Demi Moore is getting her due thanks to Metrograph.
The “Substance” actress and Hollywood icon is being honored by Metrograph with a five-film series of Moore’s most beloved features, as curated by the theater. Titled “We Want Moore,” the mini festival begins September 13.
“The rapturous reception of Demi Moore’s performance in Coralie Fargeat’s ‘The Substance’ at this year’s Cannes Film Festival seems to have reminded many people that the New Mexico-born actress is a bona fide movie star — not just in terms of box office receipts and magazine cover shoots, but in her seemingly effortless ability to command the screen every time she walks into frame,” the Metrograph press statement reads. “In ‘We Want Moore,’ we’ve brought together some other timely reminders.”
Selected films screening in 35mm include Moore’s iconic turns in “Ghost,” “Indecent Proposal,” and “Striptease,” which Moore recently told Variety was one of her most under-appreciated performances.
“I did ‘Striptease’ and ‘G.I. Jane’ back to back. If anything in this industry has ever been stacked against me, it was having those two films come out at the same time and becoming the highest-paid actress on top of that,” Moore said. “That moment was so powerful for me because it wasn’t just about me; it was about changing the playing field for all women. But because I was portraying a stripper, I betrayed women. And because I played a soldier, I betrayed men.”
She continued, “The narrative quickly became ‘Well, she’s only getting paid that number because she’s playing a stripper.’ It hit me really hard. But at the same time, I understood that anybody who steps out first is going to take the hit. That goes for anybody challenging the status quo.”
“We Want Moore” runs from September 13 to September 29, with select encore screenings to follow.
Check out the full lineup below, with language provided by Metrograph, and read Moore’s interview with IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio here.
DISCLOSURE
dir. Barry Levinson, 1994, 128 min, 35mm
The virtual reality scene in Levinson’s business class erotic thriller may have aged pretty laughably, but Disclosure represents a vaulting improvement over the Michael Crichton potboiler about sexual harassment in the world of Seattle big tech that it adapts, thanks in no small part to a cracking Ennio Morricone score, a screenplay tune-up from Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show), and the lead performances by Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, he a hotheaded exec, she his sexually assertive newly promoted superior and onetime girlfriend at “DigiCom,” where the two of them become locked in a “he said, she said” legal battle that gets mighty ugly, with major repercussions threatened in a planned corporate merger. Pure pulp performed with rare vigor and style.
GHOST
dir. Jerry Zucker, 1990, 127 min, 35mm
A sleeper phenom that would become the top-grossing film of 1990, Zucker’s irresistible, poignant supernatural romance has Patrick Swayze as the titular spirit, a Manhattan banker slain in what appeared to be a random stick-up who enlists the aid of Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), a charlatan psychic startled to discover she’s actually the real thing, in order to inform his bereaved girlfriend, ceramic artist Molly (Demi Moore), that his killer is now out looking for her. Swayze and Moore have enough crackling chemistry to elevate potential schmaltz to the level of the sublime, aided considerably by Maurice Jarre’s swooning score (and a little help from The Righteous Brothers) as well as Goldberg’s Academy Award-winning performance, a rare custom fit for her unclassifiable comic talents.
INDECENT PROPOSAL
dir. Adrian Lyne, 1993, 117 min, DCP
Lyne, the doyen of the erotic thriller, created an international popular phenomenon with this drama about two happily married former high school sweethearts turned middle-class strivers, Diana and David Murphy, played by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, who take a crapshoot trip to Las Vegas when their finances go south, and are faced with an ultimatum from dashing high-roller Robert Redford: one million much-needed dollars to the couple for one night with Diana. Moore’s performance does much to invest the film with a “genuine romantic spirit” [Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times] with valuable assists coming courtesy Seymour Cassel as Gage’s chauffeur and Oliver Platt as the Murphy’s oleaginous divorce lawyer.
MARGIN CALL
dir. J. C. Chandor, 2011, 107 min, 35mm
Chandor (All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year) made his auspicious feature debut with this Sundance standout, a story of slow-spreading panic in the workplace set almost entirely over a fraught 24-hour period at a Wall Street investment bank during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Demi Moore, playing the head of the bank’s risk management division and the lone female exec in an ensemble cast that boasts Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and other notables slipping into day trader suits and suspenders, gives a beautifully restrained performance as a woman forced to hold her own amidst a scrum of macho know-it-all colleagues. “One of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made. It’s about corporate manners—the protocols of hierarchy, the rituals of power, and, most of all, the difficulty of confronting flagrant habits of speculation with truth.” —The New Yorker
STRIPTEASE
dir. Andrew Bergman, 1996, 115 min, 35mm
Newly-divorced and struggling to gain custody of her daughter, Moore turns to exotic dancing to pay the bills, and after Burt Reynolds’ incognito congressman stirs up a fuss at the club where she works, she gets in over her head in a half-baked blackmail scheme. Sneered at on release, today Striptease can be seen as the faithful adaptation from Carl Hiaasen’s out-there novel that it is, a study in sexual bartering and power brokering in sunny, sleazy south Florida.
