You Don't Want To Mess With Me

I did a Triple Feature on Tuesday - The Last Showgirl, Presence and The Substance

What a week it has been already and it looks like it is going to get worse. A concentration camp is opening in Guantanamo Bay if the President gets his wish. The attacks on civil liberties continue, especially on vulnerable people. Mass deportations, a war on infrastructure and sowing as much chaos coming straight from the Project 2025 handbook means we’re in for a long four (likely more) years.

I have a lot about current events on my mind, but I recognize that now more than ever intentionality matters. I’m still composing thoughts and absorbing as much of the world as I can. Before I get too deep into this, I’m going to recommend a couple of people I’ve been reading on Substack - Ken Klipperstein writes about the news in real time:

And Erin in the Morning, a focus on trans issues focused on the US:

Now, more than ever, it is important to stay educated on current events. And what’s current with me? Well, I figured I might as well watch some movies while I still can. On Tuesday, a member of our movie group said he wanted to play a little catch up and our indie theater was showing the Last Showgirl and The Substance. Presence was already on the books.

I’ll tackle them in viewing order and share my thoughts.

The Last Showgirl

The Last Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson as Shellly, as an over the hill Las Vegas dancer in the legacy show Le Razzle Dazzle. She used to be the star of the show and is now a background dancer. The show is coming to a close and she is faced with an uncertain future.

She’s not alone, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Ann (Brenda Song) are two younger dancers trying to navigate the loss of their jobs, while Jamie Lee Curtis plays Annette Shelly’s best friend. Annette was also a part of the show, but is now a cocktail waitress with a crippling gambling addiction.

While Shelly is grappling with the future, she also looks to her past. She reaches out to her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), seeking to repair their fractured relationship. Much of the film deals with the cost of her choices and the rationale behind them. I appreciate that writer Kate Gersten and director Gia Coppola never moralize Shelly’s choices beyond the characters reactions to them.

Dave Bautista is a ghost haunting every phase of her life, playing Eddie the producer of the show. He provides a foil to Shelly, where everything goes wrong for her, he comes out clean. It is real and heartbreaking. Anderson gives the performance of her life and it’s hard to imagine that the material doesn’t feel personal to her. The whole movie felt like Sean Baker making a sequel to Showgirls.

That said, where the movie loses me is in the lack of tension. There are a lot of tense moments that should wear on the audience as much as Shelly, but everything is presented as so static and matter of fact that it lost its emotional punch for me. It may have been by design, this is the life for a lot of people lost in the cracks of society and they don’t have time for dramatics, but I would have liked it if the movie had a little more punch.

Still, I would recommend seeing it if you get the chance. It was never boring and it tells a story people need to hear.

Presence

Presence is a ghost story from director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Trilogy) and writer David Koepp (Jurassic Park). Two people known for blockbuster flicks making an indie horror movie, how is this going to go? If you run through their filmographies, the lists are impressive. And here, the biggest star is Lucy Liu as Rebecca Payne, the matriarch of the Payne family and a successful business woman engaging in fraud to take care of her family.

The entire movie is presented from the perspective of the presence, a ghost haunting the house. The camerawork is impeccable, bringing you into their world and highlighting the ghost’s emotional state. We don’t know who it is or what it is, but we do know it takes a special interest in Chloe (Callina Liang), the youngest daughter of the Payne family, who buys the house at the start of the film. The presence isn’t omnipresent, it only exists for brief moments of time.

We see Rebecca telling her oldest son Tyler (Eddy Maday) how every decision she made was for him. The scene is creepy, giving off incestuous vibes that are never explored. But it does lay the groundwork for major character development. All the moments that we see are important, giving hints about what is happening and who these people are.

The presence lingers on patriarch Chris (Chris Sullivan), grappling with his wife’s favoritism for their eldest child and her neglect of Chloe who has lost two friends to drug overdoses. Also, with Chris’ struggles with his wife’s illicit dealings and his contemplation of divorce. Most of all, it focuses in on the times that Chris tries to be the best parent he can be to both Tyler and Chloe in a tumultuous time.

Tyler is an athlete with a future who befriends ultra-popular Ryan (West Mulholland). Ryan is just using the friendship as access to Chloe. Ryan and Tyler behave in the way that a lot of rich, powerful people do. They treat women disdainfully, even engaging in revenge porn against an outcast girl, bragging about it to their family. Ryan tells Chloe that he’s out of control in his life, but he wants her to be in control of their relationship.

All of these threads are woven together and build into a ball of tension and dread that tells you where it is going and still destroyed me. I don’t find movies scary, but I was horrified for what was coming for the Payne family. And this movie does not hold back.

This is a must see for any fans of ghost stories or family dramas.

The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has had buzz from the get go. From winning Best Screenplay at Cannes to picking up a host of Oscar nominations, this movie has kept people talking. Demi Moore stars as Elizabeth Sparkle, a fifty year old actress relegated to fitness videos as her career winds down. Dennis Quaid plays a network executive who wants to put her out to pasture and find the next pretty young thing to exploit.

One has to wonder if Quaid drew off his political allegiances for this role, as he seemed to be very comfortable being both a misogynistic, pedophilic creep and a giant buffoon. Moore, much like Anderson in The Last Showgirl, probably felt a deep kinship with Sparkle. Her career waned as she aged, a tale as old as time for women in the entertainment industry.

After a car accident puts her in the hospital, a nurse clues Elizabeth in on The Substance, a miracle drug that gives you 7 days of a “more perfect you.” From there we meet Sue (Margaret Qualley), the other Elizabeth who is younger and perkier. She takes over Elizabeth’s job as a TV fitness instructor, making the position much more salacious. The two, as we are reminded throughout the film, are the same person. When Elizabeth wants to stay Sue, it costs her in her original form.

The movie uses the male gaze to condemn it, constantly dehumanizing the women in the film to make a statement on that practice in our culture. Much like Osgood Perkin’s Longlegs, The Substance feels like a pastiche of other works. Cronenberg’s The Fly is an obvious influence, as is the surrealism of Lynch and the camp of Waters. Elizabeth’s struggles with addiction, played out like heroin, call to mind Aranofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.

How much you’ll enjoy this movie depends on how much you like those other works. I think Farageat achieved what she set out to do, but for me the movie was trying to say too many things and didn’t say any of them as well as they could. How the actions of our youth impact our future, the dangers of addiction, the price of fame, the harms of the sexual degradation of women, the misogynistic expectation of perfection and how men are not held to the same standard, all of those themes are explored to a degree in this movie.

The body horror was excellent and the movie was very funny, so I enjoyed it. If Waters’ style of social commentary or Lynch’s surrealistic narrative appeals to you, you’ll likely love it.

Next week I am seeing Companion (and maybe Nickel Boys at noon). Stay safe and look out for each other.