Appreciate These Fine Sets of:

• Talented Actors
• Twentieth Anniversaries
• Trashy Art
• Tawdry Assassins
• … and Jason Reitman’s latest! (shrug)

Thanks to Terrific Assistants wallflower and Son of Griff for contributing this week! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

For Dazed, Nick Chen talks with director Coralie Fargeat and stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley about The Substance:

A further parallel with The Substance, though, is with her 2014 short Reality+, in which a man inserts a chip into his brain to temporarily attain a perfect physique. “It’s a theme I’ve lived with for a long time because, as a woman, it shapes your relationship with the world,” says Fargeat. “When I create, they’re different branches of a tree from the same root.” We all know what Cronenbergian refers to. Is there such a thing a Fargeatian? “Coralie pushes the envelope of reality,” says Moore. “In Revenge, when the girl falls, you’re like: she couldn’t have lived through that. Then she gets up. Coralie creates totally unique worlds that are parallel to our own world.” “Fargeatian would be that it’s bloody,” says Qualley. “And there’s tits and butts.”

At The New Yorker, Doreen St. Felix reports on the world finally catching up to The Solute and Jane Campion’s In the Cut:

In an era where we crave abject pleasure on the screen, “In the Cut” is ripe for reclamation. It will screen at the Metrograph, in New York, next month, as part of a series that equates the film’s study of female subjectivity with that of Chantal Akerman’s “Je Tu Il Elle.” The movie that “killed” Meg Ryan’s career increasingly has its protectors, who argue that it is a masterpiece, a “vital subversion of male gaze” that ought to have made her stardom more complex. Last year, in an episode of “The Letterboxd Show” podcast pegged to the film’s twentieth anniversary, Campion expressed appreciation for these defenders, though she lamented how long it took for audiences to come around. “The turn took so long, like twenty years, that I gave up,” she said.

Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri talks to Brian De Palma about the initial and current public reactions to Body Double:

[De Palma]: I think why my type of movies last so long is they’re very cinematic. Cinema kind of died with celluloid, because you don’t have the same cinematographers anymore. You don’t have film anymore. It is now completely dominated by the writers and showrunners, and the movies and shows are basically radio plays, full of people talking to each other. Plus they’re all shooting digitally, so it doesn’t look very interesting. That form of cinema went out with celluloid. That’s why I think people look fondly upon these movies, because they’re quite stunning visually, and you don’t see that anymore.

Again at Vulture, Jen Chaney wonders if Ryan Murphy needed to make his Netflix series on the Menendez Brothers so sexy?

One could argue that the incest storyline was included with a higher purpose in mind. […]

As the series points out, the Menendez brothers earned plenty of admirers who sent them loving letters and provocative photos while they were in prison awaiting trial. Those women — the series implies it was almost entirely women — didn’t fear these guys. They idolized them, and Monsters initially goads us into understanding those feelings. Then it tries to go a step further by adding an erotic layer to the nature of the relationship between the brothers. Murphy and co. are trying extra hard to make us horny for murderers, something they’ve done more than once on American Horror Story and in Dahmer. But they’ve trafficked in this territory so often that it’s difficult to see this as meaningful meta-commentary on the public’s perverse attraction to murder stories. You can’t insightfully criticize people for watching porn while giving them more pornography to watch.

This Saturday Night you’ll be able to watch Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night! Crooked Marquee‘s Jason Bailey is not impressed:

Reitman and Kenan have done enough of their research to plug in little details that will delight the comedy nerds (hi), like the staff’s insistence that they’re doing “sketches” and not “skits,” or the role Johnny Carson and his demands played in the show’s green light. But there’s also only so much drama and urgency to draw from here, and after a while, the screenwriters start ginning stuff up, with increasingly hard-to-swallow results; did they actually think anyone would believe that Michaels himself was initially going to lead “Weekend Update,” and spontaneously handed it to Chevy Chase mere moments before they went live? I’m a sucker, folks, but I’m not a dipshit.