“Moo Deng is what came out of Fiona the hippo when she took The Substance” and Other September 2024 Watches

Movies, theater, and a lot of RHONY.

Tweet credit quoted in the hed!! Love Is Blind season 7 just started and there’s a chat in the Substack app. The Friday Post is delayed this week. Peyton and I were on Las Culturistas!

Demi Moore in The Substance. Photo: Mubi.

I have been behind on these monthly watch lists, so tonight’s is extra long.

The Substance
New release
There’s a scene in The Substance that I can’t stop thinking about: Demi Moore, playing an aerobics instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle who has just been replaced with a lean younger woman (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley¹), is getting ready for a date. Sparkle assesses herself in the mirror: she looks great. She slips on her coat in the living room, feeling the judgemental glare of a billboard of Sue positioned right in front of her apartment’s window. She sees Sue’s curves and abs and tits, and goes back to the mirror put on more makeup. She thinks of Sue’s perfect hair and perfect eyes. Sparkle puts on a scarf. She thinks of Sue’s taut skin. She smears the makeup and stays home. The back and forth is wrenching, as confidence shrinks into defeat. 

The Substance goes big and loud and gory, fluids and injections and rot. That scene feels like the thesis of the movie, the way you can look at yourself too long in the mirror and start to think your eyes are too far apart or your nostril is weird. It’s not as good as Death Becomes Her, but it worked for me.

Nickel Boys
New release
An adaptation of the Colson Whitehead book by Hale County This Morning, This Evening director RaMell Ross. I’ll be writing more about this film, but by far the most stunning I’ve seen this year. I did a Q&A about it at MoMA this week, too.

Supersonic
First time watch
What if I told you there were two brothers who were both bossy, both hot, and always at odds with one another. What if I told you they were in one of the greatest rock bands of all time? No, I’m sorry, sooooo my type I need to coin a new phrase. Need them expediously. I need them posthaste. Need them in a way that is concerning to my feminism and also my budget. Noel Gallagher saying he hates his brother Liam for so many reasons, but that he’s jealous of how Liam looks in a parka? Bellissima. We are losing recipes.

The documentary itself is told through interviews and animation and photographs, with all the main band members participating. That style eventually grew a little tedious. I missed the way a camera can search someone’s face as they find an answer.

Real Housewives of New York Season 9
First time watch
The season nine Bethenny-Ramona fight that I knew about going into this season happens in Berkshires, where Ramona threatens to air all of Bethenny’s “dirty laundry” (really just desperate things she did at 20, and who among us…) and Bethenny goes spreadeagle and screams “Mention it allll!” But the one that I watched on a loop was Bethenny