Jeffrey Wells >
“Since it was announced that the Safdie brothers, the lads behind Uncut Gems and Good Time, would be splitting up, the one question on everyone’s mind has been ‘so which brother has the sauce?’ Having seen Benny’s The Smashing Machine and Josh’s Marty Supreme, the answer, I’m afraid, is painfully obvious” — from Karsten Rundquist‘s “Is Marty Supreme The Movie of the Year?”
Over the last two or three years, Deirdre‘s removal of the vocals in a large portion of the entire Beatles song library has been — for me, at least — a kind of blessing.
….but Herman J. Mankiewicz‘s use of “rosebud” in Citizen Kane‘s wasn’t a reference to Marion Davies‘ “vagina” (as Gus says at 1:45) but her clitoris. That’s a nickname that William Randolph Hearst allegedly used for it. Yes, it was also the name of Charles Foster Kane‘s boyhood sled.
Last night, inspired by the idea of visiting the Holy Land, I enjoyed my third viewing of Hany Abu–Assad’s suspenseful, decidedly un-Christian Omar (2013), which began filming in Nazareth Nablus in late 2012.
My first viewing was during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival; I caught it a second time at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January 2014.
Posted on 1.15.14: I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival.
It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise.
Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.
I’m a serious admirer of the two leads, Adam Bakri, who plays the titular character, a Palestinian youth whose decision to take part in an assassination with two friends seals his fare, and Waleed Zuaiter, an Israeli agent who presses Omar into his service as an informer.
Bakri and Zuaiter did a q & an after last night’s screening.
Bakri, probably 21 or 22, is making his feature film debut with Omar. He’s currently living stateside (either LA or NY). He was wearing a really handsome military-styled dark blue jacket, and so I asked him where he got it. Zara at the Grove, he said, so maybe he’s living here.
From Jay Weissberg‘s Variety review, filed during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival: “As he did with Paradise Now, Abu-Assad refuses to demonize characters for their poor choices. Only too aware of the crushing toll of the Occupation on Palestinians, he shows men (the film is male-centric) making tragic, often self-destructive decisions as a result of an inescapable environment of degradation and violence.
“With Omar he’s finessed the profile, depicting how the weaknesses that make us human, especially love, can lead, in such a place, to acts of betrayal. It’s as if he’s taken thematic elements from Westerns and film noir, using the fight for dignity and an atmosphere of doubt to explain rather than excuse heinous actions. Viewers with a firm moral compass, who see killing as an act always to be condemned, won’t need Omar to tell them what’s right and wrong.”
Late yesterday afternoon at the Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville, two successive showings of Marty Supreme were sold out. At the AMC Westport today (Thursday, 12.25) three showings of Marty Supreme are currently sold out, according to the AMC app. And a 6 pm showing at the AMC Sono is nearly sold out.
HE to Bill McCuddy: This is what happens when a film is “tanking.”
HE to Amazon censors who’ve reportedly eliminated the “Pottersville” sequence in It’s A Wonderful Life: Guys, you’re definitely on to something. Now you need to wipe out the Ghost-of-Christmas-Future sequence in Alistair Sim‘s A Christmas Carol (aka Scrooge). Go for it!
Season’s thanks & greetings to “HK Phooey” and “Glen Runciter Plays The Hits”…seriously.
Fair question: How does being beaten and bruised by an African Silverback woke gorilla goon squad translate into the “burning of bridges” (or vice versa)? Would it be fair to characterize a victim of China’s Great Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s and early ‘70s in such a way? Sui generis, pure as the driven snow.
Early this morning Slate ‘s Dana Stevens urged readers to consider Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in the same light — as two peas in a pod, in fact — linked as they are by the same producer, Ronald Bronstein, who is also Mary’s husband**.
But of course! Except for the fact that Marty Supreme is a hyper, adrenalized, globe-hopping, pogo-stick contact high and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a miserable, claustrophobic, feminist-minded, self-loathing agony slog that only XX-chromosome celebrationists like Kristi Coulter could possibly “enjoy”, they’re almost exactly the same film. Certainly!
Supreme–ala made me want to bop-the-rock with a hubba-hubba Chalamet while going down on Gwyneth Paltrow in Central Park and throb-dancing to Tears for Fears and going “hoo-hoo!” like Daffy Duck. If I Had Legs ignited thoughts of overdosing on Oxy while stabbing myself in the throat with a steak knife. Yeaaahhh!
** Ronald and Mary have a daughter, live in fucking White Plains.
Dooley Wilson’s piano-playing “Sam” delivers most of the heart and soul in Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid aside, Wilson is one of the cast members you really and truly remember. He’s easily as vivid and prominent as the reasonably well–paid Claude Rains and Conrad Veidt ($22K and $25K respectively) and yet Wilson snagged only a lousy $5K. Producer Hal Wallis almost certainly exploited Wilson’s situation to the hilt.
While Meg Ryan is moaning and shrieking in her seat, Billy Crystal reacts in a low-key fashion. A subdued grimace, sharing polite looks with fellow diners, etc. But if director Rob Reiner had told Crystal to glance at the camera with an Oliver Hardy-like expression of pique, it would have been a tiny bit funnier.
Received this morning:
HE reply: I fear that a significant portion of the Joe and Jane Popcorn community is too timid-hearted, too robotic of attitude, too dull-witted and far too closed- and conventional-minded to really get the wild-ass, New York Jewish hustler, pogo-stick elation of Marty Supreme.
I wish it were otherwise. It’s easily the best smarthouse–meets–megaplex movie of 2025. I can’t wait to see it another two or three times, minimally. It really is a Raging Bull-level thing.
That said, it’s time for all the Marty Supreme devotionals to link arms, begin chanting in unison and put an end to One Battle After Another’s Erwin Rommel German tank award-season blitzkrieg.
OBAA is very well crafted and acted, but the main plot driver — Sean Penn’s rightwing, starched-fatigue asshat colonel needing to kill his biological light-skinned African American daughter to gain membership into a secret white racist club — is around-the-bend stupid and hugely irritating.
It’s basically propelled by an insane lefty-fantasy theology that, if rewarded with a Best Picture Oscar, will further characterize (i.e., tarnish the image of) the Hollywood community as kneejerk lefty wackos living on their own secular planet.
Marty Supreme is on a whole ‘nother cinematic spiritual level.
“Timothee Chalamet A Smash In Spectacular Screwball Ping-Pong Hellzapoppin'” — from Peter Bradshaw‘s 12.1.25 Guardian review:
“Marty Supreme’s Megawatt Personality,” Richard Brody, The New Yorker — 12.19:
“In Josh Safdie’s hectic new film, Timothée Chalamet plays a gifted ping-pong player who’s also a born performer.
“Though Marty Supreme is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize — hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically — the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality.
“I’m not, of course, suggesting that Safdie or Bronstein has ever done anything Marty-like—lied, cheated, threatened, insulted, seduced, betrayed, stolen, clobbered, been clobbered, or endangered others in pursuit of their art—but that, in imagining Marty, they’ve successfully extrapolated from the mind–bending extremes of energy and will that themovie life demands.
“Safdie, like Marty, bet on himself, starting with D.I.Y. filmmaking, and advancing through a decade-plus of critically acclaimed movies on the industry’s periphery. Now, with Marty Supreme, he’s in reach of the brass ring, even as he self-deprecatingly admits what it feels like to have fought his way there.”