Someone for everyone

Here is the first of the two things I thought to blog about on Sunday night, the only of the two I decided was actually worth writing about. (It's debatable, at least on the topic of taste. You'll see what I mean in a moment.)

The best makeup Oscar win for The Substance (yes, here I am writing about The Substance again, even though I said I was putting it in my penalty box) has become an effective universal spoiler for the end of the movie. This happens sometimes and I guess is inevitable. Whereas if you win for best makeup for a movie about dwarves and elves, it's not such a surprise because everyone knew from the trailers there are dwarves and elves in the movie. Not so much for Monstro Elisasue, who was a surprise to all of us when we first saw The Substance. 

By necessity, that surprise no longer exists for anyone who watched the Oscars. I guess there comes a point where you've either seen the movie, or you're never gonna see it in its pure, unspoiled form.

While watching Scoot Cooper's Antlers -- a movie where a human being transforms into a wendigo, a Native American creature with the titular antlers -- my mind drifted back to the climactic transformation in The Substance. What can I say, The Substance, I just can't quit you. (Or maybe I'm doubling down because since the last time I wrote about it, a friend told me that he had hated it.)

And it got me thinking of another favorite, this time an old favorite, which I'll reveal in a moment. 

Although Elisabeth Sparkle's romantic life is a secondary consideration in The Substance -- she is more concerned with the love of the public than the love of a single romantic partner -- the subject is actually touched on in enough ways for us to consider it an underlying theme. 

The first potential romantic partner we get for her is someone she sort of dismisses out of hand before circling back to him. That's her awkward, balding, unattractive classmate who is nice but -- as my wife pointed out -- serves as an embodiment of the world's reaction to Elisabeth, because he continues commenting on her looks. He's played by Edward Hamilton-Clark, who looks like this:

(And thanks again, Stan, for having this movie so I can easily get this and the following two pictures.)

Of course, Elisabeth ends up standing up this man -- Fred by name -- not because of him, but because of herself. It's right before she's supposed to go out that she has her breakdown at the mirror and starts trying to scrub her face off. 

When Elisabeth is moonlighting as Sue, there's an unsurprising uptick in the caliber of men she's with -- at least in terms of looks if not character. Here is what the two guys we see her with, played by Oscar Lesage and Hugo Diego Garcia, look like:

The penultimate transformation for Elisabeth occurs while the second guy is in the house with her. It is implied though never stated -- this movie does not need to state anything when it can show us so much -- that the craggy, troll version of Elisabeth we have now will never be capable of a romantic relationship again. 

But why should that be the case? The old saying is that there is someone out there for everyone. 

Even as Monstro Elisasue, she's still delicately trying to pierce various ear-like appendages on what passes as a head with earrings. She still fancies herself someone who can be beautiful.

So why couldn't she still hook up with this guy?

(It probably would have been best just to drop the mic there -- albeit feeling a slight bit of poor taste over the implied body shaming of people with birth defects -- but because some of my younger readers might not know who this is, I thought I had to tell you that this is Sloth from The Goonies, as played by John Matuszak.)