Tag: Dennis Quaid

The Substance (2024)

Twisted body horror isn’t quite the feminist statement it thinks it is, but still a unique film

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore (Elizabeth Sparkle), Margaret Qualley (Sue), Dennis Quaid (Harvey), Edward Hamilton (Fred), Gore Abrams (Oliver), Oscar Lesage (Troy), Christian Erickson (Man at diner)

Getting old in Hollywood is not kind. Particularly for women. Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a big star of the 90s, now eeks out a living as exercise queen for a daytime TV show. But TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides people don’t want to watch a woman in her 50s and unceremoniously gives her the boot. Fearing a life of lonely irrelevance, miles from the limelight, Elizabeth accepts an invitation to try ‘The Substance’. This black-market drug creates a ‘younger, more beautiful, more perfect’ version of you – birthed from your spine. Taking the drug, Elizabeth spawns Sue (Margaret Qualley), a 20s version of herself who promptly lands her old job on the exercise show.

The two must swop places every week, one living their life (either in obscurity or vicariously enjoying much-lusted after career success) the other lying comatose on the bathroom floor. At first the balance works, but they soon grow to resent each other: Sue despises Elizabeth’s self-loathing bitterness while Elizabeth becomes consumed with envy at Sue’s hedonistic success. Quickly the balanced life between the two collapses, leading to inevitable disaster.

The Substance is one of those films you can pretty much guarantee people will remember about 2024. Pretty much everything in it is dialled up to eleven, a crazy mix of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Cronenberg-body horror (particularly The Fly) by way of David Lynch. Fargeat shoots it with a deliberate grindhouse intensity, revelling in the vast amounts of icky body horror, gallons of blood and guts, often filmed in a mix of dream-like drifting and trashy exploitation.

It’s a sharply directed, extremely intense film from Coralie Fargeat (who also scripts), punchy, vicious and darkly hilarious. It’s also been shot to be almost as uncomfortable to watch as possible. The camerawork is frequently disjointed, full of disconcerting jerky close-up. Nightmare Lynch-style dream horror images pop-up, along with haunting Mulholland Dr style floating heads and Kubrickian homages. Every moment of body horror is accompanied with revolting, squelching sound-effects. You’ve rarely seen anything as intensely, bizarrely OTT as this, the film carefully designed to get audiences either screaming “fucking hell!” or hiding their eyes behind their popcorn.

The film’s most successful moments are these moments of shocking body horror. Created from a host of ingenious practical effects (The Substance surely is destined for a make-up Oscar), the film superbly creates everything from green-fluid soaked birthing scenes to the grim disintegration of various body parts that slowly ages Demi Moore into a wizened babushka to the final hellish Elephant Man by way of the The Fly inspired ending. It’s superbly done, deeply unsettling, but blackly entertaining in its extremity. And The Substance is incredibly extreme, pulling absolutely no punches in this blood-soaked, Angela Carteresque fairy-tale horror.

Fargeat draws an extremely committed performances from Demi Moore, given the sort of acting challenge she never got when she was the biggest star in Hollywood, playing a woman so consumed with ingrained self-loathing and disgust (having so completely swallowed the ideology that your personal value is directly connected to your appearance) that she would rather live as a recluse in the shadow of another version of herself than build a new life. There is an extraordinary scene where a panic stricken Elizabeth prepares for a date with an old schoolfriend (possibly her last chance at a normal life) but is so consumed by self-loathing and doubt about her appearance (painfully ironic, since she of course looks great) that she goes through multiple attempts at make-up up in the movie, each time rubbing it off with such increasing fury that by the end she’s virtually sand-papering her face as if trying to erase herself from existence.

Just as fine is Margaret Qualley as the ‘perfect’ version of Elizabeth, but who has just the same self-loathing and insecurity as the original. It’s a similarly committed performance by Qualley, a carefully studied, surprisingly vulnerable performance while also being ruthlessly ambitious and self-indulgent, which embraces the hyper-sexualised expectations of young women in Hollywood. Dennis Quaid also throws in a fun cameo as a lasciviously camp, OTT executive full of ruthless, heartless bonhomie who sees women only as window-dressing for perverts. After all it’s an industry that forgets: from the opening montage of Elizabeth’s Hollywood star going from eagerly photographed to forgotten, through to the insultingly trivial gift stuffed in her hands as she is dismissed.

But The Substance’s satire is often rather forced and obvious (right down to Quaid’s exec being called Harvey). It feels like it misses a trick by having its only female character being a woman who has so swallowed the ageist views of Hollywood, she literally can’t imagine questioning it. So much so, her clone equally embraces life as a sex object. While The Substance invites us to understand the poison of this world independently, there is virtually no commentary on the unjust sexism within the film. In fact, The Substance so echoes the leering camera angles and pervy shots of the worst kinds of sexist cinema that sometimes it’s a bit hard to see it as satire and (as the camera stares at Qualley’s butt or down her top) more as just reality.

At no point do Elizabeth or Sue make any form of realisation about how they have been indoctrinated to only understand themselves as being worth something so long as they look like a pin-up. While The Picture of Dorian Gray understood the temptations of a selfish hedonism even when we know its wrong and The Fly was all about the damaging impact of ambition, for all its pointed smirking fun The Substance is at heart more of a pulpy gore-show revelling in extreme than a sort of social satire.

In fact the more you watch The Substance the more you think it’s real inspiration is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and the ‘hag-horror’ of the 60s. A star name of yesteryear, takes on a role that riffs on their loss of youth and beauty, throwing them into an ever more twisted tale of obsession and revenge. You could argue The Substance trusts us to see for ourselves that all this rampant sexism is wrong: but you could also quite happily watch the film and assume it was Elizabeth’s vanity that caused all the problems, not the system that inoculated it in her.

There is another version of The Substance that could match its pulpy love of horror thrills with a bit more of an insightful commentary on gender politics. But the fact the film ends in an explosion of blood that makes The Shining look positively restrained (a sequence that goes on too long in an overlong film), you suspect its real heart is actually in creating shocking images rather than really exploring the issues it wants you to think it is addressing.

The Right Stuff (1983)

Patriotic heroism subtly retold as shrewd satire – no wonder the film bombed

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager), Kim Stanley (Pancho Barnes), Veronica Cartwright (Betty Grissom), Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton), Charles Frank (Scott Carpenter), Lance Henriksen (Wally Schirra), Donald Moffat (Lyndon B Johnson), Levon Helm (Jack Ridley), Mary Jo Deschanel (Annie Glenn), Scott Wilson (Scott Crossfield), Kathy Baker (Louise Shepard), David Clennon (Liaison man), Jeff Goldblum (Recruiter), Harry Shearer (Recruiter)

During the Cold War, the US and Russia had to fight with something – from proxy wars to chess, but most famously with Space: the competition to go further, faster and higher among the stars. The Right Stuff focuses on the Mercury Seven pilots at the centre of the US response to Soviet success including Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), a mix of the cocksure and the confident. But in a space programme where a monkey is an acceptable “pilot” for this human cannonball, do any of them have “the right stuff”? Could any of them match the skill of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) – one of the guys who scorned this astronaut programme for being “spam in a can”?

The Right Stuff, adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book, seemed destined to become a patriotic smash-hit. Despite its eight Oscar nominations (and four wins) it was, in fact, a catastrophic bomb. Perhaps that was because it subverted its patriotism so well. The Right Stuff is, in fact, a subtle, anti-heroic satire (told at huge length) masquerading as a patriotic yarn. It’s marketing avoided that meaning those most likely to enjoy didn’t go and see it, and those who went for that felt alienated. While largely respecting the astronauts, it suggests space race triumphalism was a sort of mass hysteria, with limited results, inflated into something mythic by political expediency, media spin and industrial might. Not the happy, flag-waving message Reaganite America expected or wanted.

Kaufman’s sympathy instead lies with an older, “truer” America. The Right Stuff is an intensely nostalgic film: but for a completely different time. It is in love with Frontier America, where men-were-men and the daring proved themselves in taming the frontier, in this case the sky itself. Our tamer is Chuck Yeager, played with a monosyllabic Gary-Cooper-charisma by Sam Shepard. Yeager is the last of the cowboys (even introduced riding a horse in the desert), taking to the skies like an old frontiersman hunting down that “demon” who lives at the sound barrier.

This is the sort of America The Right Stuff celebrates, and Yeager is the guy who has it. Unlike the Mercury programme, Yeager isn’t interested in showbiz and self-promotion (his reward for breaking the sound barrier? A free steak and a press embargo), just the quiet satisfaction of having done it. It’s the old, unflappable, quietly masculine confidence of a certain kind of American tradition and it’s totally out of step with the world the media is now celebrating with the astronauts. Instead, these effective passengers in the rocket will be hailed as the great pilots.

Kaufman’s film is a long, carefully disguised, quiet ridicule of many of the aspects of the Mercury programme. It’s conceived, in a darkened room, by a group of politicians so clumsy they can’t even work a projector. It’s head, Lyndon B Johnson (Donald Moffat on panto form) is a ludicrous figure, at one point reduced to an impotent tantrum in a car when he doesn’t get his way. The NASA recruiters are a comedy double act – Goldblum and Shearer sparking wonderfully off each other – who first suggest (in all seriousness) circus acrobats as pilots and then fail to identify Yuri Gargarin. The programme begins with a series of failed launches that travel tiny distances before exploding, culminating in one attempt ending with an impotent pop of the cap at the top of the rocket.

NASA is slightly ramshackle and clueless throughout. Far from the best and brightest, Kaufman is keen for us to remember that many of the scientists fought for the Germans in the war, that decisions were often made entirely based on what the Russians have just done, that the astronaut recruitment tests are a parade of bizarre physical tests because no one has a clue what to test for, and that the final seven selected aren’t even the best just the ones who persevered through the tests and (crucially) were small enough to fit in the capsule. That doesn’t stop the media – played by a San Francisco physical comedy troop – from turning them overnight from jobbing pilots to superstars.

The astronauts status is frequently punctured. Scott Glenn’s granite-faced Shepard is strapped into the cockpit for hours on his first flight, until finally he begs to pee (followed by a montage of coffee being slurped, hose pipes blasting and taps dripping) before being instructed to release his bladder into his suit, meaning he heads into space sitting in a puddle of his own piss. Dennis Quaid’s cocksure Cooper has an over-inflated idea of his skills and is prone to dumb, blow-hard statements (arriving at Yeager’s Air Force base he non-ironically states he’ll soon have his picture up on the deceased pilot’s memorial wall). Fred Ward’s Gus Grissom is a slightly sleazy chancer – controversially The Right Stuff presents him as panicking on re-entry from his first mission, blowing his hatch and sinking his ship, something he categorically denied (and was later proved not to have done).

Even John Glenn, played with a sincerity and decency by Ed Harris (if this had been a hit, Harris’ career of playing hard-heard would have been totally different), is subtly lampooned. So straight-laced he literally can’t swear (his attempt to say ‘fuck’ never gets past a strained Ffff), he’s introduced via a ludicrous TV quiz show and his square-jawed morals frequently tip into puritan self-importance. Undergoing physical tests, Kaufman even cuts from his grimacing face to a grinning chimp on the same test (and who will beat him into space). Compared to Yeager, who can correct a plane on a desperate nose dive and beat the skies into submission (and has the only outright heroic refrain in Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score), none of them have that right stuff.

Do they get it? In a way: but their triumph is establishing their character, not their skills. Kaufman uses Yeager to point us towards this (his seal of approval is vital for the film): after Grissom’s debacle, he defends him in the bar and praises their courage in essentially sitting on top of a massive bomb.
Tellingly, the astronauts’ most courageous moment in the film isn’t in the cockpit at all: it’s Glenn supporting his stammering wife’s refusal to go on air with LBJ, despite the pressure from NASA bigwigs – and the other astronauts uniting in fury when Glenn is threatened with being dumped from the next flight. The others become more noble through maturing and casting aside fame’s temptations.

In a way they prove their spurs, even if Kaufman’s film makes clear none of them can match Yeager’s traditional values. The film ends with Yeager, maverick to the last, undertaking an unauthorised test flight in a desperate attempt to keep funding for his jet programme going. Even with this final flight – dressed in a bastardised version of a space suit – Yeager shows he’s not lost it, a man so undeniably superhuman in his American resilience that even a bit of fire won’t slow him down.

The Right Stuff celebrates Yeager, but he’s the B-story – and the film frames him as a forgotten figure, left behind by a world obsessed with the bright and shiny. The Right Stuff has to centre the astronauts but it doesn’t focus on the missions (which, apart from Glenn’s, barely receive any screen time – certainly not compared to the time given to Yeager’s flights) or the glory, only quietly implies there was a slight air of pointlessness about the whole thing – that the space race was perhaps just a dick-waggling competition between superpowers. It makes for interesting – if overlong – viewing, but as punch-the-air entertainment, no sir. No wonder it bombed.

The Alamo (2004)

“Remember The Alamo!” Problem was the movie going public didn’t

Director: John Lee Hancock
Cast: Dennis Quaid (Sam Houston), Billy Bob Thornton (Davy Crockett), Jason Patric (James Bowie), Patrick Wilson (William Barret Travis), Emilio Echevarría (Antonio López de Santa Anna), Jordi Mollà (Juan Seguin), Leon Rippy (Sergeant William Ward)

“Remember the Alamo!” was the famous war cry of the Texan rebels fighting to make Texas an independent state from Mexican rule. Problem was, fast forward 90 odd years and it seems not enough people did. This lovingly reconstructed re-telling of the doomed attempt to defend The Alamo (a sort of Western Zulu with a downer ending) was a box-office disaster.

In 1836, a civil war raged in Mexico, which then included Texas. American immigrants and other groups fought to make Texas an independent state, with an eye on later joining the United States. A small force is sent to garrison the Alamo, a key fort recently captured from the Mexicans. But the Mexicans and their President Santa Anna are descending on the Alamo in full military force…

The Alamo is a pretty decent film. It’s not a classic and at times it’s a rather staid and straight-laced history lesson, po-facedly cramming in as much as it can within its running time. But it’s got many merits, not least the fact that it’s willing to focus on character rather than action, and embraces the fact that sieges tend to be rather long, dull affairs punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Billy Bob Thornton gives a sharply intelligent and thought-provoking reading of Davey Crockett, playing him as man painfully aware that he is a legend, and wearily trying to balance this with also being a “normal” person, with the same fears and desires as other men. He plays Crockett as a gentle, even rather sensitive soul, a good listener, sharply self-critical and scared that he can’t live up to the reputation he has. As he says at one point: “If it was just me, simple old David from Tennessee, I might drop over that wall some night, take my chances. But that Davy Crockett feller… they’re all watchin’ him.” At one moment (in a scene that the film overplays by returning to at least twice in flashback), Crockett plays the violin on the ramparts to battle the Mexican drums, giving a brief Shawshank-like moment of freedom through the power of art.

The two main leads don’t disappoint alongside him. I enjoyed Patrick Wilson’s stiff-necked William Travis, whose cold and formal manner slowly reveals a decent man and a brave leader (though no master tactician). Jason Patric also manages to land just the right side of rogueish as a drunken James Bowie, the men’s leader of choice. Dennis Quaid has the dullest, least developed part as a larger-than-life Sam Houston. Impressive as these characterisations are, the film doesn’t really have time for anyone else to make an impression – while Emilo Echevarria’s Santa Anna is little more than cardboard cut-out of villainy.

The film’s main problem is its reverent regard for the moment in history that it is covering. For starters, its makers assume everyone shares this: there is no opening crawl, or scene setting voiceover, to tell us where we are, what’s going on and when. The filmmakers assume us to be as au fait with Texan independence as they are. I had to literally stop the film for a good ten minutes and read some quick timelines of Texan independence, as well as skim a few Wikipedia pages on Texan history, so I could follow the storyline.

Secondly, it’s so keen to cover all the major historical events, that at points it’s more than a little dry. Its slow pace has the upside of really allowing us to get to know the characters at its centre (the original run time was closer to 3 hours, which would have allowed many of the background characters to come to life as well). But with the runtime cut down, combined with the assumptions made about the viewer’s historical knowledge, it sometimes becomes a little tricky to either engage with the drama fully or to completely understand what’s going on.

The recut of the film after disastrous test screenings also means that the film has what feels like a tacked on “happy ending”, with the last twenty minutes given over to the (very shortened) Houston campaign against the Mexicans and Santa Anna’s capture. The film rockets through this, barely pausing to explain tactics or events, seemingly wanting to give meaning to the sacrifice at the Alamo. Some half-hearted attempts are made to contrast slaughter of the Mexican soldiers with that of the Alamo defenders, but not much.

But this is not a bad film by any means, just a fatally compromised one. It’s trying to be an intelligent, grown-up piece of film making – a character study out west – but it’s also trying to be an action film. It doesn’t quite succeed in being either, but it’s at its best as a character study, helped by some really strong, thoughtful performances. Hancock isn’t, to be honest, an original enough director to bring to life the epic scope and sweep that the film needs, but it’s clear he cares about this a lot. In fact that’s the best thing about this film: it’s clear that everyone in the film cared deeply about this story and desperately wanted this film to be a classic.

It’s a shame that this story is one that seems to have less relevance to the masses today, and that this film can’t quite coalesce all the efforts of everyone involved into something really memorable.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Our heroes undergo one hell of a cold snap

Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall), Jake Gyllenhaal (Sam Hall), Ian Holm (Professor Terry Rapson), Emmy Rossum (Laura Chapman), Sela Ward (Dr. Lucy Hall), Christopher Britton (Vorsteen), Arjay Smith (Brian Parks), Dash Mihok (Jason Evans), Jay O Sanders (Frank Harris), Adrian Lester (Simon), Kenneth Welsh (Vice President Raymond Becker)

I have to confess there are certain genres I have a weakness for. One of these is the big-budget disaster movie. For some reason, nothing helps me relax or unwind more of an evening than watching some of the great landmarks of the world being destroyed or seeing hundreds of people fleeing before a tsunami/pyroclastic flow/asteroid impact/tornado etc. There is clearly something wrong with me.

The Day After Tomorrowfits very comfortably into this trope, offering up some totally predictable and entertaining-enough thrills combined with total ‘scientific’ nonsense. Thanks to man’s foolishness, the climate of the Northern hemisphere is changing, and only Professor Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) knows that it’s happening (although to be fair he does say it will take place across hundreds of years). But gosh darn it doncha know, suddenly those projections are revised to “the next six to eight weeks!” Cue cold snaps of -100°F dealing out death in Scotland, brick sized hail bashing in heads in Tokyo, and a tsunami taking out New York. Of course Hall’s son (a game Jack Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York so Hall mounts a rescue mission…

The world-destroying scenes are suitably high scale and dramatic, with Roland Emmerich showing his usual efficient martialling of special effects. Emmerich doesn’t get quite the credit he deserves – as a B movie hack director, he’s very good at keeping the viewer fully aware of what’s happening all the time and to whom, and very rarely labours any particularly point. He also has a goofiness about him, when directing this sort of nonsense, that encourages you to disengage critical faculties and join him for the ride. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no Hitchcock – but compared to Michael Bay, he’s David Lean.

The story doles out the expected personal dramas amongst the chaos. Its main issue is that “weather” doesn’t make the most relatable nemesis ever committed to screen. To cover this, some timber wolves are introduced into New York to terrorise Gyllenhaal and his trapped student friends (Emmerich, bless him, carefully stages a scene earlier where befuddled zookeepers stare aghast at an empty wolf pen and comment “The wolves are gone!”). To be honest, though, these animals are a bit dull – what people will really remember are the desperate dashes to get somewhere warm while another “death-on-contact” cold snap speeds towards our heroes. As most of this stuff happens in the first half of the movie, the second half can rather drag – with the Northern hemisphere effectively destroyed early doors, what else is there left to show?

Emmerich does have some fun with politics. One of the joys of the disaster film (I find) is the inevitable crowd of characters who denounce any chance of the disaster occurring. Emmerich goes one better here by having the President and Vice-President vocally and visually imitate then-office-holders Bush and Cheney. The facsimile Bush even defers to his facsimile Cheney. It makes for some heavy-handed digs at their Presidency’s lack of impetus on climate change, and general perceived weakness, but hey at least the film is using blockbusting to make some tongue-in-cheek political points.

The characters are all pulled from the stock. Quaid does his usual decent job as the guy you hire for this sort of film when your first choices are unavailable, but he never lets you down and brings a lot of dignity to the ludicrous concept. Gyllenhaal and Rossum are rather sweet as smart teenagers (gotta like a film where all the young characters are bookish nerds). Smith gives some good comic support. Ian Holm and Adrian Lester manage to keep a straight face and provide a lot of dignity to roles that must have been little more than picking up paycheques.

Disengage brain, settle back and enjoy the carnage. Emmerich is like an eager-to-please student proudly presenting his work on parents’ day. The great thing about him is that you know he is a booky, geeky type (like his heroes here) and he’ll never do anything to offend you.