Oh yeah not literally. This is just judging from the scene when she was going to opt out but saw Sue on the billboard and changed her mind. Like she still felt ownership over Sue’s success despite the whole monkey’s paw nature of the deal and that was enough for her up to a point.
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I’ve been reliably told that the original version of The Substance was nearly 4 hours long. My guess is that at least some of the cut footage will have gotten more specific about the process/tech, which has been left more ambiguous in the final edit.
Snyder cut jokes aside, I feel like directors cuts aren’t much of a thing anymore? I’d be so curious to see what the longer version of The Substance looks like (even though I’d massively prefer it to be a bit shorter, not loads longer!)
4hrs! That’s absurd
I’d be curious about that as well but…. Its ridiculous! 
Jfc the last thing that film needed is more time
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Randy Quaid eating the shrimp was my favourite part
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on a tenth of the budget
On the one hand I’m glad Joker 2 is getting a bit of a kicking as it is, by all accounts, a miserable chore, but on the other hand I wish it was by better films than The Substance or Terrifier 3
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Oh it has its own thread
Loved it, one of the things I loved the most is its total abandonment, from the start, of any sense of realism. Character motivations don’t make sense, the substance doesn’t make sense, whoever makes it doesn’t even seem to charge Elizabeth for it. I laughed so many times at some really absurd line deliveries. The film is very nakedly and proudly a delivery system for the emotions it wants to provoke and I love it for that.
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According to a couple of lecturers we’ve had recently 4hours is the current ‘optimal’ length for a screenplay as it can be 6x45 min episodes for streaming in some territories or 4x1hr or 8x30mins for other territories or otherwise trimmed to 2h-2h 30m for the silver screen
Kinda makes sense I guess
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Bit hard to shake the final feeling it left me with, which is just that it’s far too long for what it is. Maybe that’s part of the point, form mirroring content, but there’s just too much of it. Especially given making sense was very clearly not on anyone involved’s agenda.
Looked incredible and was, even given the plot and revolting aesthetics, huge fun for about an hour. Cool something like this can be such a big deal, and that someone like Demi Moore was into it.
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saw this in the cinema last night. I knew little about it going in, except a lot of friends having wildly-differing opinions on it.
About 30 mins in I thought ‘this feels very French’ despite the very Hollywood-related setting. Pat on the back for me; French director/writer, history in New French Extreme, etc.
Genre- and style-wise the film isn’t going to be one of my favourites, but for something that is very excessive and blunt in its satire, it was also entertaining and funny in parts. I also felt there were more subtle critiques beneath the giant not-even-subtextual ones.
As satire it doesn’t really work because it participates in the same worship of youth and beauty it critiques. You can’t wink it away, you can’t sell the solutions to capitalism’s ills. Fortunately, I am not really bothered about that, and thought it worked to serve the themes of the story.
It is fairly based on Picture of Dorian Gray and, unlike that book, is quite normie and hetero. That does flatten some of the psychosexual aspects of the original text, but it does replace them with a more subtle critique of atomisation (remote med-tech, the generations that never speak to each other) and the pornographisation of the banal.
Solid film, good to see something reasonably novel get people talking, even if it isn’t exactly what I want. 6/10
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I think it tries to show how stupid it is, but also by replicating the exact mode of pornography or social media influencer content that is very sexualised in order to sell products (or collect data). You could adopt a film theory head and say it’s almost parodising Mulvey’s male gaze point to its epistemic extreme, literally lingering over buttocks and thigh gap and tits in order to show just how male-coded the gaze of the world is - but it just seems like it is having its cake and eating it.
Which is definitely interesting to me. There’s a whole authenticity question in this film where everyone is atomised, parentless and isolated, all decisions are remote, where the prospect of direct contact causes shock: where are the origins in this world that looks like a succession of waiting rooms and heterotopic spaces, where the camera lens with a slight fisheye constantly denatures the natural. To push your point on, I think there’s a suspicion that we may have lost a sense of the real to the point where we wouldn’t know where to go back if we abandoned our lusts for more.
it’s also why the absence of queerness is interesting given that queer (broadly conceived) persons are probably leading the way in terms of thinking in alternative ways about the body and a kind of authentic-inauthentic wherein you are “true” in what you become rather than how you began - but again is this absence because the film is trying to directly assault Western privileged views on the body? idk! m
I liked the single hair being straightened
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This might just be why I’m posting on here at nearly 40 years old, but I genuinely winced more at the hyper-sexualised exercise stuff moreso than the body horror. It felt purposefully obscene to me, had no sense anyone was seeking to titilate me.
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I think I should probably cite what influences my thinking here, I am sure you can extrapolate:
For me the film doesn’t seem to name any monsters (aside from Monstro) and makes Quaid’s corporate avatar/patriarchy character as parodic as the sexuality is.
(feel I should say btw I am enjoying this chat but don’t want to take over the thread, and enjoying our differences on this!) i don’t see a whole world of difference between the plastic form of beauty here and the form of packaged desire which actually does sell Hollywood films, make-up, pornography, data collectors in Instagram - I see a world where girls have eating disorders or overtrain themselves into anxiety or get bullied because the standard is so internalised that it resists all parody.
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Added to MUBI today.