BEFORE: So, how about this to prove the "Burned Toast" theorem - because I screwed up and I falsely believed the IMDB when it said that Danny Trejo was in "The Big Empty" and, well, he's just NOT, I had to tear apart my week's schedule and put it back together again, and all films with either Danny Trejo or Kelsey Grammer were put on the back-burner, which is FINE because I didn't have enough days to watch them all anyway - it's best to try again in a few months, I've found.
The upside is that the new connective tissue includes "Marty Supreme", and I was just talking about the Safdie Brothers' break-up three days ago when I watched "The Smashing Machine". Whatever entity controls the chain (even if that entity is the RFK Jr.-like worm inside my brain) must have been paying attention, because it suggested tonight's film, which I just recorded last month and put on DVD last week, and I wasn't planning to watch it until maybe right after the Doc Block (with Fran Drescher carrying over from "Spinal Tap II") but now LOOK HERE it's risen to the top of the list out of necessity, because the brainworm knew that I needed to watch the now-competing Safdie Brothers films close together for comparative purposes. Will I end up on Team Josh or Team Benny? You've gotta admit, three days apart is pretty darn close.
Fred Hechinger carries over from "Thelma".
THE PLOT: Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.
AFTER: Now that I've watched both "The Smashing Machine" and "Marty Supreme", can I just mention that in many ways, the Safdie Brothers' break-up is now even more ironic, because separately they almost made the same damn movie. Essentially, that is, when you break a film down to its essence, it's structure, its raison d'etre, you're going to find that many films are very similar at heart, and I don't just mean cases like "Zootopia 2" and "Bad Guys 2". You can almost DNA test a film sometimes and say, like "OK, this one's a little bit of "Alien" mixed with a bit of "Gravity" or whatever. Each brother made a sports movie, and like I said after "Gridiron Gang", nearly every football film is the same, more or less. Well every SPORTS movie is therefore the same, more or less.
The sport is different, duh, "The Smashing Machine" was about UFC-style free wrestling that came to be called MMA, eventually - while "Marty Supreme" is about table tennis aka "ping pong" which was probably an offensively enough Asian-sounded name to get the sport cancelled BACK THEN so I can't imagine that anyone still calls it "ping pong" anymore, but who knows. In both movies, the main character goes to his first foreign match and doesn't win, and has to learn a valuable lesson about losing gracefully, or that you literally can't win 'em all. Then he comes home to a rather complicated relationship that occupies his time while he's supposed to be training. Then he's got to prove himself worthy of going to the NEXT championship in Japan. See? Same movie, only with different sports, set in different years and with different actors, but also the same. More alike than different, perhaps.
"Marty Supreme" starts in 1952 with Marty Mauser working as a shoe salesman in his uncle's store while also competing professionally as a table tennis player. He wants to be the first American to play in the British open, the sport seems to be taking off in post-war Europe and Asia even faster than it is in the U.S. Marty's also got a deal with a friend to market orange ping-pong balls with his name on them, because they're easier to see against white uniforms. Marty's also having an affair with his childhood friend Rachel, she's married and pregnant, but he doesn't think the baby is his. (You mean he thinks married people still have sex? That doesn't make much sense.) His uncle wants him to manage the shoe store, but Marty just wants to earn enough money to travel to the U.K. and play in the British Open, but when his uncle isn't around to give him the money as agreed, he robs the store at gunpoint to get it - thankfully this won't have any possible repercussions later.
Yes, it's the start of another "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" film, which, again, is nearly every film. Marty could have a nice life managing a shoe store, financially secure enough, only he doesn't want that. He could settle down with a nice single, not-married girl and start a family, but he doesn't want that either. Marty wants what he wants, and he's willing to do just about anything to get it, and he's not really a big repercussions guy - I don't think once in the film he ever stops to think that his actions have consequences and some of them might be negative. Maybe all young people are like this, brash and cocky in their 20's and then in their 30's they pay the price for what they did in their 20's and maybe in their 40's they're a lot smarter. I mean, by the time they're 50 most people have learned how to roll with the punches and so they just swallow all the shit that the universe sends their way, right?
But Marty is in his 20's, so he heads for London without thinking and he seduces an older woman who used to be an actress. He meets her wealthy husband, Milton Rockwell, who is in the pen business, and tries to set up some kind of endorsement deal, but he's not very good at doing that. Marty puts on quite a show in the table tennis semi-finals, but loses the final to Koto Endo, a Japanese player who's also deaf, and somehow this helps him focus, because he can't hear the crowd or any other distractions. Marty's new goal is to focus on the upcoming World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, but he'll have to raise money for his entry fee, expenses, and the $1,500 fine he incurred for fraudulently claiming he was allowed to stay at the Ritz hotel with the judges.
When he returns to New York, he's arrested for stealing from the shoe store (wait, you mean actions DO have consequences?) and his uncle takes the money he won in the U.K., which he was going to use to finance the trip to Japan. The whole very long middle of this film is a kind of fever dream as Marty travels around NYC at night, hustling table tennis games, encountering mobsters, having sex with that actress, and looking for that mobster's lost dog in New Jersey, which he was supposed to have taken to a veterinarian, only he didn't do that. Various schemes to raise money don't work out, like he steals a necklace from the actress, only to learn that it was a worthless prop from her play. He rescues his girlfriend from her abusive husband and takes her to stay at the house of his friend Dion, and this strains the relationship so much that the deal for the orange tennis balls is literally out the window.
Marty keeps making things worse instead of better, though - like by stealing Dion's parents' car to drive to NJ and find that dog, but they get shot at by the farmer who took the dog in. He has sex with the actress again, and she promises to give him a piece of REAL jewelry he can sell, only they need it to bribe the police officers who catch them having sex in public. Nothing seems to work in his favor, and everything is three times more complicated than it needed to be. But again, this is the life Marty chose when he chose to dream and decided he was willing to lie, cheat and steal to achieve that dream. Finally, in order to get to Tokyo in time, he's got to go back to Rockwell, who offered him an exhibition match against Endo, only he's got to agree to LOSE because that would create the most drama. Sure, one day you're coming thisclose to winning the British Open, and a week later you're willing to play in a fixed game just to be able to try and finagle another shot at a championship. Marty's moving forward, sort of, but he's just not LEARNING anything along the way. Is it worth getting a ride to Japan on a private plane if it means he's got to agree to both public and private humiliation? Apparently, yes.
I won't say what happens when Marty finally does make it to Tokyo, either in the exhibition game or in the World Championship itself - but here we do see something stronger than "artist brain" and for lack of any better term we'll call it "athlete brain" today. This is an even stronger sense of entitlement that occurs when an athlete KNOWS they are very good at their sport, maybe even the G.O.A.T. - their brain is telling them that they should be given every chance to compete, that the rules and regulations maybe shouldn't apply to them, and also if someone manages to beat them, they must have cheated or used some secret advantage. You know, because it couldn't POSSIBLY be that you win some and you lose some, since they're the BEST they should win every time and that's the only result that will make them happy - only, will it? Can we think of some athletes that followed this kind of dangerous thinking and then maybe had a sort of destructive career arc? Tiger Woods, maybe? Dennis Rodman? John McEnroe, even Muhammed Ali to some extent?
This film features a large number of cast members who are NOT professional actors - and I think that's a good thing, like, come on, how freakin' hard could it be? I could be an actor (and I have been), you could be an actor, anybody can do it. Here's it's a big bunch of Josh Safdie's friends, also a bunch of real table tennis players, and then a mix of film directors, fashion designers, rappers and also Penn Jillette. I missed seeing Penn when I watched it last night, I'll have to scan through it again to see if I catch his cameo as a farmer. But this also means that with so few real actors, this COULD have been very difficult to link to in the future, now I'm doubly glad for the burned toast, that an opportunity presented itself to link to this film rather quickly, and it's not going to be taking up space on my list for the next three years.
Oh, and I don't think I'm either Team Josh or Team Benny, I'm Team "Whatever It Takes to Make a Better Movie", and if that turns out to be Team Reconciliation, so be it. People said the Gallagher brothers from Oasis would never get back together again and perform, but it happened, we just maybe have to give it some time.
Directed by Josh Safdie (director of "Uncut Gems" and "Good Time")
Also starring Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Love the Coopers"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Hard Eight"), Odessa A'zion, Kevin O'Leary, Tyler the Creator, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Luke Manley, Emory Cohen (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Larry "Ratso" Sloman (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue"), Ralph Colucci (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Hailey Gates (ditto), Mitchell Wenig (ditto), Roman Persits (ditto), Geza Rohrig (last seen in "Resistance"), Koto Kawaguchi, Pico Iyer, John Catsimatidis, Sandra Bernhard (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), George Gervin, Ted Williams, Timo Boll, Penn Jillette (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Isaac Mizrahi (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), David Mamet (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Spenser Granese (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Levon Hawke (last seen in "Blink Twice"), Isaac Simon, Mariann Tepedino, Philippe Petit (last seen in "Man on Wire"), Tracy McGrady, Kemba Walker, Naomi Fry, Ray Tintori, Paul Grimstad (last seen in "One Battle After Another"), Mahadeo Shivraj (last seen in "Good Time"), Devorah Shubowitz, Marinel Tinnirello, Nick Waplington, Nikhil Gowda, Keith Kirkwood, Conn Horgan, Joshua Bennett, John Keating, Ed Malone, Roddy O'Hehir, Michael Cummings, Harvey Shield, Diego Schaaf, Sho Miyazaki, Andy Kai Nagashima, Dennis Creaghan (last seen in "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace"), Francis Dumaurier (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Musto Pelinkovicci (last seen in "On the Rocks"), Marius Tanase, Donato P. Daddario, Frankie Carbone, Lizzi Bougatsos, Lucas Z. Heinrich, Johnny Engle, Jimmy Lindquist, Todd Vulpio (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Johnny Zito, Stephen Dachtera, Brian Marks, Kevin Eccleston, Richard Schlossbach, Emilio El Kilani, Cody Kostro, George J. Katsiavos, Patrick Wiki Morales, Jake Braff, Bill Buell (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Barry Daniels, Garrett Herrmann, Linda Malamy, Edward Puydak, Hector Diaz, Kevin Loreque (last seen in "The Post"), Joseph Cappiello, Joseph Jankauskas, Joris Stuyck, Nancy Shankman, Chris Nelson, Eric Rampulla, Randy Credico, Bob Rubin (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Michael A. Sollecito, Cheryl Flowers-Briggs, Rory Gevis, Mia Humberd-Hilf, Brian Sexton, Rick Garlick, Shingo Aiba, Yasu Suzuki, Tatsuo Ichikawa, Mark Okita, Joe Matsumura, Anna Melody, Ryuku Kina, Jota Ito, Etsuko Enami, Koji Oribe, Rae Maddren, Carolyn Gershenson
with the voices of Alison Bartlett (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Ronald Bronstein (last seen in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You") and Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Mickey 17")
RATING: 6 out of 10 '80's songs (which I think seem a bit out of place in a film set in the 1950's. Right?)
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