24 Hours of Movies: Demi!

 by Patrick Bromley

A marathon of movies devoted to one of the great movie stars of my lifetime.

The critical and commercial success of this year's The Substance suggests the coming of a full-on Demissaince, She's an actor I've always liked (and was one of my earliest celebrity crushes) but one who rarely gets recognized for her talents as opposed to the stories surrounding her movies -- shaving her head, stripping on Letterman, the Vanity Fair cover, etc. Let's give Demi her due.

10 am - About Last Night... (1986, dir. Edward Zwick)

While we won't be starting at the beginning, we'll start near the beginning. This '80s romance, based on the David Mamet play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, casts Brat Packers Moore and Rob Lowe as a young couple navigating their way through romance and co-habitation in the Windy City. The two stars are tremendously appealing in a story of people just trying to their best -- no villains, no mean behavior, no misunderstandings, just mistakes made by young lovers afraid of being in love too fast. This movie isn't singularly responsible for making Demi Moore a star, but it is, I suspect, when people really started to take her seriously.

Noon - Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003, dir. McG)

Weird that this was kind of billed as Demi Moore's "comeback" movie despite it being released 20 years ago when she was still a big star. She's -- spoilers -- the big bad in McG's follow-up to his surprisingly good big-screen Charlie's Angels reboot. I haven't seen the sequel in a number of years, so programming it into this marathon is my excuse to revisit it because I remember liking it a good deal less than the original. In my memory, Demi Moore was the best thing about it. Her casting is very clever, as she is at once able to pass the torch to a new generation of starlets while also trying to kill them for being younger and more marketable. It predates The Substance by 20 years but is talking about some of the same things.

2 pm - A Few Good Men (1992, dir. Rob Reiner)

I love that at the peak of her post-Ghost powers, Demi Moore was savvy and self-aware enough to surround herself with the very best and join one of the most amazing ensemble casts of the 1990s under the direction of one of the two best ensemble directors of the time. She doesn't have a great part to play in the movie, but her very presence elevates the movie to a certain pedigree (as does the presence of Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Kevin Bacon, Keifer Sutherland...you can go about 20 names deep into this cast and still strike gold). They could have probably cast someone of lesser talent and fame, but the filmmakers' Hammondonian insistence on sparing no expense suggested that this was a project with which everyone wanted to be associated.

4 pm - Mortal Thoughts (1991, dir. Alan Rudolph)

For as much as they were the power couple of the late '80s and early '90s, Demi Moore made only one movie with then-husband Bruce Willis, and it's fascinating that it's this movie. Part neo-noir, part "women's picture" throwback, the movie tells the story of two Jersey hairdressers (Moore and Glenne Headly) who are questioned by police when one's abusive husband (Willis) is killed. It's a really good movie, but pretty non-commercial and finds Moore and (especially) Willis playing very much against type at a time when they were both huge stars. Moore also produced for the first time, stepping up to pay the cast and crew out of her own pocket after producers tried to shut the movie down because the original director (Claude Kervan) was fired. Stories such as this make me like her even more.

6 pm - G.I. Jane (1997, dir. Ridley Scott)

This military drama, combined with Striptease the year before, represents the apex of Demi Moore testing her celebrity and pushing it as far as she could albeit in very different ways. Once again transforming herself physically (which might have gotten talked about more if people weren't so busy praising Robert DeNiro and Christian Bale for the same thing) to play the fictional first woman to join an elite Navy squad (not unlike the SEALs), Moore got more attention for shaving her head than for her very good performance in a movie that's also pretty good. It's unfortunate that the disappointing box office was further evidence of her commercial decline, because both she and the film deserved better. Few actors who achieved her level of success in the '90s were willing to take the chances she took.

8:15 pm - Ghost (1990, dir. Jerry Zucker)

Let's devote the Primetime Pizza slot to the movie that made Demi Moore the biggest actress in the country, a sleeper phenomenon that no one really saw coming. I certainly didn't, and was dragged kicking and screaming to see it with a group of friends as a kid. I loved it, of course, and went on to see it six more times before it left theaters. I don't love it like I did as a kid, but that's on me and not the movie. Patrick Swayze carries the movie as the titular ghost and Whoopi Goldberg's supporting performance won the Oscar, but without Moore as the film's beating heart I'd argue it doesn't achieve the level of cultural and financial success it did. When she lifts her face and lets one tear roll down her cheek? Money in the bank.

10:30 pm - The Seventh Sign (1988, dir. Carl Schultz)

We'll pivot to horror as Demi Moore stars in a too-soggy supernatural offering as a pregnant woman who learns of the coming apocalypse. As a Demi fan, I like her performance in the movie because she commits (as does the movie, which puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to biblical catastrophes), but the rest of the performances are uneven and director Carl Schultz has a better handle on the visuals than on the drama. I like that Demi never totally turned her back on the genre; it's where she started and where she eventually returned, as we'll see in just a few hours.

12:15 am - Parasite (1982, dir. Charles Band)

The midnight slot goes to a relic from early in Demi Moore's career -- her first feature starring role, to be exact. She plays a lemon farmer (!!) who befriends a scientist carrying a deadly parasite in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Future Empire Pictures/Full Moon Features CEO Charles Band directs -- in 3-D, no less -- and the movie is mostly junk, but it's the kind of junk that goes down perfectly at this point in the marathon. According to Band's autobiography Confessions of a Puppet Master, he and Demi Moore entered into a relationship around this time, so there's that.

1:45 am - Nothing But Trouble (1991, dir. Dan Aykroyd)

The only time anyone should watch 1991's Nothing But Trouble -- aka Valkenvania, aka the sole directorial effort of star Dan Aykroyd -- is at 2am after already watching at least 12 hours of movies. It's the kind of comedy that only works if you're not sure if you're dreaming. Moore and Chevy Chase play a couple of assholes who get stranded in a crazy town; John Candy plays multiple roles and Aykroyd himself appears buried under prosthetics (and a penis nose) as The Judge. If it were at all possible, I would program the long-rumored "gore cut" of the movie, which was at one point crazy violent before someone decided the gore might not play with the comedy (disagree) or that the movie should be a PG-13. I have no idea why Demi Moore agreed to do this movie.

3:15 am - The Substance (2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat)

Ok it's a bit of a cheat because it's so new, but the movie is now streaming on Mubi and VOD so I say it's fair game to watch during the overnight section of our marathon. Demi Moore's latest comeback has earned her possible Oscar talk for the first time in nearly 30 years, all the more amazing since it's in a horror movie -- and not just any horror movie, but one of the most insanely over-the-top and disgustingly goopy horror movies in the last 30 years. Her performance in the movie is fearless and introspective and personal and sad and funny and this is currently my favorite movie of the year, perfect for this time of night/morning. My head will explode if this winds up getting any real awards consideration.

5:45 am - One Crazy Summer (1986, dir. Savage Steve Holland)

As we shake off the overnight cobwebs, let's wake up to some Savage Steve Holland absurdity. This is my second favorite of the SSH trilogy (behind Better Off Dead but ahead of How I Got Into College), reuniting the director with John Cusack in the tale of a summer romance and a boat race. Demi Moore seems a little lost and miserable here as Cusack's muse, but she plays a musician and we do get to hear her sing, which carries a certain novelty. The movie is a ton of fun -- one of my favorite teen comedies of the '80s -- and will hopefully help return us to Earth after The Substance makes our heads explode.

7:15 am - Striptease (1996, dir. Andrew Bergman)

I don't think we can program a Demi Moore marathon without including Striptease, because it's one of the movies she basically willed to happen during her superstar '90s run: she stars, she produces, she helped shape the material (sanding the rough edges off of Carl Hiaasen's source novel to make the main character more sympathetic), she sculpted and reshaped her body knowing that it would be not only on display in the film but that it would be at the center of all the marketing. It's too bad she worked so hard and did so much in the service of a star vehicle that's not really worth her talents. 

9:15 am - Now and Then (1995, dir. Lesli Linka Glatter)

We'll cap off our marathon with a '90s YA dramedy movie I love despite not being the target audience at all. Moore produced and narrates (as well as stars in the wraparound, playing the adult version of Gaby Hoffman) this story of four best friends who come of age in 1970 Indiana. Though it's too episodic and all the gimmicky adult stuff (of which Moore is a part) isn't needed at all, the performances of all four young actors -- three of them well-known child actors and future stars -- are incredibly winning and strong, and I like Glatter's sense of time and place. Maybe it's weird to wrap up a Demi Moore marathon with a film in which she plays only a supporting role, but thanks to her role as both producer and narrator, she presence still manages to loom large. Plus it's just a nice movie. Let's end with a nice movie.