Thoughts on Challengers

    I went to see Challengers this week, Luca Guadagnino’s new film, where his name is now on the poster above the title, and promoted as a sexy love triangle about tennis players, with a heavy and fantastic synth score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The score was fun to listen to, but sometimes it played too loudly over scenes, or made scenes seem way more dramatic than they actually seemed. I did enjoy listening to the score by itself, which felt to work more than when it seemed to be drowning out scenes.

    The film starred the trio of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist as Tashi, Patrick, and Art, as collegiate and professional tennis players, caught up in a love triangle that spans thirteen years from ages 18-31, with events told out of chronological order with lots of flashbacks, culminating in a challenger match between Patrick and Art at a critical crossroads in their careers and friendship, and Tashi as both Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex-girlfriend in the middle, manipulating their emotions and friendship for her own mind games and power plays.

    I went into the film thinking it would have a threesome eroticism like Y Tu Mama Tambien or The Dreamers, in a foreign art house film kind of way, but while the film does have one effective seduction scene between the trio, in which Tashi toys with Patrick and Art as the object of their affection, it feels like it pulls its punches in any other sexually charged scene, like more teasing the audience or keeping it from going past its R rating.

    I liked the creative POV shots during the tennis matches, like the POV of the players during the game, or even of the tennis ball during the match, but I felt like the characters all felt very shallow, and I couldn’t understand why tennis was important to them beyond it being their most talented skill in life. The film will touch on the men coming from wealthy backgrounds, while Tashi gains wealth from her skills, and it will briefly touch on racism in the privileged tennis world, but I couldn’t really understand the characters beyond them being competitive and manipulative with each other. I wanted more of a character drama, and I felt like the writing didn’t go much deeper than I wanted it to.

    The actors were good, particularly with Josh O’Connor playing a scummy person with Patrick, who seemed to really relish to both cut down his best friend Art and his girlfriend Tashi, to be an asshole and bring out the anger in them, with his competitive spirit. Patrick is in a slump in his career, and getting by playing low-level matches and living paycheck to paycheck, and feeling lost in his career.

    The film centers Zendaya as the femme fatale, but she didn’t seem convincing to me, as a seductress manipulating men beyond the teenage scenes. Partially is that she still looks younger than her nearly 28 years, which makes her look more girlish, and the trio, despite being in their late twenties and early thirties, came off more like high schoolers than adults, with a lot of their immature romantic drama. I am glad that Zendaya is playing more adult characters, to not be pigeonholed as teen characters at nearly 30, but I just didn’t find her believable to think she’d still screw with two men’s lives far into adulthood. But I could understand how she was doing anything she could to still be connected to tennis through the two loves of her life.

    Mike Faist was good, and I was surprised to find out he’s American, as he has a very British look to him, and he was previously known for playing Riff in the remake of West Side Story. His character had more vulnerability to him, as someone who felt like a second choice to Tashi, and trying to get his game success back on track.

    While I feel the movie was overhyped, it was still nice to see a mainstream artsy drama mixing sports and eroticism (which also could be said for the recent Kristen Stewart film Love Lies Bleeding), and it has a great synth score and was decent to watch.

Thoughts on Monkey Man

    Last week I went to see Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s directorial debut in which he stars as Kid, a guy in India wanting revenge for his mother’s death by infiltrating the gangster world as a waiter, in a luxury brothel where corrupt politicians and police hang out at, and already having been an underground fighter who does matches in an ape mask to protect his identity (as do the other fighters donning animal masks, in a lucha libre kind of way in hiding their faces). It’s very inspired by John Wick (the movie even namedrops the John Wick movies when Kid is trying to buy a gun), and has this very red, neon look to it of the backstreets of the fictional city of Yatana, like in the back alleys of restaurants where servers smoke and feed scraps to stray dogs.

    He works his way around gangsters, befriending a sex worker who works as a high-class escort for rich club patrons, and after he has a mid-movie defeat, builds himself back up again with the help of the keeper of the temple of Ardhanarishvara and a group of transwomen in the hijra community (transgender people who live in communities that follow a kinship system known as guru-chela system), and getting back to training and punching at a bag of basmati rice, fighting not just for himself but for marginalized people too.

    The movie is two hours long, and I felt it could have been 90 minutes, as I felt bored in parts and was losing interest in the story. I also really don’t like the trope of “woman in male hero’s life is brutally attacked or murdered, so hero goes on vengeance killing spree,” it’s played out.

    But besides those two gripes, I thought the movie was all right. Dev Patel has come a long way from playing stringbean awkward dorks, now has a more regal handsome look, and wanted to make a movie where he’s the badass action hero, so good on him for that. I liked the red cinematography, and while I felt the fight scenes would have a choppiness that felt unnecessary, there were some cool sequences to watch, including a scene with a knife in an elevator that felt way more visceral and intense to see. The movie seemed very steeped in Indian culture, like the repeated references to Hanuman, a Hindu deity of a monkey man in folk tales that Kid deeply relates to from childhood stories his mother would tell to him.

    So it was a decent movie, more like a B-level action movie with a prestige star having fun with his own crime film.

Thoughts on Made in Heaven

 

    On Criterion, I watched the 1987 romantic fantasy film Made in Heaven, directed by Alan Rudolph, and starring Timothy Hutton, Kelly McGillis, and Debra Winger. This was an interesting and nice romantic movie to watch, about life after death and reincarnated souls and trying to find love again with the same person.

    Timothy Hutton plays Mike, who in 1957 gets dumped by his girlfriend (Mare Winningham), and decides to head out from his small town to go to California. He barely makes it out of the town before rescuing a family from their sinking car, only to drown and end up in heaven, where he is reunited with his aunt (Maureen Stapleton). He's drifting around, and falls in love with Annie (McGillis), who is a new soul who has never been reincarnated, and has never been on Earth. She and Mike have a whirlwind romance, where they can communicate telepathically, and plan to get married in heaven, only for her soul to be chosen for a new life on Earth. 

    Mike begs to Emmett (Winger in male drag, and going uncredited at the time) to be given another shot to be with her, and Emmett gives him and Annie thirty years to find each other again, where they will be new people and unknown to each other. Thus, the film spans from 1957-1987, where Mike is now Elmo, a struggling musician who is a hitchhiking drifter, meeting various rock star cameos along the way, like Neil Young as a trucker, Ric Ocasek as a mechanic, and Tom Petty as a bar patron. Annie is now Ally, who married an artsy director (Tim Daly) she met in college who was a fan of the French New Wave, only to make his career directing TV commercials to pay the bills, winning awards but feeling creatively unfulfilled. Both Elmo and Ally feel a void in their lives, but don't know what's missing, and have to take risks to take control of their own lives rather than just coasting and existing.

    I really liked this movie. I do like romantic fantasy movies like this, as I previously enjoyed Defending Your Life, A Matter of Life and Death, and Always, so this went right along with it. I like stories about heaven and second chances at life or finding love again and all of that.

    Hutton and McGillis had nice chemistry together when they played a couple in heaven, and I like how McGillis had this striking, mature presence to her as a 1980s star actress, in roles in Top Gun, Witness, and The Accused. Hutton was decent, more of a nice guy everyman type, and he seemed less mature when paired next to McGillis, but he was good to watch.

    Debra Winger was the obvious standout in the film. As Emmett, she wore a short-haired orange crew-cut wig, chain-smoking with a rough voice, walking with a cane in a suit, and had this whole male drag persona that made her more captivating to watch, looking like Annie Lennox in the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" video. I wouldn't have recognized her if I didn't already read the IMDB and Wikipedia on the film. She and Hutton were married at the time, and have a child together, and I also think her persona seemed way sexier and more mature than Hutton's was, so I can't really see the connection they had. But even if Winger went uncredited and unrecognized, she still shined as an interesting character who appears sporadically throughout the film, reminding Elmo, who doesn't remember him, to stop screwing around and look for his lost love before he turns 30.

    Ellen Barkin also had a fun quick cameo as a woman who charms Elmo only to quick con him out of his money, her little part felt more like she was doing a favor to someone.

    This movie really seemed to have a thing for cameos. Winningham as the ex-girlfriend, the rock star cameos plus Martha Davis of The Motels, and Amanda Plummer as a musician friend of Elmo's, who helps him put together a song his past life self came up with in heaven, which Davis ends up singing and sounds very much like a 1980s ballad.

    This was a really nice little movie to watch, nothing too memorable, but interesting to watch as a love story set in the afterlife and reincarnated souls.

Thoughts on Comrades: Almost a Love Story

 On Criterion, I watched Peter Chan’s 1996 romantic drama Comrades: Almost a Love Story, starring Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung as two Chinese mainlanders striving to make money and achieve their dreams in Hong Kong, him as a naive innocent named Li Xiao-Jun, who barely speaks Cantonese and English, and is trying to raise money to bring his fiancée to Hong Kong; and her as a streetwise swindler named Li Qiao, who has several hustles going (working at McDonald’s and taking a commission from getting people into an English class), and plays the stock market to get rich. Both are lonely in the city, as immigrants who don’t have other friends around, so they become friends, and eventually they have a brief tryst, but break it off since Xiao-Jun is engaged.

    Eventually, Xiao-Jun marries his fiancée, and Li Qiao marries a mob boss who she met while working as a masseuse. The movie spans over 10 years, where the two friends are loyal to their spouses but still having lingering feelings for each other, and both end up in New York City years later, on different paths that end up converging.

    The movie made me think of movies like Before Sunrise and Past Lives, movies about old friends who keep a lingering attraction to each other despite living far apart with separate lives over a long period of time. I thought this was a decent movie, watching it for Maggie Cheung, and liking how it’s a story about loneliness and immigration and trying to make money to achieve one’s dream, and having a close bond with one another over a decade of life changes.

    The movie also threads in the music of Teresa Teng, who was a Taiwanese pop idol of the 1970s through the 1990s until her death in 1995 at age 42 of either asthma or heart failure, her cause of death was never truly determined. She was one of the biggest Asian pop stars ever, and her music plays throughout the film, with the Chinese title of the film referring to her song “Tian Tian Mi” (literally “sweet honey, or “very sweet”).

Thoughts on Brute Force

  

 On Criterion, I watched Jules Dassin’s 1947 prison noir film Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins, the leader of his cell mates in prison organizing an escape, and Hume Cronyn is Captain Munsey, the sadistic, by the book guard who abuses the prisoners and sees them as objects to control and punish. I really liked this movie, and some parts went a lot harder than I expected, like Munsey mentally torturing a prisoner and instigating his suicide, including the movie showing his death in a crude way, even during the Production Code era of Hollywood. And the finale is really explosive and kind of wild to watch, like the way one character basically gets used as a human shield to die.

    This very much felt like a “dad” movie, of a “men in prison” tough guy kind of movie, and not what I’d normally be into, but I really liked it. It was compelling, and Lancaster was great at playing tough guys with soft hearts. The men all ended up in prison due to their loves for the women in their lives, and keep a pinup photo in their cell as a fantasy stand-in to think about their lost loves. Like one man stole money to buy his wife a fur coat, another guy stole food while fighting in Italy in WWII for his girlfriend (played by Yvonne de Carlo, aka Lily Munster), and Collins wants his wife to get surgery to treat her cancer, but she won’t do it unless he’s with her.

    I’ve always liked Hume Cronyn, but never saw him as playing a threatening character, but he was great in this, as this guard with Nazi-like tendencies to want order and abusing prisoners both by mentally torturing them and beating them with a stick, just on a power trip and gunning to be warden of the prison.

    The movie makes it very clear that it’s about the injustices of the prison system, the guards and warden using prisoners as cheap labor, and punishing all of them for any isolated incidents. It is an indictment of the prison industrial complex, one that is unfortunately still relevant today.

Thoughts on Takeout

    On Criterion I watched a 2004 indie film called Takeout, directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, about an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Ming (Charles Jang), struggling to get by in NYC, sending money back to his family in China, and in debt to a loan shark, needing to raise $800 by the end of the night, with 30% interest included. He works as a delivery man for a Chinese restaurant, hustling to get enough tips and pay to add to his stash, and dealing with pressure from the loan shark’s hired goons, stress from the restaurant and difficult customers, trying to keep his bike from breaking or getting stolen, and trying to keep it together during a difficult day of working in the rain.

    I did like seeing what a big difference twenty years makes, seeing past delivery with calling the restaurant and paying in cash at the door, as opposed to today’s app-based delivery and pre-paying for meals. And that with a lot of migrants working as delivery people on motorbikes today, it’s still very relevant with the struggle.

    I got really into this, how realistic it felt, and could get into how frustrating things felt for the characters, especially whenever a wrench gets thrown into Ming’s way and making me feel for him a lot. Sean Baker would go on to make Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, and Shih-Ching Tsou would produce those films, so it’s cool seeing some early work from them.

Thoughts on Mikey and Nicky

        On Criterion, I really enjoyed watching Elaine May’s 1976 crime drama Mikey and Nicky, starring John Cassavetes as Nicky, a low-level mobster who is on the run from a hit man after having stolen money from his boss, and calls on his childhood friend Mikey (Peter Falk), who is his last resort after he’s alienated everyone else in his life. Nicky looks rough and unwashed and desperate, and Mikey is trying to calm him and stay by his side, even if he can’t call off the hit. The two hash out a lot of drama and history in their friendship while on the run in this one night, as their relationship has turned sour, and it’s really compelling to watch because of Cassavetes and Falk, long-time collaborators with a deep friendship, who make the relationship feel more real.

    Ned Beatty is really good as the hitman, and acting teacher Sanford Meisner plays the mobster who orders the hit, with William Hickey as his associate. Carol Grace, aka Carol Matthau, was really good as an older gun moll who Nicky carelessly uses and discards.

    I liked how downbeat this movie felt, a movie about losers who are bottom-level mobsters, and just living in 1970s grime in the city.