Tag: phone number

The Substance

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 20 September 2024
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Director – Coralie Fargeat – 2024 – US – Cert. 18 – 140m

****1/2

Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) hosts a network TV keep fit show, but she’s getting on in years – and so is her audience. The show’s producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) has decided that younger talent is needed in order to attract a younger audience, and gives her the elbow. By a quirk of fate or screenplay, a mailshot about something called The Substance arrives in her penthouse apartment. It’s some sort of beauty product, although the high-end design of the blurb doesn’t explain exactly what it is or what it does. There’s a phone number.

Elizabeth’s identity is bound up with the former show. She calls the number. She engages in conversation with the unseen voice on the other end of the phone. She decides to give The Substance a try. She is told to write down an address. Later, she is sent locker card key number 503 and instructed to collect her package from that address. It turns out to be a derelict entrance with a shutter that only opens part way to about a yard in height, meaning you have to duck under it.… Read the rest

Tags activator, address, aging, back split, bathroom, beauty, beauty product, black comedy gross-out, body horror, box, card key, cardboard box, carpet, classmate, collapse, collect, collection point, Coralie Fargeat, corridor, Cronenberg, cryptic, date, David Cronenberg, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, derelict, dormant, feeding tube, female protagonist, feminise, follow instructions, food pack, genre tropes, gore, greed, grotty, high-end design, Hollywood, Hollywood actress, Hollywood star, home, identity, injection, instruction, instructions, keep fit, Kubrick, liquid food, locker, locker room, mailshot, Margaret Qualley, mayhem, medicine, network special, network TV, new self, new year, no going back, number 503, old self, once every 24 hours, our need to know, package, penthouse apartment, phone, phone number, pick up, prawns, pristine, producer, Prometheus myth, prosthetics make-up, rectangular grid, red dress, respectable and sleazy, restaurant, school, seven days, show, shutter, skin, special effects, stabiliser, Stanley Kubrick, starstruck, switch, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Substance, three parts, transformation, US, use only once, user, voice, wake, younger, youth

Features Live Action Movies

The Conversation

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 14 July 2024
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Director – Francis Ford Coppola – 1974 – US – Cert. 12a – 113m

*****

A surveillance expert records a conversation between two people, then worries about turning the recording over to his corporate client as contracted – 50th anniversary 4K Restoration is out on UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on Monday, July 15th

There’s nothing else quite like The Conversation in cinema.

Union Square, San Francisco. People milling around. Among them, a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) having a conversation. Also in the square, a man in a plastic mac (Gene Hackman). And another man (Michael Higgins) following them around, holding a bag. And, at two separate windows above the square, two long range microphones.

The first man, Harry, enters a nearby van, inside which is his recording assistant Stan (John Cazale). He’s shortly followed by the other man, Paul, who believes the couple spotted him trailing them.

Harry pays a nighttime visit to his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr). She wants him to spill his secrets. He claims he has none. He leaves, with her telling him not to bother to come back.

He goes to work in his office, situated at one end of the floor in an otherwise deserted warehouse.… Read the rest

Tags alienate, alienation, Allen Garfield, analogue sound recording, apartment, assistant, audio, audio quality, audio tape, BFI Southbank, bug, celebrity, Chang’e, change of meaning, Cindy Williams, client, convention, conversation, crowded lift, David Shire, dehumanise, digital sound recording, dream sequence, editor, extra key, failed relationship, following, Francis Ford Coppola, Frederic Forrest, Gene Hackman, girlfriend, guest attendees, Harrison Ford, hearing, hotel; room, industry convention, invasion of personal privacy, jazz, jazz records, John Cazale, landlady, long range microphone, meaning, meeting, mic, Michael Higgins, microphone, mike, obsession, obsessive, office, party, payphone, perception, phone number, piano-only, picture editor, plastic mac, protective, recording, recording tape, relationship, rip off, ripped his flat apart, room number, San Francisco, saxophone, secrets, self-isolated, solitary, sound, sound designer, sound mix, sound source, sound tech, sound technology, spools, spotted, Studio pictures, surveillance, surveillance society, sync, tech, technology, Teri Garr, trailing, Union Square, unlisted, van, volume, Walter Murch, warehouse, workaholic, wreckage

Features Live Action Movies Uncategorized

Swimming With Sharks

Director – George Huang – 1994 – US – Cert. 15 – 93m

*****

A film school graduate’s job with a Hollywood producer turns out to be a nightmare

To the blissfully ignorant outsider, the Hollywood movie business is a glamorous place where dreams come true. In reality, it’s often closer to a personal hell where the aspirant’s dreams are trampled underfoot by passing megalomaniacs. At least, that’s what the nightmarish Swimming With Sharks would have us believe as it cheerfully plunges green film school graduate Guy (Frank Whaley) into an assistant’s job with major Hollywood producer Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey).

Buddy is the sort of boss who tells underlings, “your brain counts as nothing”, then insults them viciously in front of visiting clients. Reasons for insults heaped on Guy include bringing the coffee with the wrong kind of sweetener and leaving at the office the phone number of the starlet wannabe his boss is currently bedding. Further employer vitriol erupts when Buddy’s superior (a welcome if all too brief appearance from veteran Brit Roy Dotrice) notices spelling errors Buddy had earlier refused to allow Guy to correct – in script notes supplied Buddy by Guy but palmed off by Buddy as his own.… Read the rest

Tags coffee, film school graduate, Frank Whaley, glamour, hell, Hollywood, Kevin Spacey, megalomaniac, Michelle Forbes, narcissist, one-liners, parking space, phone number, producer, producer’s assistant, Roy Dotrice, stealing the credit, sweetener, US