Who doesn’t like a good headline that is formulated as a question?

Or as an introductory sentence in a newsletter?

Sometimes the answer to this question is controversial. In other cases, such as my colleague Bill Addison’s review of the cozy restaurant Stir Crazy on Melrose Avenue, the answer is quite clear. “Aren’t small restaurants the best restaurants?” Yes. Yes, they are. Bill writes: “I’m not thinking of the busy caves that equate confinement and claustrophobia with exclusivity, but of the small refuges where we can feel safe and secure. The spaces that shield our bodies and minds from the big world for a few hours.”

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope’s Friday (and occasionally Monday) newsletter, and the guy who sings “Hold me closer / tiny diner,” because who doesn’t need a place to escape to every now and then? Especially one with a good tomato salad.

Demi Moore returns in “The Substance”

My favorite Demi Moore performance is her reading of her 2019 memoir, Inside Out, a candid memoir of her chaotic childhood and the good and bad choices she made in her career and personal life. I love her voice — literally, the expressive way she reads the book over the course of 6½ hours — and the uninhibited way she talks about her life.

Moore’s new film, The Substance, is in theaters today, and it won’t be for everyone. A blood-soaked body horror film that looks at how Hollywood marginalizes women over a certain age, The Substance manages to be both primal and compassionate, devastating and insightful.

Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a star on the wrong side of 50, fired from her retro fitness show and so desperate she considers undergoing a backyard makeover. Soon Elisabeth has a clone, Sue (Margaret Qualley), young and toned. To make the science work, Elisabeth and Sue must switch places every seven days. But there would be no movie if that went smoothly, and as the situation begins to deteriorate, writer-director Coralie Fargeat ramps up the gore and gruesomeness to epic levels. It’s truly ugly. And that’s the point.

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

“When I finished the film, it felt, in a really positive way, like I had a reason for committing to it – like I had an itch I needed to scratch,” Qualley said. “I feel a certain freedom after going through that experience.”

Moore agreed. “That deep reminder to appreciate who you are, how you are and where you are became more and more apparent as the process went on,” she said. “And not just the outside. Actually, all the internal things that make us who we are that we often overlook. And the journey that got us to where we are now.”

But as I said, it’s not for everyone. In her review for The Times, Amy Nicholson writes: “I can’t think of another Cannes-winning film that seems so indifferent to its own script. A native French speaker, Fargeat has trimmed the dialogue to what feels like 10 pages, and much of it is recycled in flashbacks. Essentially, Fargeat is a remix artist, building the film like a medley of her own DVDs of ‘The Fly’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and sleazy music videos from the early 2000s. She parades her influences like a plastic surgery client who wants Angelina’s lips and Charlize’s nose.”

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

Demi Moore plays the lead role in “The Substance”.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Goodbye, JD Souther

After JD Souther died this week, my colleague Amy Kaufman wrote in one of the Times’ Slack channels, “Vada is a father in ‘My Girl 2’ and yes, I’m the only person who recognizes him from that,” to which I could only respond, “Also, he almost separated Hope and Michael in ‘Thirtysomething’ and yes, I’m the only person who recognizes him from that.”

Of course, Souther is best known for his work as a songwriter and musician; he contributed to several of the Eagles’ best and most successful songs (“New Kid in Town,” a beautiful song about the transience of fame and love, is a personal favorite) and his own wonderful 1979 hit, “You’re Only Lonely.”

My buddy Mikael Wood wrote about Souther’s death, noting that Souther appeared onstage with the Eagles in January at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, where Don Henley introduced him as part of the “tight-knit community of songwriters and singers” that he and the Eagles’ Glenn Frey turned to in the ’70s “when we got stuck on a song or were trying to start new material.”

I was at that concert with Mikael. Have nine months passed this year already? Fame and love aren’t the only things that are fleeting.

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

(Mark Davis / WireImage via Getty Images)