The worst film of the year and two of the best.

The Substance

“Artsy trash” is the best way I’ve heard The Substance described, the new outrageous, hilarious, but not totally original body horror satirical comedy by Revenge writer/director Coralie Fargeat. Surprisingly, it won the Best Screenplay award at this year’s prestigious Cannes Film Festival for what I can tell was DJ assembling homages to countless other films from All About Eve to The Fly to The Thing to even The Shining and wrapping it around a cautionary tale about aging and rampant misogyny in Hollywood. I wouldn’t call it unique, but it’s a wonderfully entertaining way to spend two hours that completely and utterly knows what it is.

The Substance most notably brings back former movie star Demi Moore in her most daring, ridiculous, and, I’d argue, best performance ever. She plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging star hosting an 80s-style morning fitness show that, in the universe Fargeat has created, is like the biggest/hottest thing. When a creepy Hollywood producer named Harvey (get it?) played revoltingly well by Dennis Quaid tells Sparkle she’s aged out and must retire, she’s desperate to stay in the fame game. So much so she administers an experimental drug known as The Substance that – I shit you not – makes you birth out a younger/hotter version of yourself through your back and then transfers your consciousness to that younger self. The Catch-22 is that your consciousness can only spend 7 days in the hot version of yourself before returning to the normal version of yourself for 7 days. If your consciousness spends extra time in the hot body, it fucks with the health/physical appearance of the normal body.

The hilarious thing about this concept, at least to me, is that Demi Moore, even at 60, is one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. But that’s the point, in Hollywood, anyone over 24 is old and useless, so it’s a miracle Sparkle was able to last so long. While the movie doesn’t cover any new ground in the Hollywood is awful to women genre or the body horror genre in general, the curious mixing of these two movies makes it so interesting. Usually, when a film is overstuffed with influences and styles, it’s a mess, but there’s something miraculously cohesive about The Substance. The opening sequence is flat-out brilliant, easily the most original thing about the film, demonstrating the aging of Sparkle through her star on Hollywood Blvd. going through a three-plus decade time-lapse, all while deteriorating, cracking, and getting food and bodily fluids spilled on it.

The rest of the cast is solid, including Margaret Qualley, giving one of her better performances as the 2.0 version of Sparkle. The movie veers into some pretty hilarious tangents, but you know the whole time exactly where it will end up, which doesn’t lessen the enjoyment of the film’s spectacularly go-for-broke insane third act one bit. The Substance will surely be a very love-it-or-hate-it experience. I had a great time, but others will detest it. Don’t go if you’re afraid of shrimp. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)

Uglies

Uglies is the stupidest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I watched it with a good friend on my birthday and still hated myself. Not even delicious pizza and birthday cake could make me enjoy it. I hated watching this motion picture. I haaaaaaated it. Even now, as I type these words, I’m starting to get a slight migraine because of all the pent-up rage that’s currently surging through my body. I hate this fucking movie. It’s offensive – no, not in an “it’s racist!” way, but if that got the movie banned from existence, sure, I’d lie and say the film was racist.

Maybe I’m the problem, but judging by these critics’ scores, I’m not alone here. The tomatoes never lie, folks. Uglies is true to its name – an ugly piece of generic, uninspired filmmaking that takes the least interesting parts of the Hunger Games, the Divergent movies (yes, I watched those), and the Maze Runner films (only saw Scorch Trials) and dump trucks them into a blender that transforms it into this ghastly gorilla poop smoothie. Speaking of monkey diarrhea, Joey King stars in this movie. She’s awful. I don’t think she’s a terrible actress; she’s been good in stuff before, especially as a child, but it feels like she’s just sleepwalking to what I’m assuming is a six-figure paycheck here. Even more so than in the abysmal Kissing Booth trilogy. Yes, I’ve watched all three of those and even wrote an article about them. Anyway, Joey King plays an ugly girl who dreams of…sorry, let’s discuss the plot of this movie before assessing King’s performance.

Ok, so the highly overcomplicated plot of this movie, which I’m not even going to fact-check because it’s not worth the time to research (i’m writing this on my phone, btw), is that it’s a futuristic society where people are born ugly (?) and then on their 18th or 20th birthday have Laverne Cox take them through a process of plastic surgery to make them comically hot. When I say comically hot, I mean they’re so stereotypically bleached and waxed and “worked on” that no one would ever want to have sex with them. They look like the gaming avatars from Ready Player One. It would be like having sex with a Sega Dreamcast. I hate these fucking weirdos. Beyond that, they never really explore the hot people other than the reveal that along with making them hot, they also ____________. I’m sure you can guess the twist here, assuming you aren’t five years old, and in that case, please get off my movie blog; you’re much too young and impressionable to read about such graphic and disturbing things like Joey King.

The movie ends, and it’s amazing cause you know it’s over, and you don’t have to watch it anymore. One of the hot guy characters in it is named Peris, and learning this is based on a YA novel, I’m sure that’s just because it’s one letter away from Penis, and the dude is a total dickhead. Seriously, don’t watch this piece of shit, or if you do, invite your ironic friends over to shit all over it. You deserve better. We all do. Grade: F (Netflix)

His Three Daughters

This certainly came out of nowhere and I’m all for it. A brilliantly acted three-hander that takes place in a single location, with three main actors and give or take five more in small supporting roles, one that could easily be a play, but then, how could all of America get to see it? Writer/director Azrael Jacobs, who I’m pretty unfamiliar with, really makes this feel authentic in ways few other family reunion dramas ever do. Carrie Coon, Elisabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne play three estranged sisters (Lyonne from a different mother) who reunite when the patriarch of their family arrives on his deathbed. Living on top of each other in a small NYC apartment, hours turn into days, turn into weeks, and every morning they’re told their dad is going to pass. As you can probably predict, old wounds unravel during this stressful trip home and things are said that can’t be unsaid.

While the movie can be extremely uncomfortable at moments, what makes it worthwhile is how much we ultimately care about these three sisters and how invested we are in them reconciling. The complexity Jacobs gives the characters combined with the astonishing performances of all three actresses – Coon, Olsen, and especially Lyonne – are the key ingredient to the movie’s success. Perhaps some of the weed humor with Lyonne’s character and a security guard feels a bit awkward and forced, almost like it belongs in a Poker Face episode, but most everything else has the nuance required to make it ring true. The third act especially is a wonderfully emotional and rewarding big swing that works because the table setting of the first two acts is so spot on. It’s a great film but I would have loved to see this on stage somewhere. Same cast of course. Grade: A- (Netflix)