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Challengers (2024)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

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

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Movies, Rated and Ranked

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Just like when I rated & ranked the Alien franchise, the original Ninja Turtles movie remains an easy favorite. It’s not only a priceless time capusle of bodacious 90s kitsch, but it also exemplifies how attention to visual craft can make a classic out of potentially disastrous material. Without the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s involvement the first live-action Ninja Turtles film would be ranked on the same worst-of-all-time lists as Howard the Duck, Troll 2, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and Mac & Me. All those titles have their own mesmeric movie magic to them, but this one needs much less good will & forgiveness from the audience to legitimize it. It’s a legitimately great children’s film, one with a surprising amount of grit & gravitas considering the inherent goofiness of the source material.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

The franchise’s most recent theatrical outing (and, obviously, the inspiration for this ranked list) is not only the best Ninja Turtles movie in the three decades since the original, but it’s also generally the best mutation of the breakthrough Spider-Verse CG animation aesthetic to date and the most a Trent Reznor score has actually sounded like Trent Reznor’s band. It’s particularly delightful to see a TMNT movie focus on the “teenage” portion of the acronym by making everything as gross as possible and by making the young, crimefighting turtles’ ultimate goal to save prom from being cancelled. In all other Ninja Turtles movies, the titular heroes’ “teenage” status is an aspirational quality for younger viewers, who look up to them as skateboarders, pizza-chompers, and users of obscure slang (“Cowabunga!”, “Radical!”, “Tubular!”, etc.); in this one, being teens means they’re charmingly awkward dorks still figuring out their place in the world, which feels more accurate as an adult looking back on those years.

Turtles Forever (2009)

This genuinely funny fish-out-of-water comedy imports the deliriously goofy Ninja Turtles from the 1980s cartoon series into the (slightly) more realistic world of the 2000s Ninja Turtles cartoon (and then eventually imports both crews into the even grittier world of the original underground comics, sans sarcasm). It has aged remarkably well, both as a loving nostalgia piece commemorating both TV shows and as an early predictor of the superhero genre’s current, implosive addiction to multiverse team-ups. I can’t wait to see the Mutant Mayhem turts repeat the gimmick in their own inevitable multiverse sequel.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

It’s easy to work up nostalgia for 1990s pop culture all these decades later, but it takes a real trash connoisseur to look back fondly on the crass commercialism of the recent past. Michael Bay’s CGI Ninja Turtles film is bad-taste 2010s filmmaking in a nutshell or, if you will, on the half shell. It encapsulates everything “wrong” with the mainstream schlock of its era: lens flairs, found footage, product placement, fascination with viral videos, over-reliance on CGI, shaky cam, action confused by quick cuts, large-scale destruction of a major city, a phony third act death crisis, and a dubstep beat for the obligatory, plot-summarizing rap song that plays over the credits. The film itself is even an example our greatest, most frequent sin of the decade: the reboot. More specifically, it’s a gritty reboot, the most ludicrous gritty reboot of the post-Dark Knight era, considering the inherent goofiness of the source material. To top it all off, it boasts an above-it-all sense of irony that compels the movie to periodically point out how inherently silly that source material is. Characters poke fun at one another for “doing the Batman voice” and frequently mock the basic idea of talking humanoid turtles. The further we get away from a time when those qualities were our grotesque norm, the more endearing it will become as a cultural relic.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

Instead of pushing the brooding grit of the Dark Knight era’s needless reboots to their most ludicrous extreme like its hilariously hideous predecessor, Out of the Shadows calls back to the light, fun, cartoonish energy that made the original live-action Ninja Turtles trilogy such a nostalgia-inducing relic of the 1990s. I guess you could ague that banking on 90s nostalgia is in itself a snapshot of modern blockbuster filmmaking, but that’s not what makes Out of the Shadows special. Here’s what does make it special: a manhole-shooting garbage truck modeled after the franchise’s infamous pizza van toy; a pro wrestler that plays a tank-operating rhinoceros; a perfectly hideous realization of the villainous mech suit-operating alien brain Krang; etc. Given enough time, this is a film both silly & visually memorable (read: deeply ugly) enough to generate its own future nostalgia entirely separate from that of a previous generation’s (not that it was above playing the 90s cartoon’s theme song over the end credits).

Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)

This direct-to-video crossover event is shockingly violent for an animated Ninja Turtles movie, frequently interrupting Michaelangelo’s teen-boy tomfoolery (voiced by a perfectly cast Kyle Mooney) with Raphael & Batman drawing blood from various outmatched combatants. I suppose that tonal imbalance makes sense, since the target audience has to be old enough to be nostalgic for both the Ninja Turtles’ & the Batman’s respective animated series but also immature enough to be watching a Batman vs Ninja Turtles movie in the first place. Luckily, I qualify, so I got treated to the once-in-a-lifetime phrase “Jokerfied ooze”.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)

This rushed-to-market sequel replaces the grit & gravitas of the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie with nonstop catchphrase recitals, hack comedy routines, Vanilla Ice product placement, and Looney Tunes sound effects.  Those indulgences are still “turte-rific” in their own way, though, and it all amounts to a “max-amundo” action comedy that inspired an entire generation of Millennial children to “Go, ninja, go” to the polls to vote for environmental protection laws.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)

In which the turtles time-travel to feudal Japan, a setting that separates them from their most essential accoutrements (pizza, skateboards, urban grime, etc.), so it’s not surprising it killed the momentum of the original live-action franchise.  This does make sense as toned-down course correction after the nonstop catchphrase goofballery of Secret of the Ooze, and I guess it’s nice to have official confirmation that the Jim Henson costume designs look like kappa. It just also feels like the least ninja-turtley Ninja Turtles movie, verifiable by the fact that there isn’t a single pizza delivery in either of its dual timelines.

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022)

This series finale Event Film (wrapping up an animated TV show I had never heard of before starting this project) is pleasant enough but entirely disposable, by which I mean it’s a Netflix movie. There’s some novelty in it plugging Ninja Turtles characters into the plot of The Terminator, but if you are not currently 7 years old and would rather just be watching The Terminator, that novelty can also be a huge hindrance. The animation itself is vibrant & colorful but also flat & unremarkable. The most remarkable thing about it, really, is that Ben Schwartz’s vocal work manages to make Leonardo more annoying than any previous movie version of Michaelangelo – a true miracle.

TMNT (2007)

The Michael Bay Ninja Turtle movies get a lot of shit for their hideous computer animation, which is probably deserved, but at least they have personality & texture to them, however grotesque. This room-temperature CG gruel is lifelessly, insipidly hideous, as if it were a proof-of-concept storyboard for a potential Ninja Turtles movie instead of the final product. I can’t believe it was released in theaters and not on an interactive CD-ROM. It’s also way too self-serious, both for a kids’ movies about pizza-addict turtle ninjas and for a reptilian joy ride on The Polar Express.

-Brandon Ledet