Tag: movies

Movie review: Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

My wife and I went to see the new movie Marty Supreme at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. It’s on many Best Picture lists. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film a 94% positive rating, says the director/co-writer Josh Safdie had “the uncanny gift of crafting extraordinary stories from life’s most mundane moments.”

This is a movie about “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” His greatness lies in his skill at ping-pong or table tennis. His “hell and back” is almost entirely of his own making.

It is very loosely based on a guy named Marty Reisman. Reisman acknowledged that some elements in the movie were accurate, including the scenes with the Harlem Globetrotters.

You want to root for the underdog in a sports movie, and ultimately, this is one. Rudy should make it on the Notre Dame team. Ray should have people come to his Field of Dreams. 

Or maybe it’s not. Critic Alan Zilberman wrote: “Safdie’s film is less of a sports drama and more of an anxiety-fueled nightmare, a sustained effort to put the audience into the mental and physical space of a fast-talking operator who only tells the truth when it is convenient.” True enough. 

Unfortunately, I found I didn’t care if Marty “made it” or not because Marty is an ass who uses his friends, his family, women, and total strangers to achieve his goal.  The fact that he hates his job as a shoe salesman, which he’s pretty good at, might have made him more likable. But no. 

Shark Tank!

The character I liked the most is rich guy Milton Rockwell, played by the Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who serves a demeaning yet oddly justified punishment. There’s a New York Times article, How Kevin O’Leary Made His ‘Marty Supreme’ Character More Cutthroat, which is an interesting read.

Director Josh Safdie likes to use non-actors in his films. He’d watched a TED Talk Pico Iyer  delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and “came away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952.” 

I will say that the table tennis play was reasonably entertaining. 

But at the end, with the seeming payoff, I didn’t care. I didn’t believe that the final event transformed Marty. Partly, the 2.5 hours were too long. The late, great Roger Ebert  noted that “no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.”

My blogging buddy J. Eric Smith wrote that he hadn’t seen Marty Supreme and won’t “Oscar voters (and the marketing shills who serve them) fall in love with certain performances/actors/musicians in ways that are absolutely inexplicable to me, often creating eye-rolling results in their awards. Currently/recently, among my film peeves, I’d say that the deeply, smugly, annoying Timothée Chalamet appearing as an Oscar contender/fave multiple years in a row is madness.” Sure, even though he spent an hour a day to get his acne-scarred face.

As someone who liked Chalamet in the Dylan film A Complete Unknown, I nevertheless get Eric’s point. The Rotten Tomatoes audience was only 83% positive about Marty Supreme. If you see it and like it, please let me know why.

Movie review: Hamnet

director Chloé Zhao.

My wife and I looked forward to seeing the new movie Hamnet. So in mid-December, we went to the Spectrum 8 in Albany.

This is what I liked: the mysterious nature of Agnes (Jessie Buckley), who is a healer and a bit of a mystic. Unsurprisingly, Will (Paul Mescal) is captivated by her. There’s definitely serious chemistry there. After she becomes pregnant, and despite resistance from both their families, they marry.

Wait. Do you know what this sounds like? The actual courtship of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, who got married in 1582. The story is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. Due to the non-standardization of  English in 16th and 17th-century England, Anne/Agnes, and for that matter Hamnet/Hamlet, are essentially the same.  

This is something we unfortunately did not like: the dialogue was often hard to follow. Sometimes, it was volume, sometimes the words, occasionally both. And it wasn’t just us; I could hear other people in the theater whisper, “What did they say?”

Language barrier

I have a working theory about this. From the Times of London: “Chloé Zhao…, said she understood only a third of the language and depended on [Mescal] to guide her on set.” She said: “When I was on set of Hamnet, when Paul was delivering his speech, I only understand a third of it, technically, because I don’t understand what those words mean.”

Further,  she noted, ” Paul said to me, ‘Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body, the language is written like that.’”

I think there is an element of truth in that. Still, I’m more aligned with Adrian Chiles in the Guardian. “You know what that is, don’t you? That’s balls, that’s what that is. Of course, you need to understand what’s being said and what’s going on. At least I do. I’ve often been told not to trouble myself with such trifling details. Just let the artistry wash over you, I’m told, and consider how it makes me feel. Well, I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me feel confused, rather inadequate, frustrated, even angry, ultimately disengaged, and therefore bored. Just plain bored.”

I was confused and frustrated, for sure. Yet there was enough in the two crucial moments to sustain me. One is mentioned in the IMDb description and on Anne Hathaway’s Wikipedia page. (Yet there were people in the theater who were audibly confused.)

The other critical moment is the play’s production, which, interestingly, was MUCH easier to hear. 

It was good enough that I might watch it again at home. Young Jacobi Jupe as the title character was quite good. But I would turn on the captions. Critics were 86% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, with audiences at 93% thumbs-up.  

Movie review: Grand Hotel (1932)

Garbo, Crawford and TWO Barrymores

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see the film Grand Hotel. I didn’t review it then because I was struggling for a narrative.

It came across, at least early on, as stagey and melodramatic. From Wikipedia: “Alfred Rushford Greason of Variety, comparing the film to the stage production, wrote, “[it] may not entirely please the theatregoers who were fascinated by its deft stage direction and restrained acting, but it will attract and hold the wider public to which it is now addressed.”

Once the story started revealing itself, it became more interesting. Doctor Otternschlag (Lewis Stone), a permanent resident of the Grand Hotel in Berlin, observes, “People coming, going. Nothing ever happens.” He is proven wrong on the latter point.

Felix von Gaigern (John Barrymore) has the title of baron, but the assets from his position are spent. He survives as a gambler and sometimes a thief. Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore) has a fatal condition and decides to enjoy his remaining days at the luxurious hotel.

General Director Preysing (Wallace Beery) seems to be a decent industrialist trying to close an important deal. He hires aspiring actress Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) as his stenographer.

Russian ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is no longer packing theaters, causing her despair.

Most of these folk interact. As we get to know them, we find that the thief has a conscience and that the industrialist is not as nice as he initially seems.

Kael says

The Times of London wrote: “Even all this brilliance of acting and even the remarkable ingenuity of the production cannot disguise the simple artifice of the whole construction, which seems all the more obvious in a plotless story designed to show a section of life.” I wouldn’t say plotless. It was more that the strands began to overlap.

The late, great Pauline Kael (1919-2001) wrote in the New Yorker: “There is every reason to reject Grand Hotel as an elaborate chunk of artifice… But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, ‘stars’ were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.”

Notice the word “artifice” in both quotes. Yes, the acting seemed, at times, overly affected. Then I remembered that this movie was released in the early days of film with audible dialogue.

So I was glad I saw it. It has Garbo’s “I want to be alone” quote. Two brothers in the legendary Barrymore family are represented; Drew Barrymore is John’s granddaughter.

Sunday Stealing — Stranded on an Island

books, movies, songs

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week, we’re stealing from Jess Riley Writes. She puts a unique spin on the “desert island” concept by allowing us three choices in three categories.

The Desert Island Meme

You’re stranded alone on a desert island …

1) Which three BOOKS could you read over and over again?
One would be the Bible. This is less a theological requirement than the fact that it is very long. In fact, I’d probably opt for the Douay-Rheims Bible, since it contains seven Deutero-Canonical books that are missing from most non-Catholic Bibles, such as 1st and 2nd Maccabees.

When I was a kid, I tried to read the whole Bible more than once, but I was unsuccessful. So I’d start over; I read Genesis a LOT. I have read the Bible all the way through systematically at least thrice, c 1977, c 1985, and c 1997. Participating with the Bible Guys at church this century, I may have managed a fourth. I wrote about the vagaries of the Bible in 2013.

The World Almanac. It is not great literature, of course, but it has a lot of stuff. Before I married my current bride, there was a gathering, and we were supposed to answer questions about each other. I didn’t know that 100 Years of Solitude was her favorite book, but she instantly picked the World Almanac as mine. I wrote about it in 2016, but honestly, I haven’t gotten one since 2018, ending a 40+ year streak.

Top Pop Singles by Joel Whitburn. Yes, it shows the chart action, but it also has background info about the artists. 
Cinema
2) Which three MOVIES could you watch over and over again?

I went to this post and decided on King of Hearts/Le roi de coeur (1966),  West Side Story (1961), and Field of Dreams (1989), but I could have picked others.

3) Which three SONGS could you listen to over and over again?

How much may I stretch the definition of “song”? Off the top, I thought of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, Dvorak’s 9th Symphony (New World), and the Mozart Requiem. 

If I have to pick actual songs? Oh, it is too difficult! Okay. The Boxer – Simon and Garfunkel, which someone described here; Biko – the last song on Peter Gabriel’s excellent third album;  and Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel) – Billy Joel. They are all sad songs.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

the album Nebraska

It occurred to me after seeing the movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and then reading the heavily negative reviews (Rotten Tomatoes was only 59% positive), either my wife and I saw a different film or they were had different expectations.

Of course, we watched the movie at the Spectrum Theater in Albany. I was very much taken by young Bruce’s relationship with his father, and his great affection for his mother. The Boss talked about that during his brief Broadway run Springsteen on Broadway.

Some of the reviewers were saying this film was not worthy of an artist such as Bruce Springsteen. But the fact that the singer was heavily involved in giving feedback to actor Jeremy Allen White who portrayed the Boss was significant. Clearly, it was real enough and meaningful enough to him that he wanted to share this narrative of his depression.

The movie is about the period after Bruce had released the River album in 1980, a big double album hit that included the #5 pop hit Hungry Heart, followed by months on the road. Naturally, the record company was looking forward to the next chart mover.

When he decides to veer into uncommercial territory, recording Nebraska onto a cassette, barren and unpolished, the people on his label didn’t know what to make of that. He didn’t even want his picture on the cover. For more info about the album, go here.

Reviews

One of the positive reviews: “It’s an admirable adaptation that sometimes goes out of its way to avoid the usual cliches and pitfalls of the typical big-screen rock flick. But it also wants to be one.” That’s a fair assessment.

Another: “Jeremy Allen White captures the essence of Springsteen. To its credit, it’s not the conventional biopic of his whole career, but the problem is that the section they picked is not compelling to a normal viewer. Springsteen fans will find it more intriguing.” I’ll admit to having quite a number of the albums by the Boss. But my wife, who is at best a casual Boss fan and has never heard Nebraska, was nevertheless captivated. 

A negative review: “I have to think Bruce Springsteen was a little more exciting to be around during the creation of Nebraska. No way he was this dull.” Of course, I can’t answer that, but I have known depressed people, and it seems plausible. 

The fans were more supportive, 83% positive. I was very affected by Deliver Me From Nowhere, maybe even a little teary-eyed. 

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