Ready to quit smoking?

Who doesn’t like a good headline posed as a question?

Or as an opening sentence written in the newsletter, for this?

Sometimes the answer to the question is up for debate. Other times, like my colleague Bill Edison’s review of the cozy Melrose Avenue restaurant Stir Crazy, it’s practically open and shut. “Aren’t restaurants the smallest?” Yes. Yes they are. As Bill writes, “I’m not thinking of small spaces that equate crampedness and claustrophobia with exclusivity, but of little sanctuaries where we can feel safe. Rooms that protect our bodies and minds from the big world for a few hours.”

I’m Glenn Whipp, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The About Fridays (and sometimes Mondays), and the guy who sings “Hold Me Closer/Little Kitchen” because he doesn’t need shelter from the occasional storm? Especially one with a good tomato salad.

Demi Moore is back in The Substance

My favorite Demi Moore performance is her reading. Memories of 2019, “Inside” a candid memoir of his troubled childhood and the good and bad decisions he made in his career and personal life. I love his voice, basically, the way he talks about reading a book in 6 and a half hours, and the way he talks about his life.

Moore has a new movie, The Substance, in theaters today, and it’s not for everyone. A blood-soaked body horror film that looks at how Hollywood singles out women after they reach a certain age, The Substance manages to be both primal and poignant, gentle and revealing.

Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a star on the wrong side of 50 who’s been fired from her retro-style fitness show and is so desperate she’s considering committing to a face-lift rejuvenation regimen. Elizabeth soon has a clone, Sue (Margaret Qualley), who’s young and strong. For the science to work, Elizabeth and Sue must switch places every seven days. But it wouldn’t be a movie if it continued smoothly, and as things get worse, writer-director Coralie Farget ramps up the pain and horror to epic levels. It’s really ugly. And that’s the point.

Emily Zemler spoke to Moore, Qualley and Farget for The Times in an interview that turned into an “hour-long therapy session.”

“In a real, honest way, finishing the film felt like there was a reason I signed up to do it, like there was an itch I needed to scratch,” Qualley said. “I feel a certain freedom having gone through this experience.”

Moore echoed that. “Those deep reminders to appreciate who you are and where you are resonated more and more as the process went on,” she said. “And not just the outside. Actually, all those things within who we are that we often overlook. And the journey it took to get to where you were.”

But as I mentioned, it’s not for everyone. Commenting in The Times, Amy Nicholson writes: “I can’t think of another Cannes screenwriting winner who is so blasé about his script. Farji, a native French speaker, has reduced the dialogue to 10 pages, and much of it is recycled in flashbacks. Indeed, Fargeat is a remix artist who created the film as a combination of her DVDs of “The Fly” and “Sunset Boulevard” and the clever music videos from the early deals. She shows her clout as a plastic surgery client by demanding Angelina’s lips and Charlize’s nose.

Let me know what you think if you see it this weekend.

Greetings, JD Souter

After J.D. Sauter died this week, my colleague Amy Kaufman wrote in one of the Times Slack channels: “Wada’s father in ‘My Daughter 2,’ and yes, I’m the only one who credited him for that” — which I just added. I can answer — “He also almost broke up with Hope and Michael around 30, and yes, I’m the only one who credits him for that.”

Of course, Sauter is best known for his work as a singer and musician, having co-written some of the Eagles’ best and most important songs (“New kid in town” Beauty is about the fleeting nature of fame and love, a personal favorite) and a beautiful 1979 hit “You’re just alone.”

My friend Michael Wood wrote about Sauter’s passing, noting that in January Sauter appeared onstage with the Eagles at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, where Don Henley introduced him as part of a “community of songwriters and singers” that he and Eagles Glenn Frey referred to in the ’70s as “when we were stuck on a song or trying to start new material.”

I was at that concert with Mikael. Has it been nine months this year already? Fame and love are not just passing things.

JD Souther, who performed in Los Angeles in 2012, died this week at the age of 78.

(Mark Davis/WireImage via Getty Images)