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players (anthony harvey, 1979)

Quentin Tarantino thinks Players is unjustly maligned. It's pretty hard to find anyone else with something nice to say about the film, so let's give Quentin his say: "As a Hollywood tennis sports movie it’s pretty good.... Dean Paul Martin, in his only feature film lead, is pretty good as the tennis bum turned tennis star. His tennis is terrific, and while I didn’t necessarily need to see him star in anything else, as a tennis pro he’s pretty fucking convincing ... The film's best moments are Dean Paul Martin training with his coach, real life tennis giant Pancho Gonzales."

Where I come from, this is called "damning with faint praise". You've got a two-hour movie that's only "pretty good", with a star who you didn't need to ever see in a movie again, where the best scenes are a tennis player in training. Dean Paul Martin has something going for him: he was actually a tennis player, so the climactic match with Guillermo Vilas is believable in ways better movies like Challengers can only fake. But Martin isn't much of an actor, and he's paired with Ali MacGraw, about whom you could say at least her acting is the equal of Martin's. The romantic plot is old-fashioned in a predictable way, and I never cared about the lovebirds. It's fun to see tennis stars of the 1970s playing themselves, and the footage of Wimbledon will cause fans to swoon, but this is a bad movie. One thing people have praised is the score by Jerry Goldsmith, but I thought it was just as crappy as the rest of the movie. The most interesting thing about the film is the tragic story of Martin, whose father was Dean Martin. As a teenager, Dean Paul was part of the pop band Dino, Desi, & Billy, he grew into a talented tennis player, and was also a National Guard pilot who sadly died in a plane crash.

borg vs. mcenroe (janus metz, 2017)

The IMDB tells us, "In Nordic countries, film was titled 'Borg'." This is apparently because the director is Danish and the star is Swedish. But it's an appropriate title, no matter the country, because while the actual title suggests an even matchup between two tennis greats, in fact, Borg vs. McEnroe is much more about Borg than about his American counterpart, enough so that if this movie was Oscar-worthy, Shia LaBeouf as John McEnroe would properly fall into the Supporting Actor category.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but at the time these two titans played, Björn Borg was known at times as a "machine", while McEnroe's emotions were famously explosive on the court. The film spends more time with the man who internalized than with the one who wore his heart on his proverbial sleeve, which means the feel of the movie is also quieter on the surface. To balance this a bit, there are segments of the two players when they were younger, and from this, we learn that Borg too was known as temperamental growing up. This allows us to better see the effort Borg endured to maintain his famous composure as an adult. Ultimately, though, the movie might be more entertaining if McEnroe was the primary focus.

To an extent, this mirrors the times ... tennis fans often favored Borg or McEnroe, and a case can be made for both ... these are two of the greatest tennis players of all time. The film is pretty accurate about all of this, I just feel it needed a bit more of McEnroe's fire.

One uncanny note: Sverrir Gudnason and LaBeouf look enough like their real-life characters, thanks partly to the wigs they wear. But Gusnason looks so much like Viggo Mortensen, it drove me crazy until I figured out the resemblance.

music friday: 1993

Salt-n-Pepa, "Shoop". From Wikipedia: "Salt stated: The objective was to turn the tables on men - make them the objects. When writing my verses, I was thinking of tongue in cheek ways to objectify men. When you really like a song, it's easy to record. Fun fact: I had my daughter Corin in my arms while recording Shoop.''.

Radiohead, "Creep". The "1993" part is a bit of a cheat ... the single came out in '92, the album on which it was featured in '93. The band got tired of the song ... hard to blame them, I guess, but it's their own fault for making such a perfect record. This video has more than one Billion views on YouTube.

R.E.M., "Everybody Hurts". I identify with "Creep", but I once put "Everybody Hurts" on repeat and listened to it about a dozen times in a row.

Bonus: Liz Phair, "Fuck and Run". The one person on today's post that I saw live. It was 1995. "I can feel it in my bones. I'm gonna spend my whole life alone."

film fatales #207: battle of the sexes (jonathan dayton and valerie faris, 2017)

Battle of the Sexes tells the story of an event that resonated at the time it occurred, but is perhaps not well-known today. Former tennis great and hustler Bobby Riggs challenged top women tennis players (a la Andy Kaufman in pro rassling) to big-stakes matches. His first was against then-champ Margaret Court, who he beat, setting up a 1973 match with Billie Jean King that got tremendous hype, a big Astrodome crowd, and national live television coverage. King had no problem beating Riggs, and her victory was seen, not just as a win for women's tennis, but a win for women (this was at the height of the second-wave feminist movement).

It's a good subject for a movie, and Emma Stone and Steve Carell do well as the two tennis players. The directing team of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton made a splash with their first feature together, Little Miss Sunshine, which garnered four Oscar nominations, with two wins. I was not in the majority on that one ... I thought its supposed touting of the power of being different was ultimately only a desire to redefine "normal". Battle of the Sexes is an improvement on that, although it didn't get any Oscar love, and lost money while Little Miss Sunshine was a hit. The problem here is that I don't know that Battle of the Sexes is necessary. The story is worth telling, and the stars are good, but in the end, a documentary about the event could be just as useful (there was a 2013 documentary titled The Battle of the Sexes that didn't get a lot of attention). This movie was enjoyable to watch but inessential.

challengers (luca guadagnino, 2024)

Likability is a funny thing when it comes to characters in movies. There are actors so likable that it's hard to cast them as villains, and there are actors who often play villains but are likable enough that we enjoy seeing them on the dark side. Zendaya is a gorgeous screen presence, but she has shown in her two-time Emmy-winning role in Euphoria that she can play ugly with the best of them. Still, I found myself glad that in Challengers, as a former college tennis star turned tennis coach, Zendaya wasn't afraid to be unlikable. It's the kind of role where an actor can coast on their likability, but that's not Zendaya's game.

I mention all of this because there are other characters in Challengers that aren't overly likable ... part of the theme of the film is that it takes a certain kind of obsession to be great at something. I've liked Josh O'Connor when I've seen him in other movies like Mothering Sunday. And I'm pretty sure he is playing one of the tennis-playing characters in Challengers as everyone intended, as a person whose likability is reduced by his desire to be the best at his sport. Yet there was something about O'Connor in this movie that really set me off. I couldn't stand his character ... of the three people in this Jules and Jim Play Tennis story, I think there is supposed to be a balance in the characters, yet I found O'Connor to be so off-putting I rooted against him pretty much the entire movie.

Because of this, I don't know that I can fairly evaluate Challengers. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, and plenty to like. But looking back, I suspect my memory will be how much I didn't like Josh O'Connor.

Bonus clip:

music friday: 1992

Arrested Development, "Tennessee".

House of Pain, "Jump Around".

En Vogue, "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)".

Bonus: Bruce Springsteen, "Living Proof". Yesterday was my son's birthday, and this one goes out to him. Bruce wrote this about the introduction of a son into his family's life.

Well now on a summer night, in a dusky room

Come a little piece of the Lord's undying light

Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon

In his mother's arms it was all the beauty I could take

Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make

In a world so hard and dirty so fouled and confused

Searching for a little bit of God's mercy I found living proof

a fool there was (frank powell, 1915)

Silent film that is one of the only existing films of Theda Bara. It was a hit, and with her first starring role, Bara became an icon as a "vamp(ire)". She exists to destroy men's lives, and she succeeds. There are no happy endings here. It's worth it for film historians to see Bara and the vamp role, but it's a pretty poor movie.

the masque of the red death (roger corman, 1964)

It seemed appropriate to visit the films of Roger Corman on the news of his death at 98. I've probably seen Attack of the Crab Monsters more times than any of the others ... I could watch it again right now. And that film could easily stand in for much of Corman's work. But I thought I might honor his passing by watching one of his better films, The Masque of the Red Death (I'd choose either this or A Bucket of Blood as Corman's best).

Corman's Poe films are in general his classiest, and The Masque of the Red Death might be the creme of that creme. Masque was the penultimate film in the Poe series that began in 1960 with House of Usher. It gives the lie to any notion that Corman was an inept filmmaker ... he may have considered turning a profit to be the primary aim of a movie, but he wasn't incompetent about what turned up on the screen. (I just finished reading a book by Katharine Coldiron, Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, and Corman only gets a brief mention ... Attack of the Crab Monsters might be awful, but compared to Plan 9 from Outer Space, it's Citizen Kane.) The budget for Masque was limited, of course, but it was still 20 times higher than that for A Bucket of Blood. And Corman was always a master of finagling to reduce costs ... a deal with the studio allowed Corman to film in England on a slightly longer shoot, and he was able to use sets leftover from the Oscar-nominated Becket. Nicolas Roeg signed on as the cinematographer, fresh off of second-unit work on Lawrence of Arabia ... the cinematography is one of the highlights of The Masque of the Red Death.

Vincent Price once again added his pleasingly hammy touch. Poe's story is short indeed, so another of his stories, "Hop-Frog", is worked in as a subplot. The build up is a bit draggy, and the final appearance of the Red Death lacks something ... Corman himself said he was dissatisfied with the sequence. The point isn't to dismiss the movie, which is better than just "Roger Corman's best", but it's a good movie without reaching the heights of a great movie.

koyaanisqatsi (godfrey reggio, 1982)

I'd say this was a one-of-a-kind documentary, but since it's the first film in a trilogy, I guess that's not true. Koyaanisqatsi washes over you, abetted by the score by Philip Glass, and I imagine a sizable number of its adherents have seen it at least once while stoned. The world of the film represents "life out of balance". I am too much a slave of narrative to truly appreciate a movie like this, which has no dialogue or narration, just visuals and music. Reggio uses time lapse photography extensively here, and some of the effects are admittedly amazing. But it's largely a humorless vision of modern life, and a tough slog even with its short running time. I wouldn't call it slow cinema ... Glass' score is often pulsating, and the time-lapse effects present almost constant motion. But I don't know that Reggio needed 86 minutes to get across whatever point he is making. #448 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

african-american directors series: menace ii society (albert and allen hughes, 1993)

I'm not sure, but I don't think I've seen this movie since it came out more than 30 years ago. It had a huge impact on me, in particular, the performance of Larenz Tate as O-Dog.

It's an amazing supporting cast: Glenn Plummer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Samuel L. Jackson (I have seen him in more movies than any other actor, 41 and counting), Khandi Alexander, Arnold Johnson, Saafir, Pooh Man, MC Eiht, Too $hort, Bill Duke, Charles S. Dutton, and more. Tate's co-lead, Tyrin Turner, is by necessity less flamboyant, but he is effective. But it's Tate who grabs the screen. Credit to the Hughes Brothers and writer Tyger Williams for creating the character Tate portrays. Over the past 30 years, Larenz Tate has shown his versatile side ... his work isn't defined by O-Dog. But I didn't know that in 1993, and his acting is so believable I forgot he was an actor.

O-Dog seems to take joy out of killing people, and the way he shows off a surveillance tape of one of his murder/robberies is cringe-worthy, except Tate makes that seem joyful, too. The film is not exactly celebratory ... most of the main characters come to tragic ends due to their ways of life. But, in an odd way for a movie so full of excessive violence, the Hughes Brothers don't overplay their hands.

In 2002, a Brazilian film, City of God, reminded me a lot of Menace II Society. It's a better film, one of the all-time classics in fact, and the "O-Dog" character in the Brazilian movie makes O-Dog seem almost subdued. But it's no crime to fall short of a great movie like City of God, and Menace II Society is even better than I remembered it. It is astonishing that this was not only the directorial debut for the Hughes Brothers, who previously had only done a few music videos, but they were only 20 years old at the time.