Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-03-01 (Saturday)

On 3/2/2025 9:12 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

On 3/2/25 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
 

What did you watch?

 Got through a movie and a Lifetime flick yesterday, plus some soaps:
 soaps: Y&R - Wed's ep. This was such a nullity of an episode, that I don't think there was anything worth synopsizing except that Chelsea is just an incredible loser, falling back into Adam's lap. [roll]
    DOOL - Fri's ep. This ep was also mostly a loser - if it hadn't had sweet Holly The Brat, it might have been a total write-off! And I still don't like the NuSophia compared to the old one... Holly tells Maggie that Doug III is into her, and claims that she's not, but at worst she seems ambivalent about it (and, at best, Holly can probably parlay this into a Devil's threesome if she knows what she's doing!!  :p  ). NuSophia lies about Johnny and Chanel to her mommy, and then drops a surprise lunch with her mommy on them. Johnny and Chanel talk over the adoption angle with grandma and mom, respectively. I don't think anything else happened here.
 Strange Darling (Pee+) - A highly stylized 2024 (the 2023 festival premiere doesn't count!) - but filmed in 2022 - ...well, I'd put this much more firmly in the thriller genre than the horror genre, so "thriller film", told in non-linear fashion that consists of 6 Chapters (they cheat - the "Epilogue" actually makes it 7 Chapters!).

I'll stop there.  I missed this.  Adding it to the watch list.

 Killing the Competition (Lifetime) - This new flick turned out better than I expected. It wasn't as much of a slog as I was anticipating, and Lily Brooks O'Briant's character is at least sympathetic.
    The star here, of course, is Melissa Joan Hart, and she doesn't just play the mom - she's playing a Momster!
    Returning to her hometown where she was once the Queen Bee of the high school apparently drives Hart's character nuts (as she's pretty much a "nothing" now). She becomes obsessed with her daughter (O'Briant) recapturing her former glory - obsessed to the point where she does stuff like go to the school board to publicly complain, and sit in on the cheer practices wearing a weak "disguise". But worse than all that, she starts becoming emotionally abusive to O'Briant's character, constantly running her down and belittling her for not being as great as Hart's character was in high school.
    They pretty much wimp out on the ending (the movie's title is a lie!!), though I did appreciate that the very final scene lets us know that Hart's character was still a nut job, and any contrition on her part was almost certainly an act!
    So, as "mothers from Hell" flicks go, this might have been one of the better ones.
    P.S. Please get whoever played the tall cheerleader girl her own Lifetime flick to headline!  ;p
  What did you watch?
 

Found - I binged through three episodes.  I'm almost caught up with one more to go.  The big development over the three episodes was Margaret's son showing up.  For those who don't watch the show, Margaret's son went missing from a bus station 13 years ago when he was a young boy. Margaret has developed a super power to now detect if someone is lying, but she is also psychologically broken, and *obsessed* with finding her son to the point where she was banned from the bus station because she went there every night looking for him.  Now while she was standing in front of the station (In spite of the restraining order) this young man shows up and she declares he's her son and he basically says sure why not.  Everyone else is shouting red flag alert but she doesn't want to hear it.  So far 2 or 3 episodes in with this guy and he's definitely suspicious, but nothing has outright proven him a fraud.  I mean sure he refuses to discuss where he was for the past 13 years, and he refuses to meet any relatives or anyone else who would have known him as a child and OK, he doesn't have the mole on his arm because it was removed.  But there's nothing suspicious about that?  Right?  Now leave Margaret alone and let her enjoy having her son back.  Although, isn't it maybe a little suspicious that the people who kidnapped him took him to a surgeon to have a mole on his arm laser removed?  I guess not.
The Substance (theatrical) OK, so this is going to be hard to discuss without spoilers.  I'll do my best to talk around them.  This movie stars Demi Moore as a former celebrity who now hosts a daily exercise show. But when she turns 50 her boss (Dennis Quaid) decides she's too old and needs to be replaced by someone younger.  I'm going to pause there.
When this movie first came out I knew almost nothing about it.  I knew it starred Demi Moore as an aging celebrity who does something to her body.  And I was pretty sure it was a "body horror" movie.  I was able to piece that together through the vagueness.  I didn't want to see a body horror movie, at least not in the theater.  Then I kept hearing people who saw it talk about how great it was, but no one ever gave any details about what actually happens.  Then the movie started to get all of these award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress.  So I went to see it.
Back to the movie.  Moore's character (and this is all very sketchy, even in the movie) comes across "The Substance" if you inject yourself with it, you are split into two people, but they are the same person. One is a younger version of yourself (Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell plays the younger Moore) that for 7 days at a time gets to live life.  But the two *must* swap places every 7 days.  I'll end the plot description there.
When the movie was over I and the audience were in stunned silence.  One guy said he was still processing it and asked me what did I think.  I told him it felt like Dennis Quaid read the whole script for the movie and knew it was a comedy.  While Demi Moore only read the scenes she was in, and treated it like a serious drama.  Seriously, Dennis Quaid's performance is straight out of the Nicholas Cage school of not subtle acting! I can sense at some point Quaid said, "Is that too over the top?" and the directed said, in this movie there's no such thing as too over the top!
That being said, this is definitely a body horror movie.  Think "The Fly" or anything by David Cronenberg.  I never thought this about a movie before, but as I was walking out I thought to myself if I was on the MPAA, I would have rated this NC17 for the gore.  But I have to admit, those are some excellent practical effects (think, "The Fly"). However, the directing style straight up steals from "Crank" and "Gamer."  I honestly though the guys who directed that movie directed this one.  It is the exact same directing style and camera movements.
The other thought I had was it would be like if someone made original 1984 "Toxic Avenger" but cast Robert De Niro as the avenger, and he brought his "A-game" and treated the movie seriously, while everyone else did exactly the as in the original movie.  Or if Bob Guccione decided he wanted to make an X-rated version of Calugula, but cast serious actors like Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and John Gielgud in the movie.  And you don't find out what type of movie it is until you're in the theater.  Wait, that actually did happen.  Now might be a good time to mention that both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley do full frontal nudity in this movie.  There is a lot of nudity in this movie.
Anyway, enjoy the teaser trailer.  It doesn't spoil anything about the movie.  The marketing campaign went out of their way to hide what actually goes down in this flick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1B3HZRHpEw
I think I'm going to root for Demi Moore to win the Oscar tonight.  Just for having the nerve to be in this movie, she deserves it.