sports

Marty Supreme (2025)

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Timothée Chalamet is an annoying twerp. That’s just a fact. Or, it’s at least been a fact for the past ten or so months of self-aggrandizing PR stunts, as he’s brought a style of hype & bravado to the film marketing business that’s usually only heard from rappers & athletes. During a SAG Awards speech earlier this year—where he won a statue for headlining a cookie-cutter Bob Dylan biopic—he declared that he is currently “in pursuit of greatness” as an actor, citing Michaels Jordan & Phelps among his professional inspirations alongside more relevant luminaries like Daniel Day-Lewis & Marlon Brando. His announced ambitions are the loud, brash ramblings of a twentysomething bro who hasn’t yet been slapped back down to Earth by the limitations of his talents & life, an inevitability eagerly anticipated by all of the pasty movie-nerd cynics watching from home. While annoying, however, there is an undeniable charm to the little twerp, who can worm his way into your heart with the slightest “Ain’t I a stinker?” smirk. Has his year-long campaign to dominate The Movie Business the same way Michael Jordan dominated the basketball court been a sarcastic bit, or is he totally sincere in his rejection of actors’ usual put-on airs of professional humility? I can’t say for sure, but if it’s all been a long-form viral marketing campaign for his new starring role in Marty Supreme, then he might be on the most genius self-promotion run in the history of the artform.

The titular Marty is a twentysomething ping-pong player who honed his craft by hustling tables in 1950s New York City, based loosely on real-life table tennis showboat Marty Reisman. Marty is a scrawny twerp possessed with the self-driven mission to prove that he is the greatest ping-pong player in the entire world. All signs point to it being time to put that dream aside and settle down, get a real job, and build a home life with the woman he just got pregnant behind her husband’s back (Odessa A’zion, the only supporting player who manages to keep up with Chalamet’s manic energy). Unfortunately, none of those practicalities will penetrate his thick skull until he can prove his dominance in the sport, despite the fact that ping-pong is not especially popular, profitable, or respectable outside a few niche international circles that he cannot afford to reach by plane. So, he acts like a petulant child until he gets his way, getting both literally and figuratively spanked for his brattish misbehavior as the Bad Wittle Boy of Table Tennis until he achieves a self-determined marker of victory. Then, his ambitions lift like a curse and he can start to see other people in his small orbit as human beings, not just boardgame pieces to move around in his “pursuit of greatness.” It’s an incredibly disgusting, energizing performance from Chalamet, who nails every beat in building up Marty “Supreme” Mauser as one of cinema’s greatest attractive-repulsive antiheroes. For his sake, I hope he wins an Oscar for it, freeing him from his own curse of professional ambitions so he can calm the fuck down and we can all catch a breath.

Structurally, Marty Supreme is not especially surprising for anyone who’s seen Josh Safdie’s previous directorial efforts. Like Adam Sandler & Robert Pattinson’s pieces-of-shit protagonists in Uncut Gems & Good Time, Chalamet spends the entire film hustling every single person he runs into in desperate bids to fund his own selfish gambles. The only difference here is a matter of genre, leaving the audience more satisfied with the built-in payoffs of a sports drama than the grim, end-of-the-line letdowns of Safdie’s previous works. Bona-fide celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, and Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary mix with first-time no-namers who appear to have been cast at the corner bodega, overloading the screen with a surplus of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero — another Safdie trademark. Third-time collaborator Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) returns to deliver another dizzying synth soundtrack, this time mixed in with a coke-fueled 1980s mixtape that disorients the audience within the 1950s setting. There’s an escalation of surrealism here in momentary tangents involving falling bathtubs, licked honey, vampires, The Harlem Globetrotters, and a seminal opening credits sequence borrowed wholesale from Amy Heckerling. Overall, though, Safdie mostly sticks to the formula that’s been earning him bigger acclaim every picture (as opposed to his brother Benny, who went out on a limb with his own sports drama this year, to lesser success). So, all of the novelty and spectacle on this outing belong to Chalamet and Chalamet alone, as he seeks to dominate this movie in every scene and, by extension, all movies for all of time. I wish him all the best, meaning I hope he eventually gives it a rest.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bashing Machines

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There two high-style, blunt-force sports thrillers in theaters right now, neither of which are especially successful. Both Justin Tipping’s football-cult horror curio Him and Benny Safdie’s cinéma vérité MMA story The Smashing Machine reflect on the damage young men accept in their bodies in order to make a lot of money very quickly as wannabe-star athletes. In the fanciful former, that damage triggers a supernatural transformation into a kind of permanently concussed god, and in the more reality-grounded latter it results in a debilitating addiction to opiates. Unfortunately, neither movie is as invested in exploring the nuances of that shared theme as they are in platforming the surface-aesthetic visual experiments of their respective directors and the dramatically severe acting turns of their respective unconventional movie stars: former sketch-comedy clown Marlon Wayans and former professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. As a result, they both look very pretty but ring a little hollow, cushioning the bodyslamming impact of their damaged muscle men with superficial distractions that have little to do with the bodily exploitations of professional sports. Pity.

The dual disappointment of these bone & spirit crushing sports thrillers is mostly due to the high expectations set by the names of the filmmakers involved. Him is especially victim to its own marketing hype, with producer Jordan Peele’s name being foregrounded in the ads to compensate for first-time director Justin Tipping’s professional anonymity. Considering Tipping’s newcomer status, he does fairly well with the material at hand, shooting his football bootcamp torture film with the slick, luxury-brand commercialism of a Nike ad. The rhythmic repetition of its young, concussed football star (Tyriq Withers) suffering seven days of choreographed, ritualistic abuse from his childhood sports idol (Marlon Wayans) gets to be punishingly monotonous by the time it reaches the “Day 5” title card, but the movie does have visual panache to spare. It’s stylish enough in a Martyrs-for-meatheads kind of way that it probably would’ve gotten better reviews if it went straight to Shudder under the title The Goat instead of bearing the weight of Peele’s name in the studio system marketing machine, but instead it’s had the misfortune of being a flashy mediocrity in front of a lot of people. There’s no doubt that Tipping & Wayans’s work in particular could have been repurposed into something truly, brutally spectacular if the quality of the screenplay had matched their gusto.

Speaking of wasted talent, it’s been decades since The Rock has made any notably daring choices in his acting career, with early titles like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain having long disappeared in the Fast & Furious rearview mirror. And even in those early, wild jabs, he was still playing off his larger-than-life wrestling ring charisma to pummel his audience into being entertained. The Smashing Machine is a different beast, asking The Rock to play a real-life, complicated human being under a layer of face-obscuring prosthetics. The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it’s impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career, mimicking the gentle-giant politeness of pioneer UFC fighter Mark Kerr as profiled in the 2002 documentary of the same name. The problem is that there isn’t much else to the movie besides giving The Rock that opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, regardless of how well he makes use of the spotlight. It’s easy to see why director Benny Safdie might have been interested in Mark Kerr as a cinematic subject, given his previous thematic preoccupations with failed athletic gambles in Lenny Cooke & Uncut Gems and with drug addiction in Good Time & Heaven Knows What. He just doesn’t make much of an attempt to communicate why the audience should care about this retired athlete’s unremarkable what-could’ve-been story, besides gawking at The Rock’s acting chops.

Dramatically, there’s a lot more muscle on The Smashing Machine‘s bones than there are on Him‘s. The Rock’s chummy chemistry with frequent scene partner Emily Blunt is mutated into something squirmy & toxic here, with Kerr and his longterm girlfriend prolonging an explosively volatile relationship long past its obvious expiration date. Blunt’s role in that mutually corrosive romance is embarrassingly thankless, since the Mark Kerr story is mostly retold here in service of spotlighting The Rock. Still, the little ways they dig at each other in exponentially violent domestic arguments scores way more in-the-scene dramatic points than the mentor-protegee tensions of Him. Safdie might not arrange those individual pixels into a larger, satisfying picture, but they’ll make for great out-of-context awards season clips as The Rock launches yet another militaristic PR campaign. There’s a version of The Smashing Machine that might’ve been a thrilling relationship drama with the UFC backstory used only as a distant backdrop, but instead the major dramatic payoffs are staged off the back of Kerr’s performances in a career-defining Japanese tournament and the woulda-coulda-shoulda introspection of where he fits into the larger UFC story today. In the end, the movie feels like just as much of a sports-industry advertisement as the stylistic markers of Him, promoting both the UFC and The Rock as decades-spanning sports institutions.

I went into this double feature hoping to see a dramatic reckoning with the physical & emotional toll that professional sports take on young men’s fragile bodies, and I left still craving that reckoning. All that you’ll find here are a few inspired visual choices in how those bodies are commodified in sports-world iconography and a few inspired acting choices in how Wayans & Johnson subvert the more cartoonish archetypes they’re more famous for portraying. That’s all to say that just because neither movie is entirely successful doesn’t mean they’re entirely disposable. To misquote an infamous tweet, why must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a muscular bod, huge?

-Brandon Ledet

Bull Durham (1988)

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As we’re nearing the midpoint of 2025, I’m making peace with the fact that my favorite new release so far this year is a movie about baseball. The laidback, casually philosophic baseball comedy Eephus finds tremendous thematic & spiritual significance in a sport that I’ve never really had much interest in before but now understand to be a rich cinematic subject. I was charmed by the team-camaraderie story told in A League of Their Own (both the 90s movie and the too-quickly cancelled TV show).  I had an unexpectedly emotional experience with the 90s baseball melodrama Field of Dreams as well, finding it to be a surprisingly affecting story about marriage, faith, and fatherhood – all filtered through the rhythms & spiritualism of baseball. My entire life, I’ve considered baseball to be about as boring of a spectator sport as watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I get that it’s an interesting strategic game for the players, but visually there’s just not much spectacle to it; it’s like watching competitive chess with the added excitement of … waiting around. All of that empty time spent loitering on the field and over-thinking game theory in the dugout does leave plenty of space for the transcendent poetry of cinema to flourish, though, and so I’m starting to appreciate the appeal of baseball movies these days even while still missing out on the appeal of baseball itself. As a result, it seemed like the perfect time to catch up with another classic example of the genre, the minor-league sex comedy Bull Durham.

Written & directed by former minor-league player Ron Shelton, Bull Durham attempts to provide behind-the-scenes insight to the general baseball-watching public of what it’s like to play for the minors. There are seemingly two career paths for competitive minor-league players, both defined by their relationship with The Major League (referred to in-film simply as “The Show”). Tim Robins is a young player on the upswing: a talented but undisciplined fuckboy who could earn his way into The Majors if he focused on honing his skills instead of bragging about what he’s already achieved. Kevin Costner is his older, wiser counterbalance: a dependable, level-headed player who’s aged out of his physical ability to compete in The Majors but is hopelessly addicted to the ritual of the game. Costner is hired to get Robins’s wildcard hotshot pitcher into shape as his more mature, grounded catcher, entering the scene with a verbatim “I’m too old for this shit” complaint of jaded exhaustion. Their old-timers vs. new blood conflict is quickly supercharged by the intrusion of Robins’s other unofficial sidelines coach: a fellow “too old for this shit” team groupie who sleeps with one promising player every season so she can help mold him into something great. Naturally, Susan Sarandon steals the heart of both men in that part, and the question of whether this will be her final season hangs just as heavily over her head as it does for Costner.

I might not ever fully understand the spiritual power of baseball, but I feel like I’ve intrinsically understood the full sexual dynamism of Susan Sarandon my entire life, so this is likely the most effective gateway to appreciating the sport as I’ll ever find. Sarandon is nuclear hot here, flavoring the cougar seductress role she later filled in White Palace with a thick Southern drawl, recalling Dolly Parton’s sweetly sexy narration track in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her pursuit to reshape Robins’s wild horndog energy into something more purposeful & measured takes on a distinct BDSM power dynamic as soon as their first night together. He wants to tear his clothes off and immediately jump into bed, but she makes him slowly strip to really feel his body, then ties him to the bed and reads him classic poetry as foreplay. Later, she convinces him to wear black-lace lingerie under his uniform to help distract from the internal self-doubt monologue that throws off his pitches. When he first meets her, “he fucks like he pitches, all over the place,” but by the time they part she’s almost literally whipped him into shape. Meanwhile, her sexual dynamic with Costner is much more sincere & equitable. When Costner ties her to the same bed, it’s to paint her toenails as a visual substitute for cunnilingus. He’s mature enough to take things slow, all romantic-like, which is an energy Sarandon struggles to adjust to after “coaching” so many jumpy, undisciplined fuckboys over the years.

Bull Durham wastes no time to addressing the spiritual, transcendent aspects of baseball. In her opening narration, Sarandon explains that she has chosen to dedicate her spiritual life to the sport as a direct substitute for religion, musing about how the 108 beads in the Catholic rosary directly correspond to the 108 stitches in a regulation baseball. She’s not the only old-timer in the picture who pontificates about how The Church of Baseball is “the only thing that truly feeds the soul,” either. Whenever Costner gets misty-eyed bragging about his brief time playing in The Majors, he gets lost in the thought that “The ballparks are like cathedrals.” All of the game theory, philosophy, ritual, and superstition that goes into keeping even a mediocre minor-league team on its feet for a season gets away from everyone involved, and the genius of the film is in how it’s connected to Sarandon’s own complex theorizing on the transcendent poetry of casual sex. For his part, Ron Shelton brings all of this spiritual abstraction down to a tangible, real-world level once Costner & Sarandon make peace with their impending retirement. At the climax, Sarandon explains in narration, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” Balancing that working-class practicality with the spiritually fulfilling poetry of the sport is something I’ve seen wrestled with in all of the various baseball movies I’ve been watching lately, so I suppose there’s an undeniable truth to the observation.

-Brandon Ledet

Vision Quest (1985)

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The 1985 high school sports drama Vision Quest has exactly one attention-grabbing detail that argues for its continued cultural relevance four decades later: a mid-film Madonna concert. About halfway through his rise-to-local-notoriety story, the film’s high school wrestling hero (Matthew Modine) meets with his age-inappropriate romantic crush (Linda Florentino) at a dive bar where Madonna happens to be performing to a small crowd as if she were a punk act and not, in fact, an international pop star. At the time of casting & filming, Madonna was just one of many 80s pop acts included on the soundtrack to signal hip, with-it tastes to the teenage target demo: Journey, Dio, Berlin, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the time Vision Quest hit theaters, however, Madonna’s fame had exploded, and she was already a generational style-icon, prompting the film to be marketed under the alternate title Crazy for You in multiple countries outside the US. Italian distributors even featured her image on the retitled film’s poster, despite her commanding only two minutes or so of onscreen performance time. Madonna sings two songs in that brief sequence: a godawful tune I’ve never heard before called “Gambler” and the semi-titular hit “Crazy for You,” which later replays anytime the romantically conflicted wrestler gets in his feelings. Still, it was the notoriously cinephilic pop star’s first motion-picture appearance, which does afford it a lasting cultural significance.

Madonna aside, it’s worth noting that Vision Quest is a very good movie. It may walk & talk like a corny, cliché sports drama, but it finds surprising complexity & nuance in every character beat that elevates it above formulaic tripe. Modine’s troubled-young-man protagonist might think he’s struggling to get his body in shape to become a legendary high school wrestler, but he’s really struggling to get his mind in shape so that he doesn’t become a bully with an eating disorder. The 18-year-old kid is caught between two all-consuming pursuits: cutting weight so he can qualify to wrestle the county’s most intimidating competitor (the relatively unknown Frank Jasper) and losing his virginity to the 21-year-old drifter who’s temporarily staying in his family’s spare room (Florentino). Neither goal is especially high-stakes. The mutant teen he desperately wants to wrestle will lead to no championship trophies or financial scholarships; it’s an entirely arbitrary, self-imposed metric for greatness. Likewise, the mildly taboo Age Gap relationship he pursues with the drifter is not his only sexual or romantic opportunity (he is a sweetheart jock, after all), but he’s still so obsessed with the self-imposed goal that he starts to consider a professional career in gynecology so he can “be able to look inside women, to find the power they have over [him].” The only thing at stake in these pursuits are his own mind & body. Will he permanently harm himself in order to temporarily drop a couple weight classes for a wrestling match that ultimately doesn’t “matter”? Will he become a manipulative fuckboy in his frustrated yearning over the more sexually casual, mature drifter? These are not world-changing consequences, but they are life-changing ones.

As with all great genre films, it’s not what happens in Vision Quest that makes it stand out from its easiest comparisons; its greatness is all in the delivery. Modine does a great job playing a friendly, ambitious young man who’s in danger of becoming a dipshit if he allows his ambitions to overpower his friendliness. Most of his dialogue is delivered as shy muttering, which makes him a more convincingly authentic Movie Teen than most. Florentino conveys a laidback, detached sultriness as the (relatively) Older Woman archetype, a quality that her younger lover provocatively describes as exemplifying everything he likes about girls and everything he likes about guys. Even all of the obligatory gay-panic moments required of an 80s teen drama about male wrestlers are handled with surprising nuance & complexity, with Modine only describing himself feeling “a little freaked” by homosexual advances, not violently furious. More importantly, his older, grizzled coworker in a small hotel’s room service kitchen (J.C. Quinn) delivers a convincing argument that the climactic wrestling match does serve a greater communal purpose outside its importance to the teen’s self-worth. He describes sports as a divine transcendence of the human form, arguing that when an athlete can “lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute […] it’s pretty goddamn glorious.” It’s such a great speech about the communal ritual of Sports that it doesn’t matter that the film ends on a hack freeze-frame image of the wrestler’s moment of personal triumph (or that Madonna’s prominence on the poster is a lie). It’s a conventional story told with great emotional impact.

-Brandon Ledet 

Challengers (2024)

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I don’t really understand sports. I’m not talking about the rules of various games or what have you, but the appeal—Wait! Don’t go! I promise this isn’t just another one of those “guy who tries to be funny on the internet does a tired ‘I think I’m better than people who like sports’ thing to be relatable to other disaffected millennials” thing. This has nothing to do with in/out-group mentality or sport/anti-sport tribalism. I’m confessing something here. See, I understand competitiveness, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of seeing me at trivia can attest. I personally hate sweating, and I don’t understand the appeal of feats of athleticism that are specific to “sport” as an inscribing factor; I’m never interested enough to watch some kind of strong man competition where an overrepresented number of kilt-wearers (for some reason) chop down trees and haul them up an incline, but I do understand that as a thing that would be of interest, as a viewer or a participant. People who find meaning in devoting their life to the pursuit of athletic achievement are so different in the way that their minds work that they are as inscrutable to me as an alien would be. 

Obsession, on the other hand, is something that I do understand, and that, more than tennis, is what’s at the heart of Challengers. The film opens and closes in 2019, during a “challenger” match between Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) in New Rochelle, observed by Art’s wife, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). It’s clear that there’s more than just this win on the line, and we learn about the complicated relationships between these three through a series of flashbacks. Thirteen years earlier, Tashi Duncan was the hottest thing in tennis – Adidas sponsorships, scholarship to Stanford, nothing on the horizon but bigger and better things. After successfully trouncing her sore-loser opponent at the Junior U.S. Open, she meets Patrick and Art, “Fire and Ice,” who had their own big win playing doubles that same day, at a party in her honor. They both come from some amount of wealth while she does not; we don’t know the extent of the Donaldson family’s finances other than that both boys have attended a tennis-focused boarding school together since age twelve, while the Zweig’s money is implied when the shoreside mansion at which the party is held is noted to be smaller than Patrick’s family home. Later, back at the hotel, the trio drink and things get steamy, with Tashi making out with both boys at once and then pulling back to watch them make out with each other. She agrees to give her number to whichever boy wins against the other the following day. 

In the intervening time between 2006 and 2019, the three of them grow closer and then further apart at different intervals. Patrick and Tashi date long distance while she’s at Stanford, as is Art, while Patrick attempts to go straight into the pros. When he comes to visit and see one of Tashi’s matches, she gives him unsolicited advice about his tennis playing beforehand, and he storms off on her and doesn’t come to see her play; Tashi ends up with a career-ending injury, possibly because Patrick’s absence got in her head. This drives a wedge between Patrick and not only Tashi, but Art, too. In 2019, Tashi and Art are a coach-and-player power couple, but the line between their time together at Stanford and the reunion with Patrick at the challenger match in New Rochelle isn’t a straight one. The frenetic energy of tennis is deliberately evoked in the way that the narrative frenziedly moves around in the timeline and pings back and forth between different characters’ perspectives, showing us secrets being created, kept, and discovered, all while the soundtrack jumps from utter silence to pulsing house music and back again. 

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. Before going to the theater, some of the critique I read was about the film’s length, which is a complaint that I, eternal champion of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, practically never agree with. I did feel the length of this one (I feel the need to say “no pun intended” here given the homoerotic nature of the text) though, and when I walked out, I wasn’t sure if I had seen a good movie or a very stylishly crafted but shallow erotic sports fantasy. In the intervening time, I think my ruminations on it led me to give it more credit than I initially did. For one thing, and not to knock any of these performers, but this is a movie where the characterization comes through more in the editing than in the performance. O’Connor’s character is one that lets him emote more, his devil-may-care attitude letting him get away with smirking and scheming, while Tashi (and Art as he spends more time with her) spending her whole life stoically, as serious as a heart attack. As a result, Zendaya is called upon to be stone-faced for a lot of this, especially in the framing narrative. We get more about her character in the opening when she is watching the match, her head following the ball in tandem with everyone else in the stands, until she stops watching the game and starts watching the men, and then focuses in on one of them, than we do in many of her more dialogue-heavy scenes later in the film. Tashi is driven throughout, but there’s a stark contrast between her playfulness prior to her injury and the way that she’s eternally guarded for the rest of her story. She’s effective at compartmentalizing and disguising her bitterness, and while the narrative affords her few opportunities to drop that wall, Zendaya is able to do it with a subtlety that seems effortless. 

I’m a big fan of both Call Me By Your Name and director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, despite my extensive reservations about the latter. I don’t know that this one is really in the same league as those two films, both of which could arguably be named one of the greatest pictures in their respective genres. It does feel of a piece with them, though, even if I can’t say that this one has the same immediately apparent artistic merit that they do. It’s not bad; not at all. That the non-linear narrative is so clear and easy to follow is praiseworthy, and it cleverly mimics the spontaneity of moving between memories that, for whatever reason, are linked in our personal histories. It’s fun, but the things that make it interesting and exciting are the same things that capture my attention in music videos or this video edit. On the night that I saw it, I texted Brandon to say it felt like an elevated David DeCoteau movie in large swathes, but I’ve come around on it a little and can see that an artistic decision was made here: to make a sexy drama about hot people, and use that basis to play around with some cool drone footage and go into the tennis ball’s POV and make people feel like they’re at the club. It’s not a bad impulse.

I’m reminded of something that Brandon wrote about last year, when we were talking about how directors who have had the mixed fortunes to start their directing careers with what would be the magnum opus of any of their peers: Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and I would add Guadagnino to this list and stand ready to nominate Julia Ducornau the next time she puts something out. I’m probably the biggest proponent of his work around these parts, but I’m not ashamed to fly this flag. In the link above, Brandon talks about how far into his career Hitchcock was able to get before he started making what we think of as the biggest hits of his canon, but I’m reminded of a bit of trivia about Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Psycho, perhaps the most enduring of the auteur’s work in the public consciousness, was a project that he actually made on the cheap and with a large portion of the crew carried over from the weekly series. There are several episodes in the seasons leading up to the filming of Psycho where you can see a few trial runs for things that Hitch would do in later films. The episode “One More Mile to Go” is the most obvious as it gave the old man, who directed the entry, the opportunity to try out some of the camera tricks that he would use to build tension when Marion Crane is pulled over in Psycho’s first reel. Challengers feels like an episode (or several) of a theoretical Luca Guadagnino Presents, where he’s given a couple of new techniques a shot so that he can use that skill to make the best possible version of a story that, unlike this one, is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon (sorry, I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately). Challengers may be one of the things that helps him crack the code of how to make the filmmaking equivalent of overlaying audio onto satisfying kinetic sand or Subway Surfers footage, while making it cinematic art. That’s something to see, even if it wasn’t really for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #208: Lenny Cooke (2013) & Basketball Docs

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Welcome to Episode #208 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna celebrate March Madness by discussing a handful of basketball documentaries, starting with the Safdie Brothers’ 2013 profile of Lenny Cooke.

00:00 Welcome

07:23 How to Have Sex (2024)
13:52 The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
19:11 The Marsh King’s Daughter (2023)
24:11 Out of the Blue (1980)

30:23 Lenny Cooke (2013)
55:30 Hoop Dreams (1994)
1:19:46 AND1 Ball Access – The Mixtape Tour (2002)
1:40:01 Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang (2015)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

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I love the 1996 sci-fi comedy film Space Jam, by which I mean I was 10 years old in 1996.  Even as an adult, I find the movie fascinating as a corporate cashgrab mash-em-up of two disparate but popular brands—Looney Tunes & Michael Jordan—that accidently stumbled into sublimely silly post-modern absurdism.  The contortions Space Jam forces itself into to highlight both a post-baseball, career-reflective Michael Jordan and a hyperviolent, physics-defying cartoon bunny are incredible to watch, both from a place of ironic detachment and as in-the-moment entertainment.  Of course, it’s impossible for me to claim that Space Jam is objectively good, considering that anyone who was not a child in the mid-90s seems to despise it as a cultural scourge rather than just a middling, studio-made kids’ film.  I just want to confess up-front that I’m a Space Jam apologist; I even prefer it to the Joe Dante Looney Tunes film that supposedly fixed all its faults (according to more respectable tastemakers).  That way I can I credibly say I went into Space Jam: A New Legacy genuinely hopeful that I would enjoy the experience.  I did not watch this long-delayed sequel just to lazily dunk on it or call it out as the death knell of modern cinema.  I thought it might be fun.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is devoid of fun.  It succeeds neither as intentional comedy nor as accidental absurdism.  It lacks the shameless commitment to its own crass commercialism that the pushed the original Space Jam to the point of post-modern delirium.  Like the worst cash-grab sequels, it does its best to retrace the steps of its predecessor while suppressing all its strangest, most exciting ideas to the margins.  A New Legacy simply subs out Michael Jordan for his modern-day equivalent in LeBron James, then hangs up the towel.  James teams up with Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters to win a cosmic game of basketball so he can get back to his family . . . except this time the game is staged in a computer server instead of outer space.  That venue change allows the new Space Jam to rope in as many background characters as it can from the full library of Warner Bros. Entertainment IP – including blasphemous “cameos” from “cinematic universes” like The Matrix, The Devils, Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.  That’s the kind of naked corporate-synergy flexing that has professional critics decrying the film as “an abomination”, “an apocalyptic horror movie”, and a “swirling CGI garbage tornado.”  Those layup hit-pieces were preloaded before the movie was actually screened for critics, though.  What really holds A New Legacy back is that it keeps its only new, exciting idea—that intrusion of characters from classic films outside the Looney Tunes brand—relegated to the background.  King Kong, The Penguin, and Baby Jane Hudson should have been shooting hoops alongside LeBron James and Bugs Bunny, not cheering them on from the sidelines in blurred-out crowd shots.

It’s most widely being compared to Spielberg’s post-apocalyptic VR thriller Ready Player One (which is much more critical of this kind of self-aggrandizing IP worship than it’s given credit for), but the basic premise of Space Jam: A New Legacy actually lands much closer to the underappreciated sci-fi bummer The Congress.  In a dystopian vision that only rings truer to out shithole reality every year, The Congress imagines a world where celebrities no longer physically perform in mass-distributed art, but instead are scanned-into a computer system that simulates their screen presence in AI emulations.  It’s the ultimate movie studio power grab, one we’ve seen echoed in real-life simulations of deceased performers in films like Rogue One (Peter Cushing), Furious 7 (Paul Walker) and, most recently, the ethically-shaky documentary Roadrunner (Anthony Bordain).  In Space Jam: A New Legacy, LeBron James is offered the same opportunity: being scanned into the Warner Bros. “serververse” so his likeness can be plugged into whatever intellectual property the mega-corporation can scoop up before Disney gets to it first.  A New Legacy even maintains some of the dystopian undercurrent of Ready Player One & The Congress, with human beings cheering on the Looney Tunes team on one side of the court, fictional-product characters cheering on the opposing team of villains, and Don Cheadle orchestrating the entire event from the center as an evil algorithm MC (the film’s only decent, fully committed performance).  No matter how much its pile-on of disparate IPs in a single locale is supposed to register as Fun! and Cool!, the Warner Bros. studio itself is clearly positioned as the main villain of the piece, in direct opposition to its human, terrified audience, which it literally holds captive. 

It’s a shame that idea wasn’t pushed further.  If the entire point of this movie was for Warner Bros. to show off its extensive collection of intellectual properties, it should have just flooded the screen with them to the point where the audience was crushed under their immensity. Instead, it just sweeps them to the background so LeBron James can cosplay as a late-career Michael Jordan by recreating the exact plot beats & character dynamics of the original Space Jam in a new locale.  At least doubling down on its grotesque display of corporate synergy could’ve been memorable. As is, there’s nothing offered here worth sitting through A New Legacy to see, which I’m saying even as the rare dumdum who loves the original Space Jam, The Congress and, to a lesser extent, Ready Player One.  There are technically jokes in this movie, but none of them are funny (save maybe a couple throwback Silent Cinema gags featuring Wile E. Coyote).  It’s a full half-hour longer than the original, sacrificing the breakneck pacing that makes it such a breezy watch.  LeBron James is too concerned with being lauded as both the greatest basketball player to have ever lived and the ultimate family man to do anything risky or interesting with the material.  Even with all those missteps, though, A New Legacy‘s greatest sin is that it doesn’t push its one deviation from the original Space Jam to its furthest possible extreme.  Humorless movie nerds were already going to be pissed about it dragging characters from beloved classics down to the level of a Space Jam sequel no matter what, so there’s no reason for the movie to be timid about its shameless Warner Bros. IP promotion.  Fuck it.  Show Pennywise spin-dunking in Immortan Joe’s face, then high-fiving Free Willy and planting a sloppy kiss on Lego Catwoman’s blocky lips.  If you’re going to be blasphemous, at least have fun with it.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #123 of The Swampflix Podcast: Birds of Prey (2020) & Good Movies in Bad Genres

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Welcome to Episode #123 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss the recent superhero blockbuster Birds of Prey (2020) and several others movies we enjoy in genres that usually bore us.

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

The True Terror in The Faculty (1998) is High School Athletics

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I was lodged so embarrassingly deep in the target demographic for the 1998 Robert Rodriguez creature feature The Faculty that I spent my pre-teen allowance money on its soundtrack CD. The first time I heard Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen” was as a Creed cover on that soundtrack, years before the band re-branded as Christian Rock. The movie that soundtrack was cross-promoting was a blatant attempt to update the Invasion of the Body Snatchers alien-takeover template for the post-Scream era. Its Kevin Williamson-penned screenplay even features a lengthy discussion of Body Snatchers lore, leaning into the writer’s weakness for self-referential pop culture meta-analysis. As with Williamson’s work on Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Cursed, this winking at-the-camera dialogue is delivered by hip, young teen actors (Josh Harnett, Elijah Wood, Clea Duvall, Jordana Brewster, Usher, etc.) to appeal directly to a high school age crowd with an expendable income – the same teen-cool throwback aesthetic that currently fuels The CW’s Riverdale. Between those just-barely-older-than-me movie stars, their weirdly horny relationship with the adult staff, the film’s gateway introduction to sci-fi themed gore & body horror, and the marketing’s hard-rock posturing, I was helpless to resist the allure of The Faculty. But it turns out my vulnerability as the film’s target demographic runs even deeper than that.

The central threat in this drive-in era creature feature throwback is an invading alien force that burrows deep into the brains of its human hosts – turning them into mind-controlled Lovecraftian monsters who hide in plain sight as suburban high school teachers. The intended menace of this transformation is the spread & enforcement of Conformity, a satirical target that would have loudly spoken to me as a preteen nü-metal shithead (and one that’s increasingly hilarious in retrospect, given the characters’ unanimous modeling & marketing of a Tommy Hilfiger wardrobe). However, because of all the stylized, teen-targeted cool of this sci-fi mayhem, the alien creatures themselves register mostly as badass, fist-pumping payoffs worthy of celebration – especially in moments that opt for practical effects gore over CG rendering. The only aspect of The Faculty that can remain genuinely creepy, then, is the behavior those creatures illicit in their titular school staff hosts. Yet, even those results are varied on a pure horror scale, as the movie insists that the women on the school staff transform into horned-up dominatrix types rather than personality-free Conformity ghouls – upping the film’s appeal to hormonally-addled teens but muting its potential for genuine terror. One major member of the staff sidesteps that horny makeover entirely, though: the high school sports coach, played by the liquid Terminator himself, Robert Patrick. He remains an absolute fucking nightmare, no matter how goofy or dated the film might feel elsewhere.

Part of the coach’s terrifying presence in the film is due to Patrick’s hyper-masculine performance as an emotionless hard ass; part of it is that his gender allowed him to avoid the inhibiting sexualization that dampened the presence of fellow castmates like Selma Hayek & Famke Jensen. For me, personally, though, what’s really terrifying about Patrick’s onscreen menace as a rage-filled monster is that it recalls every single relationship I had with a high school or middle school PE coach growing up. As the kind of wimpy indoor kid who’d much rather watch horror movies than play football, I consistently had combative relationships with PE coaches throughout my educational career. I was terrified of them; they were not at all amused by me either. This culminated in being kicked out of PE entirely in my senior year of high school, when the coach reassigned me to library duty for that period (a blessing he foolishly coded as a punishment) and told me I would only pass if he never had to see or talk to me again. Watching Robert Patrick bully the similarly wimpy, unathletic Elijah Wood for daring to eat lunch alone on his football field was a vivid flashback to that conflict. When the coach jokingly recruits the nerd for track & field, Wood protests “I don’t think a person should run unless he’s being chased.” The coach retorts, “Get out of here,” ushering the twerp out of his macho domain. I’ve thankfully never had a coach follow up that conflict with an act of physical violence (represented here in Lovecraftian tentacled monstrosities), but I always feared that transgression was imminent, so this particular coach-wimp relationship dynamic taps into a very specific source of fear long buried in my past.

Of course, a burgeoning horror film nerd having a combative relationship with a high school sports coach is not all that unique to my own lived experience. If anything, centering the film’s source of terror on a scary macho football coach is just as blatant in appealing to a specific target demographic as the hip-teen casting & soundtrack contributions from then-bankable bands like Stabbing Westward & The Offspring. You can feel that screenplay-level machination in the way Patrick’s character is broadly portrayed as a sports coach archetype. He’s referred to simply as Coach and is an instructor in seemingly every sport played at the school: football, track, swimming, basketball, etc. Like Terry Quinn’s iconic performance as the archetypal Stepfather or Corbin Bersen’s skin-crawling performance as the archetypal Dentist, Robert Patrick transforms the broad concept of the high school sports Coach into a classic movie monster abomination on the level of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, or The Wolfman. It would have robbed the film of some of its other post-Scream late-90s charms and transformed the endeavor into something much more thoroughly horrifying, but I think they could have easily reworked the entire premise to be about that one monstrous villain alone – under the title The Coach. His performance is that scary, and the real-life terror of sports coaches runs psychologically deep for many horror nerds – something I had forgotten until I was confronted by the menace of this particular space alien bully all over again.

-Brandon Ledet

The Evolution of The Lonely Island Sports Movie

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It’s been three years since The Lonely Island (Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, and Andy Samberg) released their latest commercial-bomb-turned-cult–classic, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and that 2010s update to Walk Hard pop music biopic parody finally has its follow-up. While Popstar mocked the modern “concert documentaries” (read: feature length infomercials) of acts like Justin Bieber & One Direction as an excuse to stage ZAZ-style gags & The Lonely Island’s classic music video sketches, the group’s latest release adopts an even flimsier format to do the same: the visual album. Self-described as “a visual poem” and surprise-dropped on Netflix in a Beyoncé-evoking distribution strategy, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is pure Lonely Island goofballery. It’s difficult to tell if its visual album format is meant to be a joke at the expense of hubristic projects like Lemonade & Dirty Computer or more of a self-deprecating joke at the expense of The Lonely Island themselves for even attempting to pull off such a loftily minded project in the first place. Either way, its’ a brilliant move that not only updates their cinematic sensibilities to a more modern version of pop music media, but also removes two barriers that tend to stand in the way of what makes them so enjoyable to watch: the necessity of a plot to justify a feature-length film & the necessity of box office success to pay their producers’ bills. The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience isn’t as successful or as substantial of a work as Popstar, but it is one that further suggests that these very silly boys have finally reached a new sense of ambition & efficiency in their craft. It’s also an accomplishment that they’ve been building towards for years, if you consider the earlier, more restrained sports mockumentaries of their past as trial runs.

Appropriately enough, The Lonely Island’s cinematic career started with a feature-length sports narrative. While still producing Digital Shorts for SNL, the trio of pop music parodists delivered their first delightful box office bomb with 2007’s Hot Rod. While not quite as formally daring or riotously funny as Popstar (or even Jorma Taccone’s other SNL-era feature, MacGruber, for that matter), Hot Rod is still pretty damn hilarious from start to finish. It was the first instance when I can recall genuinely enjoying Andy Samberg beyond his usefulness as someone who makes Joanna Newsom laugh. Playing an overgrown man-child who wants to be a daredevil just like his deceased father, Samberg’s general mode in Hot Rod is slapstick comedy and it’s classically funny on a Three Stooges level as a result. Often missing jumps on his dirtbike & puking from the pain, Samberg’s titular Rod is far from the Evel Knievel Jr. he imagines himself to be. There’s a lot of solid humor derived from the disparity between Rod’s confidence & his actual abilities, which allows you to have a good laugh at his expense even when he drowns, catches fire, or explodes. That’s an interesting subversion of the traditional underdog sports story, but it’s still one that plays its comedic beats relatively safely. The premise is mostly grounded in reality yet is careful not to resemble any real-life public figures too closely (not even Knievel). Its structure remains true to the traditional sports movie narrative too, even if its greatest strengths rely on long strings of non-sequitur gags. For instance, most of the film boasts a killer 80s synthpop soundtrack, but towards the climax when Rod’s crew has their inevitable third-act falling-out, the score suddenly switches to melodramatic string arrangements – effectively poking fun at its own necessity to transform into A Real Movie at the last minute. With more filmmaking experience under their belts & more celebrity star power backing up their audacity, their sports movies parodies only strengthened from there.

At this point in The Lonely Island’s career timeline, Hot Rod’s timid SNL Movie comedy template feels more like a one-off anomaly than an early wind-up for what Bash Brothers delivers. If anything, Bash Brothers feel like it’s the final film in a trilogy of sports parodies that Lonely Island initially produced for HBO, mostly as a creative outlet for Samberg. At a half-hour a piece, Samberg’s sports mockumentaries Tour de Pharmacy (2017) & 7 Days in Hell (2015) are the earliest telegraphs of where the Lonely Island crew would eventually go with Bash Brothers. Respectively tackling the real-life sports world controversies of doping in cycling & angry outbursts in tennis, Tour de Pharmacy & 7 Days in Hell fearlessly make fun of some of the biggest scandals in sports history (short of the O.J. Simpson murder trial) in violent jabs of ZAZ-style chaos. What’s most amazing about them is that they invite the real-life sports celebrities involved in those scandals to participate in their own mockery. John McEnroe drops by 7 Days in Hell to poke fun at a fictional “bad boy of tennis” (played by Samberg, naturally) whose antics with sex, drugs, and physical violence result in a deadly Wimbledon match that drags on for a solid week, disrupting & disgracing a once-reputable sport. Serena Williams also pops by as a talking head, even through the media’s policing of her own supposed emotional outbursts is much more unreasonable than McEnroe’s. In Tour de Pharmacy, Lance Armstrong talks at length about how every single cyclist who competes in the Tour de France is aided by illegal substances, directly recalling his own downfall in a very public doping scandal. Wrestler-turned-comedian John Cena also appears as a steroids-enraged monster in the film, tangentially poking fun at the WWE’s own history with performance-enhancing drugs. Of course, both projects are still packed with the juvenile non-sequiturs & physical comedy gags that have been constant to Samberg’s sense of humor, now emboldened to be more sexually explicit than ever before thanks to the freedom of HBO – resulting in bisexual orgies, unconventional prostate stimulation, and characters high-fiving during cunnilingus. It’s the bravery of connecting those very silly gags to very real publicity crises for sports figures who are participating along with the creators that feels new & mildly transgressive.

As daring as it may be to trivialize real-life sports controversies in such a flippantly silly way, those two HBO productions still feel somewhat formally restricted. It wasn’t until Samberg rejoined with Schaffer & Taccone post-Popstar that his sports cinema mockery really hit is pinnacle, just a few weeks ago. The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience makes full use of all The Lonely Island’s best cinematic qualities: the music video sketch comedy of their SNL days, the rise-and-fall (and fall and fall) sports narrative of Hot Rod, the gross-out sex gags of MacGruber, the shameless evisceration of real-life sports scandals from Sandberg’s HBO mockumentaries and, finally, the chaotic disregard for traditional structure of Popstar. The Netflix-hosted half-hour comedy special wastes no time mocking the steroids abuse scandal that plagued the 1989 World Series run of the real-life “Bash Brothers,” Mark McGuire & Jose Conseco. The very first verse Samberg raps in this “visual poem” (read: loose collection of music videos) references steroids abuse, a theme that’s reinforced over & over again in the group’s usual 80s-era Beastie Boys cadence with lines like “I never finish sex because I’m so juiced out” and “Stab the needle in my ass until I am rich.” The genius of adapting this mockery to a visual album medium is that is allows the boys to go full-goof 100% of the time, packing in as many music video sketches as they please, unburdened by the necessity of a coherent plot. As funny as Samberg’s HBO specials were, they’re still fairly grounded mockumentaries that parody the tones & structure of many HBO Films productions of the past. Hot Rod is even more beholden to classic cinematic templates, falling well within the boundaries of a typical SNL movie even if its individual gags are specific to The Lonely Island’s sensibilities. While Bash Brothers can easily be seen as a swipe at the hubris of the visual album format, it ultimately just proves the point that it’s a genius, unrestrained medium that brings out the best #purecinema potential of any popstar who dares to utilize it – even incredibly silly parodists with a fetish for traditional sports narratives.

The Unauthorized Bash Bothers Experience feels like an epiphanic moment within The Lonely Island’s cinematic output, a culminating achievement in the sports movie template that they’ve been trying to crack open for more than a decade now. Of course, I wish that feature-length comedies like Popstar & MacGruber were more successful as theatrical gambles, but I am glad that these very silly boys have finally found a more viable niche for their sports movie parodies. I’m also glad to see these comedy nerds continue to take the piss out of our deeply flawed sports gods of yesteryear – an achievement that’s only make doubly fascinating by those gods’ participatory amusement in their own mockery.

-Brandon Ledet