore) was a big movie star thirty years ago, and is now starring in a network fitness show (think Jane Fonda’s Workout franchise). Elisabeth is happy with her life until the male suits at the TV network tell that she’s passed her Sell By date and prepare to dump her for a younger, hotter starlet. The shock jars Elisabeth into a desperate spiral of body-loathing. Of course, this is absurd because I would describe Demi Moore as the world’s most beautiful 47-year-old woman, except she’s really 62.
Elisabeth finds a mysterious underground pharmaceutical (called The Substance) that will miraculously take 30 years off her appearance. There is a at least one catch. She has to inject a substance, which triggers the formation of a clone in a separate, younger body – but only for a week; then she needs to recover by re-inhabiting the older body. Off and on she goes, alternating weeks and the older and younger versions. Eventually, she learns about an even more significant side effect.
The clone is Sue (Margaret Qualley), who immediately is hired to replace Elisabeth on the show and vaults to stardom herself. With her celebrity, riches and stunning beauty, Sue’s life is pretty damn great – until each week is over. We soon realize that this is not going to end well for either Elisabeth or Sue.
There is a lot of body horror in The Substance, beginning with an icky “clone birth” scene and the weekly transitions between Elisabeth and Sue. The Substance ends with an over-the-top, splattering finale that makes Carrie look like a finger prick. It’s not going to work for most of my readers whom I know personally. I’m not a big horror fan and especially don’t care for body horror, but I’m glad I hung with it.
Margaret Qualley in THE SUBSTANCE. Courtesy of MUBI.
The Substance is the second feature for French writer-director Coralie Fargeat. Her first film Revenge (which I haven’t yet seen) won accolades as a feminist take on the rape revenge genre. To keep her right of final cut, Fargeat spurned Hollywood financing and made The Substance on spec. It is now the highest grossing film for MUBI, which bought the distribution rights. She knows what to do with the actors, the camera and the soundtrack, and is unafraid of coloring outside the lines. Wow, Fargeat is impressive.
The first three scenes are enrapturing. The first is an overhead shot of a broken egg, which is injected with a syringe and then clones a second yolk. The second scene is another overhead shot, this one of Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which traces the arc of her career. The third is of Elisabeth leaving the set of her show, as she absorbs the accolades of her stardom, the unwelcome birthday wishes and some rude hints to her aging out of being a sex symbol. Really smart storytelling.
Predictably, given my personal bias, I thought that the running time 2 hours, 20 minutes was too long, but it’s not like the movie dragged.
The male characters in The Substance are not very smart nor even minimally evolved; they are so broadly played that it’s even fun for men in the audience.
This is career-topping performance for Demi Moore, who , besides being uniquely physically perfect for the role, brings out all of Elisabeth’s yearnings and vulnerabilities – and her fraught ambivalence for continuing with The Substance. Moore is also a good sport about working under some some very extreme prosthetics.
Margaret Qualley always brings energy and magnetism to her performances, and she’s superb here as s Sue who, like Elisabeth, wants it all and wants it too much.
Dennis Quaid takes boorishness to new lows as a shamelessly sexist network boss. Quaid must have had lots of fun in this role, and he’s hilarious.
The Substance got a standing ovation at its premiere at Cannes, and won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto. The Substance is now streaming on Amazon and AppleTV, and it’s free on MUBI.
Photo caption: Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in MEGALOPOLIS. Courtesy of Lionsgate.
The epic Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s labor of love, a project he had been imagining since the 1970s. I’m glad he finally got to make the movie he wanted to make. Sadly, it’s not good.
Megalopolis is set later in this century in a New York City fictionalized as New Rome. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a visionary urban designer, seeks to replace midtown Manhattan with his creation, a utopian built environment. From his aerie atop the Chrysler Building, Cesar is as unaccountable Robert Moses in The Power Broker. Cesar must overcome the resistance of the vision-impervious mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the psychotically venal aristocrat Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) and Cesar’s own ruthlessly avaricious mistress Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Mayor Cicero’s Wild Child daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) sets out to punish Cesar for Cesar’s disrespect to her father, but she becomes fascinated by him.
Obviously, no one can imagine razing and rebuilding 100 contiguous square blocks of Manhattan without some hubris, and Cesar has plenty. Of course, he has invented a miracle building material, won a Nobel Prize and has the super power of stopping time. But his hubris makes him underestimate his enemies at his peril. Soon, Cesar and New Rome are plunged into a convulsion of betrayal and treachery. Will Cesar and his vision survive?
The visuals are astounding. New Rome is so dystopian that we yearn for the Times Square of Joe Buck, Ratso Rizzo and Travis Bickle. Ben Hur-like gladiator battles emerge, and a circus looks like Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge. There’s no shortage of eye candy.
Unfortunately, there are also no shortage of movie-killing flaws. The first is the revolting pretentiousness. Each chapter is introduced with a self-important title, carved into stone, no less. Great Thinkers, from Marcus Aurelius to Ralph Waldo Emerson, are quoted, and, just in case that isn’t elevated enough, Latin is occasionally uttered. Every time poor Lawrence Fishburne speaks in voice-over, he’s proclaiming something ridiculously heavy-handed without any irony. All of these Great Thoughts are about as deep as the inside of a Hallmark greeting card.
The second major flaw is that Megalopolis is a message movie with a message that is naive and simplistic. Coppola seems to have missed the core lesson in The Power Broker, which is that the tradeoff for letting an unaccountable visionary build great things in a city, is that the result may be unjust, and that regular people are stripped of any ability to control their own lives. Everybody likes freedom, which requires the messiness and inefficiency of democracy. Coppola wants us to root for Cesar because he is vaguely high-minded, but letting Cesar have his way on everything is pretty disrespectful of Cesar’s fellow citizens.
Third, with one exception, the characters are cartoonish, like they’ve been pulled from a Batman movie. As a result, we don’t care about them. For example, there’s never been an actress better equipped to play a dangerous, sexy conniver than Aubrey Plaza; but here, Plaza only gets to act like a comic strip version of a dangerous, sexy conniver. Clodio is a silly cross between a Bond villain and Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (and Shia LaBeouf ‘s eye makeup sometimes makes him resemble TV character actor Anthony Zerbe). Cesar himself toggles between smug and tortured with little texture.
Finally, the story is often incomprehensible.
This all makes for a wretched movie-viewing experience.
There are a few bright spots. Nathalie Emmanuel seems to be acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast, and imbues her Julia with life force, charisma and genuine feelings. Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck themselves are back in very small parts. Dustin Hoffman sparkles as a big city fixer. Jon Voight plays a doddering financier with the dulled eyes and speaking mannerism of Donald Trump – very funny. And what about the name of Aubrey Plaza’s character – Wow Platinum? What would her stripper name be?
It pains me to pan a Coppola movie. Casablanca remains my favorite all-time movie, but The Godfather Part II is probably my #2. Godfather II, along with The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now! are films that have impacted me deeply. That being said, as fond of Coppola as I am, and even reverential, I haven’t been enraptured by his post-1979 body of work.
In the first 20 minutes of Megalopolis, I resolved that I didn’t care about any aspect of the film and was going to walk out, but somehow stayed for the entire two hours, eighteen minutes, You don’t need to.
Photo caption: Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and James Hong in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.
The mind-bender Everything Everywhere All At Once is often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. It’s as if a martial arts version of It’s a Wonderful Life were written by Terry Gilliam on LSD and Red Bull
Michelle Yeoh shines as Evelyn, the burned-out owner of the coin laundromat that she lives above. Evelyn is simultaneously tying to run the business, survive a crippling IRS audit, organize a birthday party for her cranky father and avoid facing her daughter Joy’s (Stephanie Hsu) having a girlfriend. Stressed out to the max, Evelyn is so emotionally neglectful of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) that she doesn’t grok that he’s trying to divorce her (for emotional neglect).
Suddenly, Evelyn is plunged into a multiverse where a master villain named Jobu Topaki is wreaking carnage and sometimes inhabiting Joy’s body. And, just as suddenly, we are plunged into a mile-a-minute adventure like being inside a pinball machine. Every so often, Waymond is possessed by a multiverse good guy and blurts out a stream of exposition, but it’s best not to try to follow it.
An “everything bagel” appears – both literally and metaphorically. There’s a heartfelt message embedded that is much simpler than all the sci fi hoopla.
It takes a movie star like Yeoh (the martial arts star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Bond Girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, and the steely mom in Crazy Rich Asians).tio hold the center of this wacky extravaganza.
Jamie Lee Curtis in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.
The rest of the cast is excellent, too. Ke Huy Quan, who, as a child, played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom captures Waymond’s gentle cluelessness and domestic frustration. I especially loved 93-year-old James Hong (recognizable from his 450 screen credits) as Evelyn’s dad. The funniest performance is by a hilariously glammed-down Jamie Lee Curtis as the IRS agent.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is co-written and co-directed by the Daniels – Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The pair is best known for getting $3 million to make the utterly transgressive Swiss Army Man, starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) as a flatulent corpse.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a succession of zany action and eye candy with an avalanche of googly eyes at the climax. The best bits are:
a brilliant martial arts set piece with a fannypack as a weapon.
a fantasy of what Evelyn’s life would be if she hadn’t married Waymond, which turns out to be the real movie star life of Michelle Yeoh.
the moment in evolutionary history when hot dog fingers overcame real human fingers in natural selection.
a live action homage to the movie Ratatouille with a CGI racoon.
Stephanie Hsu in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.
One more note: the costume design (Shirley Kurata) and makeup (Michelle Chung) for Joy when she’s possessed by the villain is inspired.
I’ve rarely seen so much imagination thrown up on the screen, mostly for the better. Everything Everywhere All At Once is kinda draining to watch and often frustrating, but its best moments are very, very good.
