Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
The unknown and unsung musicians who played on the hit songs of he 1960s have been assayed in acclaimed documentaries Standing in the Shadows of Motown (which covered the Funk Brothers, the house band of Motown) and The Wrecking Crew (covering the L.A. session players which included pre-solo artist Glen Campbell and legendary bassist Carol Kaye) and fans of these retrospectives now have another documentary to check out from Denny Tedesco (son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco), director of the latter doc, Immediate Family. (Bad title even in context.)
Focusing on the quartet of players - guitarists Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel - who became the first famous session cats thanks to manager/producer Peter Asher putting musician credits in album liner notes, they backed a Who's Who of 1970s stars such as James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt, and more and became in demand as others wanted the guys who played on so-and-so's album.
With testimonials from those they worked backed with copious clips, we're given the quick rundown of their lives and how they rapidly coalesced into the unit they became. Whereas the Wrecking Crew musicians didn't tour because they feared someone else getting their chair in the studios, times changed where artists wanted the guys who recorded the album to be their live band, so they had active studio and touring careers. Sklar and Wachtel are both recognizable to normies due to their distinctive looks - Sklar has a massive white beard and Wachtel long tight curly hair - so this may be revelatory to non-liner notes nerds.
There are amusing stories like when Everly Brothers superfan Wachtel auditioned for their touring band and met their music director, Warren Zevon, and showed he knew the material better than Zevon and the time Waddy accompanied Ronstadt to a strip club when she didn't have any ID on her. Don Henley's solo career is basically owed to Kootch as the fellows branched off into different career paths of production and writing in the Eighties.
The pacing drags a bit towards the end as the focus shifts to what they're doing now - they're all still active in their seventies, but also slowing down to enjoy life more - and their recording and live shows as The Immediate Family, but for fans of music docs (and liner notes), it's worth a watch.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Hulu.)
Sometimes you're disappointed by a movie even when it's not actually that bad and that's the case with My Old Ass (bad title even in context), the second feature by actress-turned-writer/director Megan Park (The Secret Life of the American Teenager). What is being touted as a sci-fi comedy co-starring Aubrey Plaza is not remotely sci-fi and it's more a dramedy as my tags indicate. Due to the incorrect expectations set by the trailer and reviews, we went in expecting something it wasn't, not that it was bad. Let's get into it.
Maisy Stella (TV's Nashville) stars as Elliott (no explanation for the male name), a newly 18-year-old girl from a rural Canadian town in lovely country with a lake. Her family owns a cranberry farm, she has a couple of gal pals - Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) - and a girlfriend, Chealsea (Alexandria Rivera), who we know nothing about other than they're always making out, two younger brothers (the youngest of which is obsessed with Saoirse Ronan because that's a thing that really happens), nice non-stupid parents, and she can't wait to get out of this podunk town and move to Toronto to start having a real life.
While her family sits waiting with her birthday cake at home, she and her pals go camping on an island and drink tea made with a lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms. While her friends start tripping balls, Elliot doesn't feel anything until suddenly Aubrey Plaza appears next to her and announces that she is Elliot at age 39. (How the vanilla white Stella transforms into the Puerto Rican Plaza is never explained either.) Older Elliot is cagey about telling her about the future, but only lays down one firm recommendation: Avoid a boy named Chad.
Of course, Elliot almost immediately encounters a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White, The Gifted) who is doing summer work on the family farm. And also of course the more she hangs out with Chad, the more she becomes attracted to her causing confusion about her being gay because straight kids in movies aren't a thing much these days. Compounding matters is that she can't reach Older Elliot (who left her phone number in Elliot's contacts as "My Old Ass" leading to many chats); she's stopped responding to her calls and texts leaving her to wonder what's so bad about Chad?
The fundamental "problem" with My Old Ass is that we went in expecting much more Plaza than it delivers. (We're on a bit of a kick with her lately, having watched Agatha All Along just because she was in that and also wasn't in it enough.) About halfway through the missus grumbled that "this is an Afterschool Special" and groused about the trailer being misleading. (She also found White not hot.) Semi-valid complaints, but what remains is still a nice modest dramedy about not taking life for granted & appreciating the times you get to have with family and friends.
Park sets a naturalistic tone in the girls conversations and performances which gets tripped up when Elliot spouts off woke blather which also makes one wonder how a movie where a gay teen goes straight got financed and the little brothers Ronan infatuation. But it also shows Elliot not being such a self-absorbed brat under her older self's influence. Stella's performance is fine, but Plaza sparks so much when she's there, her absence lowers the energy level.
As for the supposed sci-fi element, it's reminiscent of the underappreciated 2000 film Frequency which starred Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid as a son and father who communicate across 30 years via ham radio enhanced by aurora borealis and how they literally change the world with their actions, albeit on a micro scale. All we learn of the future is that salmon are extinct, people aren't allowed to have three kids, and there are air raid sirens going off, but Older Elliot doesn't seem too concerned.
The film's ending is nice, but requires one final massive suspension of disbelief to accept what's happening. How this connection works isn't explained and perhaps is besides the point. My Old Ass is a pleasant enough coming-of-age story. Just adjust your expectations going in.
There is an annoying habit of film critics losing their minds over weird movies because they are so numbed by the usual mindless dreck Hollyweird pumps out that anything that's remotely unique triggers a herdthink stampede of fawning slobbering about how "important", "thought provoking", "blah-blah-woof-woof" a film is. Toss in some elite festival prizes, like winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and the synchronized baaing intensifies. Thus it is with 2024's cause célèbre, the dark satire/body horror freakout The Substance.
Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging ("OMG, she's 50! That's like....dead for women!" is the text, not even subtext here) actress who hosts an aerobics fitness show that's a cross between Jane Fonda and the 20 Minute Workout show which ran from 1983-84 featuring hot babes working out while making O-faces for the camera. (IYKYK, Gen Xers) As a birthday present, she is fired from her show by the producer, Harvey (a wildly flamboyant Dennis Quaid), and distracted by her billboard being taken down, she's in a big auto accident which miraculously leaves her uninjured.
While at the hospital, a male nurse slips her a flash drive labeled The Substance on one side with a phone number on the other. At home she watches its promo video promising a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself. Initially, she tosses the drive away, but after seeing an ad in the paper for auditions for her old job, she calls the number and is given an address in an alley and sent a keycard to access the dropbox where The Substance and refills will be left.
The setup is simple and clear: After taking the Activator, she must stabilize herself with injections daily, and after seven days she must switch back with The Matrix, the original version of herself. (The emphasis is important.) What's not made clear in the packaging is that the Activator doesn't transform Elisabeth's body, it causes it to divide into a wholly separate person who emerges from a split in her back. (Zoiks!) While Elisabeth lays unconscious for the week, fed intravenously, her new improved version will be on the loose until she returns, cross-transfuses with her, then going dormant for a week.
The new girl is Sue (Margaret Qualley, whose mother is Andie McDowell, who costarred with Moore in St. Elmo's Fire) and she promptly goes and gets the job as the new host of Pump It Up, the updated edition of Elisabeth's workout show. Harvey loves her and is fine with her cover story that she needs alternating weeks off to care for her sick mother.
Of course, where there are rules with severe consequences for breaking them - like getting a Mogwai wet and feeding it after midnight - it doesn't take long for Sue to start bending them. When time runs out just as she's about to hook up with some dude, she rushes to extract more stabilizing spinal fluid from Elisabeth's inert body, switching back the next day. But Elisabeth wakes up to her index finger being withered. She calls the Substance hotline and is told that whatever has been taken cannot be returned - the damage is permanent; follow the rules.
What follows is a game of passive-aggressive warfare between the two. Elisabeth spends her week just eating or watching TV while Sue parties and rapidly advances in her career. Sue begins to stay out longer and longer, wrecking ever more damage on Elisabeth. Eventually it gets VERY out of control leading to an utterly gonzo bonkers finale.
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat (whose last movie was her debut, 1997's Revenge) isn't hiding the ball as to her intentions and inspirations. She's fusing the body horror of David Cronenberg movies like The Fly and Crimes of the Future to a commentary on how society and especially the entertainment industry pressure women to look young and attractive at all costs lest they lose their value and be discarded. However, while you can see the obvious outlines of theses, the irony of The Substance is that its execution lacks much substance.
There was an LOL moment in Barbie when Barbie was crying about not being traditionally Barbie pretty and narrator Helen Mirren snarks, "Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point." This immediately came to mind as we are presented Moore's fully nude 59-year-old body (at time of filming in 2022) which despite some sags & remnants of plastic surgery effects is holding up quite well. When an actress can pass for a decade younger & even pass muster by the supposedly merciless beauty standards the movie contends to rage against, you're starting in verisimilitude hole.
The sterile art-directed world & calculated cinematography adds to the unreality. After taping her show, Elisabeth walks down a long hallway festooned with huge posters cataloging her career only to find the women's restroom out of service, forcing her into the men's room where she conveniently overhears Harvey's plans to replace her. She doesn't have her own dressing room with private bathroom?!?
The rules of the Substance also seem situationally random. We're told there is only one person and the switching process involves hooking up a two-line transfusion device, implying that memories would be downloaded into the other body, but neither is aware of what the other does except environmentally as Sue is disgusted by Elisabeth's binges and Elisabeth resents Sue's rapid fame as shown on the billboard outside her window. But Elisabeth's binges don't harm Sue; she eats her way through a French cuisine cookbook and Sue remains a hardbody; but Sue's cheating wrecks Elisabeth.
It also suffers from what I call "no one in the world but the people in the movie." Elisabeth has no family, no friends, no ex-husbands or children, not even a therapist. She is utterly alone. The one outside man she encounters who knew her from school, she makes a date with out of desperation, but ends up standing him up because she didn't think she looked good enough when she looked fine.
Which leads to the ending, which I shant spoil here, but for all its Grand Guignol excess, it's just too much in a movie where excess was the medium. There is a shot where Sue appears on stage at the climatic New Year's Eve show which should've been the end of the movie. But Fargeat didn't end it there.
I have a suspicion that much of the fawning adulation for The Substance & uniform commentary echoed by critics comes from reading the press notes about what the movie is about more than what the movie actually has to say in its telling. Too arch & sterile in its milieu, too sparse in its actual storytelling - surprisingly it's 2-1/4 hour runtime didn't drag - its commentary is inferred rather than explicit and the choices made in telling the story ends up leaving things to interpretation - "Like, wow, man, what did it mean when Bowman saw himself as a dying old man reaching for the Monolith at the end of 2001 and did he turn into the Space Baby, man?" - which you'd think were explicit according to those who got the explainer notes in their press packets.
It's not that the subject doesn't merit discussion. Hollyweird has always liked its starlets young and tales of ridiculous ageism are legion like how then-28 year-old Olivia Wilde was considered too old to play 37-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in The Wolf of Wall Street so the role went to 22-year-old Margot Robbie, her career-making big break.
But wouldn't it have made more sense to cast an actress who was once a sexy star, but clearly lost the genetic lottery for aging? Elizabeth Hurley, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman, and Ming-Na Wen range from 57-60 years old and would have little trouble attracting the so-called male gaze. Kelly McGillis was blunt when asked why she wasn't asked to return for Top Gun: Maverick - then 48-year-old Jennifer Connolly was cast as then 57-year-old Tom Cruise's love interest - stating, “I’m old, and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is." (She's also five years older than Cruise.) People age, some better than others, so how stunning and brave is it really to cast one of the lottery winners in a story of unrealistic beauty standards when she's already waaaaay ahead of the game compared to mere mortal women?
Moore is being talked up for Oscar attention and I can see the case for it, but let's be honest, most of that is because she was willing to play "old" & get naked in the process. Someone snarked that Patricia Arquette won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Boyhood (which I call Twelve Years A Movie) for "being willing to age 12 years on screen." Considering how shrill and one-note her character was, that's likely. Moore is good and she needs to work more - perhaps some of the roles Jennifer Connolly is too busy to take - but again the overpraise.
Qualley has the different task of being both a naif and a malevolent actor in the story. Decked out with impressive prosthetic breasts - makeup has become so advanced that actresses who used to have to get implants (e.g. Mariel Hemingway's modest upsizing to play doomed Playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80) now can play boob queens like Pamela Anderson (Lily James in the Pam & Tommy miniseries) or Angelyne (Emmy Rossum) - she almost fares as badly as Moore as The Substance wreaks its havoc on rulebreakers, but as with everyone else, the script infers more than explicates.
Quaid is clearly having a blast filling in for originally-cast Ray Liotta, who passed away before filming started, but he's playing a cartoon.
While the sum is less then its parts, The Substance is still worth a look for those seeking something....different, yeah, let's go with that. If you didn't grow up with Cronenberg body horror movies in your life, it may seem like the craziest thing you've ever seen with its gooey old school makeup effects. But for all its slickness & grotesque excesses, it's a shame that there's not more thematic, narrative & character substance to The Substance. (Yes, I enjoyed the pun enough to use it twice. Sue me.)
