The Substance
​(dir. Coralie Fargeat)
Review by Jeff DeRouen

As a good gay, I’m here for an acting swing from Demi Moore and happy to lay my money down to experience the magic that made her one of the nineties biggest stars.

I’d heard The Substance was not typical “I’m back” fair, that writer/director Coralie Fargeat had crafted something special, and that Demi Moore gives a brave, compelling performance. Holy moly – what an understatement. This is a momentous work inspired by the likes of Cronenberg and Kubrick and absolutely one of the most batsh*t movies I have ever seen.

Moore plays an aging fitness star who takes a secret serum and splits in two – her younger and older self. They are both HER and she must change bodies every week or complications take place (and I wouldn’t dream of giving you any more details than that).

The Substance is a sci-fi/body horror allegory where Fargeat lays bare her view of how
society affects women giving us top notch gore and career-best performances from both
Demi Moore AND Margaret Qualley.

It’s a riveting, unsettling, hilarious, and absolutely disgusting sci/fi body horror masterpiece that must be seen with an audience in a theater – I can’t wait to go again.

The Apostle
review by Jeff DeRouen

I miss video stores. Something about being able to look at titles I can pick up with my hands seems a more efficient way of curating my viewing instead of, you know, scrolling through Netflix for two hours before deciding to just go to bed.

The New Orleans Public Library is a fix for my nostalgia ache, as they get just about every new release on DVD or Blu-ray and have a large selection of older titles (including Criterion for those in the know). And so I enjoy the occasional perusing of the shelves and finding hidden gems I may have missed or would like to see again.

This week, my soul was led to a rewatch of Robert Duvall’s small and magnificent Louisiana-based film, The Apostle (dir. Robert Duvall, 1997). Shot in towns like St. Martinville and Des Allemands, Duvall hired locals (amateur actors and regular folks) to inject verisimilitude to the story of a disgraced evangelical preacher. He believes he’s on a divine mission to revitalize an old Louisiana church, after losing his own congregation and fleeing from the police in Texas.

Duvall gives us the world of Charismatic Christianity, where Jesus reigns supreme and even the worst sinner can be delivered unto salvation. It's also fun to see Billy Bob Thornton in one of those early redneck, racist roles that the guy does so well. He deals with the subject ironically and unflinchingly, delivering a more authentic faith-based story than any of the recent, stylized and melodramatic Angel Studio releases. And Louisiana, captured in all its sweaty, sunlit, mosquito-infested beauty, is the perfect backdrop for this moving and messy tale of redemption.

You can buy/rent The Apostle online (on YouTube only for some reason) or head to the public library and get that good ole standard definition DVD.

The New Orleans Film Society (NOFS) is thrilled to announce the first wave of titles for the 35th annual, Oscar®-qualifying New Orleans Film Festival (NOFF), which will showcase over 150 films in-person October 16 - 22 at The Broad Theater, Contemporary Art Center and The Prytania Theatres, plus virtually October 16 - 27 through the NOFF Virtual Cinema (available globally). This year’s opening night film, A King Like Me (directed by Matthew O. Henderson), follows members of the Zulu Club, New Orleans’ first Black Mardi Gras krewe, as they work to bring the Zulu parade back to the streets for Mardi Gras Day 2022, in the face of a global pandemic, Hurricane Ida, and the loss of members due to COVID and gun violence. The film will have its Louisiana Premiere on October 16 at the Orpheum Theater (time TBD).
VIEW THE FULL LIST OF ANNOUNCED FILMS HERE

​Alien: Romulus

Remember ‘Alien’, and how it masterfully drip-fed suspense to create one of the most chillingly immersive horror films of all time? Remember ‘Aliens’, the contrasting, high-octane sequel which shifted gears into viscerally dynamic combat sequences? Well, preserve those memories in cryostasis, because in comparison, Romulus isn’t worthy enough to pry a crusty facehugger off their freshly-impacted space helmets. 

The ninth film of the Alien franchise (including Predator spin-offs) is an “interquel”, a word I really hope to see spat out of an airlock some day as I look on impassively. It feels like a concept from an IP on life support, klaxons blaring, the letters INTERQUEL illuminated in urgent, flashing red neon. 

Rain Carradine (Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny) and her adoptive android brother, Andy (Industry’s David Jonsson) are stuck on a grimey mining colony. Rain’s work-earned travel visa is denied by The Company, and so they hook up with an anarchic collective, and joyride a shuttle out of the atmosphere to steal a derelict, but still orbiting cargo ship. Seems like incredibly lax security considering all of the corporate authoritarianism on land, but hey, the movie has to happen. 

Rain is the responsible, adaptable, Sigourney Weaver insert. Andy is an easily-reprogrammed automaton with a dad joke subroutine that you wish was mutable. The rest are four or five (I honestly lost track) generic, Young Adult punk/hacker types, with cut and paste personalities and provincial accents. What follows feels like a regional youth theater production of the original film, adapted from memory with a week’s notice until opening night. 

Their mission is to hotwire the cargo ship and use its cryogenic pods so that they can head to Rain’s home planet for picnics and personal fulfillment. The only obstacles are the cargo ship’s residents: a robot science officer and an unknown quantity of, well, aliens, who have apparently been routinely using him as a chew toy. This gristle-legged humanoid is a digitally de-aged, waxwork version of the late Ian Holm (he's from the first movie!), his estate hopefully well compensated for this gruesome curtain call. 

The stakes include Rain and Andy’s familial bond, and a hinted-at-but-largely-undeveloped romantic interest with one of the less mouthy punks. Oh, and one of the hackers is pregnant. Don’t worry, you’ll be reminded of this A LOT. The dialogue consists mainly of sweatily-yelled explainers: “That will damage the baby!”, “The elevator won’t work without gravity!”, “They have acid for blood, remember!”...I’m paraphrasing but it’s exposition all the way down. 

Plot points are rammed down your throat with the subtlety (and spiritual enjoyability) of a facehugger’s facial impregnation probe. Speaking of which, I might be growing prudish in my old age but the visual lingering on the notably phallic/gynecological aesthetics of the aliens’ eggs and writhing tendrils felt creepily uncomfortable, especially given the youthfulness of the cast. 

The rest of the movie devolves into a scrappy, ragtag crew, just haphazardly Scooby Doo-ing it around a gooey industrial warehouse while the sound guy double clicks on a folder of wav files called ‘IRON FOUNDRY’. It’s hard to care about any of them, any character development left languishing in the vacuum of space somewhere. The actors are not the problem (I’ve really enjoyed Spaeny and Jonsson in other things) and do what they can with the script, but they’re all written as indistinguishable, aggressively cocky Zoomers. It’s an alien horror for the IG Reels demographic - a Gen-Zee-nomorph, if you will (though you probably won’t).

What we’re left with is an underwhelming meteor shower of half-hearted fan service. Outside of Holm’s infirm android, we tick off a chest-bursting scene (plus a bonus, gratuitous variation), and TWO alien-human face-to-face shots with the protruding teeth, just in case you didn’t get the first one. The kicker, though, is a dead-eyed re-delivery of an iconic line from Aliens that burns up in the atmosphere under the weight of its own cringe value, well before its landing gear can even be activated.

I know that this sounds like “Old Man Shouts At Gaseous Nebulae”, but as someone who saw the originals, Romulus is a Disneyfied mess that asks: what if a space horror was navigated by TikTok influencers? Rewatch the first two Alien movies and bask in the characterization and the near-unbearable tension, with pay-offs that earned their places in cinematic history. By the time the inevitable Alien: Remus comes around in 2026, this absolute casserole of a movie will surely have been forgotten. Don’t call Romulus, we’ll call Romulu. (PO)

​Review: Kinds of Kindness

It’s strange to say that a director is ‘returning to form’ after their last movie - in this case, last year’s Poor Things - won prizes (Oscars included) across the globe. What I mean here is that Yourgos Lanthimos is returning to a kind of form that is reminiscent of the mood of his early films, such as Dogtooth. 

What does that even mean, though? Kinds of Kindness is an unsettling, experimental triptych that sees a return to writing with his collaborator Efthimis Filippou. All three stories share a cast, including Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Hong Chau, and Jesse Plemons. (One fun thing to note: much of the movie is shot in and around New Orleans, with scenes in The Windsor Court Hotel, and around the CBD). 

The basic plots are these: In part one, Plemons is in a subservient relationship to his boss, Defoe, who controls his every waking moment. In the second, Plemons is a cop whose wife (Stone) is rescued from a shipwreck but he’s convinced that she’s not the same person, and in the third, Plemons and Stone play members of a cult, led by Dafoe and Chau, who seek a divine being on Earth.

All of the worlds depicted are familiar yet deranged, with violence, delusion and perversion all simmering under a superficially mundane surface. Lanthimos drops clues and details that overlap or hint at connections - a character referred to as “R.M.F.”, a fascination with dogs, his trademark stylistic weirdness and a brutal dissection of power dynamics. 

The events on screen - some surreally beautiful, some viscerally depraved, some psychologically scarring - allow for a real spectrum of readings. Some have floated that each one represents a particular religion (Islam, Judaism, Christianity), and there are dozens of theories already abounding in film discussion threads. 

The Lanthimos hallmarks are all there, and if you’ve enjoyed his pre-Poor Things work, especially his earlier Greek movies, then you’ll find lots to chew over here. Characters all speak in that clipped, removed way, and instances of socially unusual behaviour are mainly just accepted by everyone at face value. 

Although the photographic flourishes of Poor Things and The Favourite aren’t to be found, it’s nevertheless a provocative and unhinged film in other ways. People lose sense of themselves, whether through self delusion or control by others, and it can feel disorienting to watch, the sense of things only coming together with pieces that you’re not even sure are part of the same puzzle.

The best summary of how the director sees humanity comes by extrapolating the lines of the opening song, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by The Eurythmics: Some people want to use you. Some people want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you. And some of them? Some of them...want to be abused. (PO)

About to Snap: Civil War

There have been some negative reactions to director Alex Garland’s (28 Days Later, Ex Machina) provocatively-titled thriller, Civil War. The backdrop is enticingly dramatic: in an unspecified near future, The United States of America is divided into warring regional factions. It’s full-out war, with violent guerilla units in the streets and heavy artillery blasting neon jets across the night skies. 

And yet, this film is not really about that, and I think that’s where the disappointment might lie. Yes, the civil war exists, but Garland doesn’t really dissect it. We have no idea who anybody is politically, and with developments such as Texas and California aligning, we can safely say we’re in fantasy territory. If you’re hoping for a bloodthirsty onslaught, where your side sticks it to the other, then this is not the film for you. 

Nothing is defined on a macro level (an intelligent choice, I think) - this is all about the personal. It’s a road trip, a buddy movie, a dissection of journalism and a tribute to the war correspondents that Garland grew up around as the son of a political cartoonist. 

Kirsten Dunst plays conflict-hardened war photographer Lee Smith (a nominative genuflection to real-life WWII photographer Lee Miller), and the movie tracks her odyssey from New York to Washington D.C. to track down the President (Nick Offerman). Manhattan feels like 1973 Phnom Penh at the end of the Cambodian War, with the press holed up in a hotel, drinking through the power cuts. Here we meet Smith’s colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), a charismatic, gung-ho thrill seeker, as well as veteran correspondent Sammy (Stephen McKinley-Henderson) and young upstart Jessie (Cailee Spainey). 

There seems to be a real trend in modern media to have a battle-scarred elder transport a vulnerable innocent along a treacherous journey (cf. The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, etc), and this movie broadly falls into that category. 

In their trusty press truck, the gang set out across a lawless country. We encounter local militia, rogue army units, refugee camps, death squads and isolated men fighting personal battles. There’s even a bucolic small town where it’s business as usual, the clothing boutiques open and quotidian life continuing despite the snipers on the roofs. There’s brutality (especially the jarring cameo by Jessie Plemmons), danger and a sense of chaos. It’s a very analogue war, with automatic weapons and film cameras rather than drones and digital media. 

Smith is Jessie’s hero, and there’s a sharp learning curve as the experienced, decorated war photographer (“You took that legendary picture of the Antifa Massacre,” Jessie gushes) educates the inexperienced snapper in the most grueling on-the-job training imaginable. It’s a visceral experience, with gorily bleeding casualties, mass graves and gunpoint negotiations all a part of everyday life. 

Garland has taken pains to make this a very personal film. Civil War is less about politics and is more concerned with the documentation of atrocity and how it shapes its witnesses. It values poetic truths and intimacy, and I’d argue it’s a better film for it. (PO) 

New balls, please: Challengers
​
As if being one of the tennis balls so thoroughly thwacked in this tennis-themed love triangle, I was back and forth on this movie. There was a lot to enjoy, as well as some less engaging aspects that left me firmly on the fence, or in this case, the net.

The plot is fairly straightforward: two very close young friends fall in love with the same woman, a fellow tennis phenomenon, who courts (pun very much intended) both of their affections. The dynamics of this lusty triangle are tested as their careers lurch in very different directions. Starting with the positives, the three leads combine with infectious chemistry, especially when the two tennis players (Mike Faist as Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connor as Patrick Zweig) trade loving quips or, eventually, pointed barbs.

Their love interest, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) motivates much of their bonding and conflicts, and Zendaya pulls off a confident, mature performance. There’s some dazzlingly innovative cinematography as we inhabit the point of view of the dueling players on court and even the tennis ball. Shots hurtle violently down the camera lens, almost threatening to burst out of the screen (and this without the need for 3D glasses).

For me, though, some artistic choices landed out of bounds. Some of the more emotional scenes are hijacked by a jarring, intrusive synth soundtrack that feels out of place. I’m generally a fan of composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross moody electronica, but here it seems ill-employed. I also felt that some of the non-game edits are unnecessarily busy, and there’s a pacing issue that could have been avoided with a heavier hand on the cut. This movie does not need to be over two hours long.

That said, the nonlinear structure works well as a gradual reveal of a couple of twists, and though some other reviews seem to suggest it’s confusing, the time periods are all very obviously titled. The story naturally culminates in a tense face off, and though the ending might be divisive, I think director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria) made the right call here. In turns ebullient, sexy and dramatic, Challengers is an engaging match up, thriving more on court than off. (PO)