No, I didn't put in a last-minute viewing of any movies I might not have seen, in order to better make predictions about tonight's Oscars, or to feel myself more engaged in them.
Instead, I rewatched my favorite best picture nominee with my wife, which happened to be my #1 movie of last year.
And it looked great.
Yes, yet another post about The Substance on this blog, but I will probably retire the topic for a while now. I don't expect to talk about it much in the next piece, my annual "Oscar thoughts" piece, which will come many hours after the ceremony ends. Which is because for the first time in three years, the Oscars do not coincide with Labor Day here in Australia. That means I'm working today, and even after I finish work, I have two different sporting events to attend, one in which I'm just a spectator and one in which I'm participating. My 14-year-old has a basketball game at 6:05, and about a half-hour after that ends, I'll be playing tennis with my tennis partner. Then, sometime after 9 p.m. local time, I will finally watch the show.
Anyway, The Substance will come up in that post I'm sure, but possibly only in the context of Demi Moore winning, which I predict will happen. (And was reminded why she should win when I watched the film again.) After that, I'll probably put it in my personal penalty box for a while -- a term used by the hosts of Filmspotting when they've been talking about a particular movie too much. (This is my sixth post on The Audient to have gotten "the substance" as a content label.)
Before getting sidetracked, I said a few paragraphs ago that Coralie Fargeat's film looked great, and that's what I want to come back around to explain now.
A couple times in the past few weeks I have made mention of The Substance's pending arrival on my Australian streaming service Stan, and how I wasn't sure if I could watch it because the stream on Stan looked so shit. Of course, proper scientific testing ruled out Stan as the culprit, and seemed to rule in another culprit, Fetch, which is a sort of AppleTV-like product through which you play other streaming apps, such as Stan.
Wrong again.
On Thursday night I decided to do some further testing, as I really didn't want to have to hook up somebody's laptop to the TV through an HDMI cable in order to watch The Substance with my wife on Friday night. She had agreed to the viewing -- even to starting it just after 8 o'clock due to the length of the movie -- and this was my chance to get it right and make the experience involve as little pain as possible. Other than, that is, the pain, both physical and emotional, we would be seeing on screen.
So I took another stroll through my TV's various settings, both the TV itself and Fetch, and I just could not get a better idea of what to do. My 11-year-old was on the couch with me, and he put in his two cents as well. But not even the advanced technical knowledge of today's youngest generation could figure out the issue.
Then I finally got the brainstorm that cracked the case: I needed to connect Fetch to a different HDMI port on my TV. HDMI 3 was available, as we only ever use it when the kids connect their Nintendo Switch to the TV, which they do less and less these days, as they are generally happy to just hold it in their hands.
And suddenly, all of it -- Stan, Fetch and The Substance -- looked great.
I do not, as of now, know why HDMI 2 looks so terrible and HDMI 1 and 3 look so great, but I also do not care. I just switched it to another port and voila, problem solved. That night I watched an old favorite, Shattered Glass, that was streaming on Stan, just to prove it was all better. And the movie looked good -- well, as good as a movie made in 2003, which was not particularly focused on looking good, could look.
I do know, now, that there is probably a setting I could tweak that relates to that HDMI port itself, a setting that is currently out of sync with the same setting on the other HDMI ports. But I have not bothered to figure that out yet.
The reason I know this is that HDMI 3 was once the red-headed stepchild of this TV's HDMI ports, because an incorrect setting in the aspect ratio was once cutting off some of the image on that port. For a long time I thought this was just a hardware error in the port, until one day I finally saw I could make an adjustment, and the port was back to performing at the same level as its brethren.
I know that HDMI 2 will someday be redeemed, but for now, it can just take a little break and sit in the corner to think about what it's done.
For a post posting on the actual day of the Oscars, I thought I should probably write a bit more about The Substance itself, so I will. However, as I was watching, I didn't know how I'd limit my thoughts to just a few. Things kept on popping up into my head, ways to name the piece, etc. I ultimately went with naming the piece after fixing the streaming issue, and I'll try to keep the rest of my thoughts fairly limited as well.
1) First, the rejected titles for this post, which I don't need to explicate at length, but you can probably imagine the things I might have said about the movie based on these titles. One was "The weirdest best picture nominee ever?" Which indeed, The Substance might be. It's crazy that a critical mass of people in the film community embraced this movie as a standard bearer for their brand. One was "A constant state of exhilaration," which was, indeed, the way I watched this movie. I think there was one other but I am forgetting it now.
2) On this viewing I particularly noticed some of the regular motifs that seem to be beyond the film's most obvious themes. One of my favorites was how Fargeat keeps going to insert shots of palm trees at night, which ends up being the final thing Elisabeth Sparkle lays her eyes on in this movie. They are at once an encapsulation of the glamor of a place like Los Angeles, and a sense of how it is distant, out of your reach. If you want to start spinning off into theories about this, it could be the idea that most of what's taking place in the film is a flashback, and the shots of the palm trees are what's occurring in Elisabeth's present tense as she confronts what happens to her at the end of the movie. This viewing convinced me that the movie is even more totally metaphor or totally fantasy even than I first thought.
3) If we are looking for more direct visual embodiments of the themes, I love the shot where Elisabeth sees the fly that landed in her former boss' glass of wine at their final dinner as colleagues. The fly is making strokes in the liquid at first, dutifully trying to escape from its watery death bed, until it inevitably consumes more sugary broth than it can handle and stops swimming. This is a world where you greedily drink in everything that is offered until it kills you, perhaps without even noticing that's about to happen.
4) The oppressive score stood out to me more on this viewing as well. The sort of harrowing metallic scratches that sound a bit like a biohazard alarm, those kind of sounds were the foundation of my now three-decade love affair with industrial music. (We're talking mostly Nine Inch Nails here, but I appreciate the imitators as well.)
5) Another rejected title for this post deserves its own separate entry. The title would have been something like "No problem with a big ending," because during the film, I realized that wild endings that don't work for everybody -- which is how my wife felt about this ending, despite saying she "really, really liked" the film -- don't seem to sidetrack me too much. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but I think both my #1 of 2018 and my #1 of 2020 -- First Reformed and I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- ended in ways that left some viewers perplexed, and may have ultimately turned them against the movie. For me, the ending of First Reformed is perfect, though I am a little less sold on both Ending Things and The Substance. With Charlie Kaufman's film, it's more "I love it despite the perplexing ending." With Fargeat's film, it's "I don't know if she needed to go that extra step" -- you'll know what I'm talking about if you've seen The Substance -- "but I'm glad she just decided to go all out." And this viewing made me sure I was glad.
I actually think I had other things to say, but some of them have escaped my head. Besides, you know I love this movie. I thought it was important to let you know, though, that I may love it even more on the second viewing.
Because second viewings of favorite films do create some trepidation in us. What if it's not as good as I thought it was?
In the case of The Substance, it was as good as I thought it was -- in fact, it was better than I thought it was. All that time I spent slightly fretting about whether a better 2024 movie would come along was wasted fretting, because it should have been evident to me that this was my #1 from the moment I saw it. In fact, I'm now wondering if it has a serious leg up on other films from this decade -- something I think of now that we are closer to the end of the 2020s than the beginning.
And fortunately, I had an excellent stream of it on Stan to help confirm that.
Okay, now it's really time for The Substance to go in the penalty box.
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