** "I have lived a long time and I've had a crazy life - I guess that's the one good thing about having a life be crazy..."

Andie MacDowell Talks Good Girl Jane, Goodrich, Groundhog Day. Starring as a stressed out mother of a downwardly spiralling teenage daughter strung out on meth in the ironically titled Good Girl Jane, MacDowell is joined by the young actress Rain Spencer, on the show. Along with a look at her other current film, Goodrich, co-starring with Michael Keaton.

** "Here's my evaluation. We have bad economic times - and one party rather than leaning into it, they're gaslighting people..."

Breaking News - Or Rather Broken News, Broken Media. Presidential Election Prophesies: Pacifica Host Garland Nixon mulls the future. With connections to pickup trucks, mortgages, evictions, banks, gas prices and chicken wings.

** "Once, when a priest of the Zen sect was journeying alone, he lost his way - for a long time he wandered about helplessly, and he was beginning to despair..."

Ladcadio Hearn, Jikininki - 'Next we'll have a ghost story - in fact a Japanese ghost story.' Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...

** "We explore a landscape fraught with pain and hope...*It's the killing of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, that reverberates through Gaza and the West Bank once again..."

UK Desk: An interpretation of a traumatic history in progress, while 'we must grapple with the deeper ramifications...' 

The Substance: Feminist Fatale Toe To Toe With Pharma Horror

Tales of humans longing to be someone other than themselves did not appear with the transgender movement. But are rather a timeless historical universal fantasy, in particular as symbolically expressed in that Ugly Duckling fairy tale and Cinderella's racing the clock to avoid returning to rags. 

But 'The Substance' has much more in mind than Demi Moore's celebrity exercise guru Elisabeth Sparkle strung out on a fountain of youth drug reversing her fading career as she turns fifty. Namely in this French writer/director Coralie Gargeat's feminist fatale horror spree, summoning two sets of villains - the male dominated culture demonizing older women, and the pharma industrial complex exploiting everyone - though in this case, women in particular discarded in value as their youth fades.

And in the case of The Substance, Sparkle is hooked on a mysteriously promoted drug promising a return to young womanhood, but only for a week at a time - during which she must inject herself with the potion alternately back to her original self, lest the potentially lethal remedy commence her exceedingly grueling demise. Enter her vibrant young persona Sue (Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell), and so begins the brutal competition for dominant selfhood between the two - a tremendously hyper-horrific allegorical buffet of ostentacious surreal pharma expressionism. And nods to Mary Shelley and Brian De Palma's Carrie, with a neo-gothic explosion finale of lavish, extremist artistry, conveying internalized, released mind over matter menstrual mayhem and insurrectionary female body parts in revolt.

But less apparent in the narrative, is the The Substance itself, an invisible entity appearing solely as a voice on the phone, but essentially dominating the narrative, both on and off screen. In other words, the drug corporations that promote problematic if not unrealistic and impossible personal dreams and fantasies with hard sell miracle medications, as well as in many cases mind rather than matter disfiguring surgeries - predominantly greedy motives pushing lucrative medical maintenance instead of exceedingly less profitable cures. 

Case in point - the reported observation of transgender elderly men in nursing homes troubled by the inability to find their missing genitalia. In other words, a medical monster movie preying on everyone.

Prairie Miller
Read The Film Review At Rotten Tomatoes HERE