The Substance
About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because this is a movie of ludicrous escalation.

Sue (Margaret Qualley) is so refreshing she's the condensation on the Coca-Cola can. Her firm buttocks enter the shot several times before she does. Her breasts defy gravity. Everything is tight. But she has the arrogance and appetites of youth. While this movie is positioned as a feminist body horror it is a movie about a parasitic system.

Yes, the movie's men are grotesque. They were in the director's previous genre movie, Revenge, too. But unlike that movie where all the men were abusers. Or this movie where men participate in a abusive system. Women do unforgivable things here.

After a chemical pickup from a dead drop that screams evil life sciences corporation, Sue emerges from Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Sue are one person but must alternate between seven days of active and resting cycles. There are side effects to breaking this rule. You'd have to be dumb like a character in a movie to ignore potential abuse. Abuse here begins with disregard, the resting party left on a cold floor, and slowly progresses to ghoulishness.

Sue transforms from born yesterday wandering to electronic dance music strut in hours. She is not Barbie Mr. Hyde but she is genetically better than Elizabeth and she can be cruel. With seven days of opportunity open to her she gets Elizabeth's old job and takes it to heights the older her could not achieve. While they are one person you know that has to hurt.

Were it the lazy "all men are pigs" trope I'd have tuned out fast. But the nicest character in the movie, a low bar, is an awkward former schoolmate of Elizabeth's who asks her out. This leads to a brilliant scene with Demi Moore later that is her finest work in the movie. It also brings what drives this story into focus.

Focus is something used to make Dennis Quaid's, leering, sleazy, network producer fill the screen. He's ghastly and even more so when he's eating. Sue is his next dish after he exploited Elizabeth's beauty and celebrity to make money for the network's share holders. Sue and Elizabeth have their own relationships with nutrition. It's not healthy.

This world here has many stark block colours and sometimes feels like it's attacking you from the screen. That's intentional. The body horror is disturbing enough to make you wince so it succeeds. The flaw here is that the movie is indulgent and too long. At a bloated two hours twenty minutes the journey to the mania in the third act tested my patience.

This was an uncomfortable but interesting watch. It is a decent body horror movie with a high level of visual gloss that is uncommon. While it is more female than similar movies if you go into it sold on the idea of feminist politics you're in for a rough time. It is a genre movie first.

A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t.

The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium. Seeing ghosts is not a gift. Beetlejuice has been tormenting her from the periphery of her vision for decades. Lydia is an unusual protagonist for a movie like this. There is no expectation that her life will get better here. It did in the first movie, but now we find a woman weighed down not by a problem but by the disappointments in her life.

This is the most adult of approaches to take with the material because none of the characters change. No one gets better. No one is redeemed. No one has a conversion on the road to Damascus. This lack of change isn't bad for Delia. In a great performance by Catherine O'Hara, she has perfected her taste and artistry. But, she is still hilariously shallow. Now a widow, she finds her husband's death both inconvenient and heartbreaking. Jenna Ortega's Astrid is more activist than artist. She has friction with her mother, Lydia. She's so strong and independent that she falls in love with a guy with great hair overnight. Well come on, he listens to great music and is tall. If he'll go to a protest with her he's the dream.

Like the first movie, repairing the imperfect family is the connective thread throughout the story. And like the first movie Michael Keaton here does Beetlejuice as a chaotic force. But he doesn’t feel as present here as he did in the past. We get several musical numbers; I particularly enjoyed the underworld train one. The production design looks good. The classic movie house looks impressive.

But, as I put in the opening paragraph, this is a movie for those who want more Wednesday quirkiness. It lacks sharp edges because the Beetlejuice of 1988 would be canceled if he showed up again in 2024. Studios are afraid modern audiences will trash their movies. I was in a theater filled with Gen X and older. Studios might want to rethink who the audience that pays to watch movies is.

Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series.

The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet. Malcolm Lee, its creator, makes poor arguments for human survival. Again hubris. If we were looking to enlist an artificial champion we would hope our most talented minds would engage with it to build our case. But no, here we have the heartbroken computer scientist who can’t muster enthusiasm for his own children. This is the man who thinks he can use philosophy and rhetoric to prevent the AI he has built from agreeing with the army of red-eyed metal skeleton killers on the way.

The balance here as in other movies is the idea that Skynet has overwhelming technical superiority but is too inept to finish the job its nuclear strike started. But then, "AI wipes out humans and now reigns over cockroaches" isn’t that much of a story. Here we get a robot action girl, a human action girl and three ghastly children. By anime standards it doesn’t look like the state of the art. It's too computer animated and looks cheap at times.

The flaw in this show is that it attempts to ask questions the premise was never designed to answer. Terminator is a story about a stalker who cannot be reasoned with looking to kill a person who has to save themselves. It was never more complicated than that. While Skynet creator, Miles Dyson, should have engaged in four hours of philosophical meditation before building the thing that destroyed humanity, the rest of us don't need that. You can skip this series.