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!
To quote Morrissey, stop me if you've heard this one before: Monsters have wiped out virtually the entirety of the human race leaving a remnant clinging to life while coping with the specific rules of the threat. Sure sounds like A Quiet Place, right? While that sleeper hit has already spawned a sequel and prequel installment, Elevation is the first outright knockoff that I can think of.
This time the gimmick is literally unstoppable killing machine monsters called Reapers (super original name there!) have burst from below ground and killed everyone. Their one weakness is they can't go any higher than 8000 feet, so after a few years handy white rock lines and fence posts have been placed to tell survivors when they're crossing the line of death or safety, depending on which way you're headed.
In the Rocky Mountains lives Will (Anthony Mackie), a widower whose wife was killed by the beasts and lives with his young son, Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Next door lives Nina (Morena Baccarin), a hard-drinking misanthrope of a scientist constantly trying to discover a way to kill the Reapers.
Hunter has a lung condition requiring filters for an oxygen machine while he sleeps and of course the supply runs out. The hospital in Boulder, CO will have plenty, but it's below the line. Nina demands to come along because she has a theory about the Reapers and how to kill them, but requires chemicals in her lab in Boulder. There's bad blood between Will and Nina for fairly predictable reasons, but he agrees to let her tag along. Katie (Maddie Hasson) is a tomboyish hunting pal of Will's who also invites herself along.
While the route only dips below the line at a couple of places before the final long leg into Boulder, it's no surprise that they manage to run into Reapers and it won't be much of a surprise who gets killed, who survives and how. While director George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) does an OK job trying to keep the tension up, the committee-written script doesn't have enough originality to really keep the mystery of the Reapers going and when they're finally explained, it's mostly to set up a sequel that will never happen and begs a question that the 8000-foot limit being arbitrary shouldn't have been an impediment at all. (See below the trailer for a spoiler about this.)
Clocking in at a tidy 91 minutes, at least Elevation doesn't try to pad out the proceeding too much. The performances are OK considering the thinness of the writing, but if Baccarin was actually drinking as much as Nina is portrayed as guzzling, she wouldn't been looking that choice.
While A Quiet Place elevated the post-Apocalyptic monster movie genre in a surprising way, Elevation is strictly plodding along in the valley of adequacy.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
>>>> SPOILER ALERT!!! <<<<<
The Reapers are revealed to be alien robots and a mid-credits scene shows three "meteorites" in the night sky - presumably alien ships approaching Earth with updated models to finish the eradication of carbon-based life forms infesting the third planet in the system. But why was there a limit in the first place? If you're going to depopulate a world, why leave the high ground as a refuge? Set the height limit to 25,000 feet to cover Mt. Everest or just not have one at all.
Identity theft is a nightmare for those it happens to. But what if you're a semi-famous musician who discovers someone (or someones) has been impersonating you to your fans, leading them to believe they have been Close Personal Friends with you? This is the situation Tegan Quin - half of the musical group Tegan & Sara (probably mostly known to Normies who've even heard of them as "those identical twin lesbians") - found herself in over a decade ago and now recounted in the sparse documentary, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara.
Opening with a quick recap of their career, starting as 18-year-olds in Calgary, Alberta, Canuckia, their early adoption of social media and close bonds with their fans - coming out to greet them outside venues in line, going to the merch table after the show, posing for all the photos requested - also laid the foundation for who (or whoms, plural, it develops) became know as "Fake Tegan" or "Fegan" to begin building years-long relationships with fans, leading them to believe they were actually pals with Tegan.
This erupted in 2011 when Fegan sent a fan named Julie a link to a drive containing their passport photos, info about their band members, and very personal details like their mother battling breast cancer. Sensing something off about this escalation, Julie contacted their management and was told in reply Tegan had no idea who Julie was. As management put the word out to fan boards that anyone interacting with Fegan was being had, more reports of fans having been suckered by the catfisher came in, some even believing they were in line for some up close & personal happy fun times with Tegan, if you follow.
The distress over this hit the fans hard, leaving them embarrassed or hurt, especially a Vancouver musician named JT who lashed out publicly against Tegan (the real one), whom she'd had a real world friendship, after feeling dissed by Fegan. But on the band's side, the question of how tightly secured song demos and items like the passport photos got released led to paranoia about their friends and employees. Who was using their access to then harm the fans. While no one lost money, they lost more: Their sense of privacy, trust, and security. Some said they couldn't listen to T&S's music anymore because of the feelings of betrayal or embarrassment.
So, who was this perpetrator? Well, that's the problem because Fanatical never finds out. Several suspects were identified, including a woman named "Tara" located in Maine who the director, Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs. Spears), traveled to interview only to get stood up. Ultimately, Tara takes a conference call with Carr and Tegan where she denies being Fegan, but is actually another hurt fan who only reached out to others to have her feelings validated. In a post-call discussion, Carr and Tegan decide to believe her.
With no resolution, Fanatical overall lacks much of a purpose. Many of the incidents occurred over a decade ago and even Tegan had relegated the experience to background noise. They had never publicized it during its peak, so what's the benefit of dredging it up now when there is no resolution other than a long therapy session for her and the fans whom she communicates over Zoom calls? The reunion of JT and her is poignant, but the imbalance of their statuses hangs over the meeting.
The line between being a really big fan and a danger to the objects of their adoration is touched on. They had to stop mingling with fans before or after the show, resorting to VIP meet & greets where they know who's coming in. "The barricades and security are there for a reason. We've had people rush the stage and bearhug us." and these are just fans wanting to show their love, not dangerous psychos like the lunatic who assassinated Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell on stage at a Damageplan gig. But the added level of invasion of privacy with these catfishings must suck even more of the joy out of the art.
Without a resolution and so far removed from events discussed, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara ends up feeling like a video of Tegan's group therapy sessions with those who were deceived.
As Saturday Night Live begins its 50th season, it's hard to believe there was a time where the show's existence was hanging by a thread and that the whole thing may've just been a gambit in a contract dispute with King of Late Night Johnny Carson at the time. Thus is the background for Saturday Night, the semi-biographical portrayal of the final 90 minutes before the airing of the first episode on October 11, 1975.
Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) stars as Lorne Michaels, creator and el jefe of SNL for most of its half-century run. The 30-year-old Canadian comedy writer and producer had been given 90 minutes of time at 11:30 pm Saturday nights which normally ran reruns of Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show to do something with and he assembled a rogues gallery of writers and performers from the National Lampoon, Second City, and The Groundlings along with short films by Albert Brooks, Jim Henson's Muppets (not Kermit or the Sesame Street ones, but original adult ones), musical performers, etc. Not a typical Seventies variety show, the question of "What is this?" looms over everything.
Told in close to real-time, Saturday Night portrays the countdown as utter chaos with friction between the cast, open rebellion from the union stagehands and technical staff, and a menacing network executive (Willem Dafoe) who has the power to kill the show and air another Carson rerun if he loses faith in Michaels.
Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, Gotham) is a vainglorious a-hole already plotting his next career move; Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation, New Girl) is a Julliard-trained published playwright and at 38, far older than most of the cast and writers and wondering why he's there; Billy Crystal (Nicolas Podany) is looking at show rundown - the dress rehearsal ran three hours - and wonders how he's going to get on the air; host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) thinks it's all a joke. Chasing after Michaels is Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza), a network exec who's trying to keep him on course, but also trying to shoehorn product placement. (Ebersol would take over as producer of SNL for part of the five-year interregnum where Michaels was away.) Will the show go on in time? Duh.
There are two major problems with Saturday Night which hamper it despite the energetic direction and go-for-broke efforts of the cast. First off is the real-time conceit where we're supposed to believe all this stuff went on in the 90 minutes before air and I saw this as someone who watched every season of 24 where we accepted that Jack Bauer could get across LA in 15 minutes. To believe the movie is to believe Michaels left the studio, went to a nearby bar and met and recruited writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) about 11:15 pm and the audience was still waiting to be let in five minutes before the show started. If they had simply made it the 5-6 hours before that first show, all those moments would've been infinitely more believable.
The second problem was manifested by the disappointing box office (about $10M gross against a $25-$30M budget) as the question of "Who is this movie for?" isn't answered. Unless you're an older Gen Xer who remembers the OG SNL and/or is familiar with the behind-the-scenes intrigue from one of the two books written on the show, you won't really know what the actual heck is going on, who these people are, etc.
Now, as a member of both cohorts, I was able to keep up with (and sometimes fact-check) what was being portrayed, but with nearly two dozen major characters fighting for time, characterizations are mostly shorthand at best - Chevy's a jerk, John Belushi (Matt Wood) is surly, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien, The Maze Runner series) is a motormouth, and so on. It mostly comes down, like so many biopics, to how well the actors imitate their counterparts; the Morris, Aykroyd and Carlin ones are the best matches. J.K. Simmons also has a blast cameoing as Milton Berle.
LaBelle chooses not to imitate Michaels unique tone - which Mike Myers based his Dr. Evil accent on and if you've ever heard anyone tell an anecdote involving Michaels they ALL fall into doing this voice - but perhaps he should have because with not much more time than the rest of the mob to make an impression, maybe doing an impression would've triggered some latent familiarity in the viewer.
While the haters insist "the show hasn't been funny since the original cast left", the show simply couldn't have coasted without regular infusions of new stars like Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Keenan Thompson, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudakis, and countless more for the ensuing 44 seasons. It's been around so long you have to be eligible to join AARP to remember a world without it and the story of how Lorne Michaels cobbled together what turned into a comedic institution is why there are two oral histories in print about it while Saturday Night ends up a rushed, chaotic sliver of how it came to be.
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.)
