Dogs Bark

I Can Get It for you Wholesale - - The Substance (2024, UK/France, Color, 141 min) - - 28 September 2024

Not recommended. The Substance starts with a good premise, develops nicely, but ends in the most revolting 20 minutes since the bathtub scene in Saltburn. Who knows why the Cannes jury awarded the Best Screenplay trophy to this unfunny disappointment? The movie threatens Gran Guignol with an early-on close-up of TV exec Dennis Quaid (Great Balls Of Fire) slobbering down shrimp while horrified actress Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, Ghost) looks on. It’s Sparkle’s 50^th birthday, and she’s too old to keep her job. She turns to a shadowy wonder drug, The Substance, to create a new “her.” A younger girl emerges . . . literally (Margaret Qualley, Poor Things). At this point, an intelligent take on youth and drugs - - read Ozempic - - seems possible; Moore’s poignant enactment of a woman endlessly reconceiving her make-up for a date is promising. But soon after, special effects took the wheel, and the movie degenerated into stupidity.

Gaw! - - Pygmalion (1938, GB, B/W, 89 min) - - 25 September 2024

Strongly recommended. If you are still smarting over the choice of Audrey Hepburn over Julie Andrews to play Miss Eliza Doolittle, you may be a Sicilian. And if it matters that much to you, you deserve to see the original celluloid performer, Dame Wendy Hiller (Murder On The Orient Express).  This role was the source of her first Oscar nomination, losing to Bette Davis in Jezebel. George Bernard Shaw received his only Academy Award for the script, in which he was deeply involved, even insisting on Ms. Hiller’s selection. So, you might say Wendy was the REAL guttersnipe. Leslie Howard (The Petrified Forest) directed himself as Henry Higgins and may be a better one than Rex Harrison in closeness of age. The most amusing bit of casting trivia is Cathleen Nesbit (An Affair To Remember)  as “A Lady,” eventually playing Mrs. Higgins in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady.

Who Are We To Disagree? - - Kinds Of Kindness (2024, USA, Color, 164 min) - - 4 September 2024

Recommended. But barely, because Kinds Of Kindness is a strange and challenging movie, or actually, three short - - but subtly interconnected - - challenging movies. Yorgos Lanthimos’s (The Favourite) masterful Poor Things, set him up for an easy A, but Kinds Of Kindness is much harder to like.  The opening music sets up the theme: The Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams, which most reviewers assign to dominance and control. But it’s the dream - - specifically, the American one - - that Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou (The Lobster) are playing with herein. It’s just that control is crucial to the dream. The cast is wonderful, with the Lanthimos regular Emma Stone (Poor Things) once again nailing down strangeness, backed up by the luminous Margaret Qualley (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood), Willam Defoe (Poor Things) and non-regular, but Cannes-be-knighted, Jessie Plemons (The Irishman), who adapts perfectly. It’s gruesome and bleak, so beware . . . Kinds Of Kindness is never kind.