Jeffrey Wells

Early this morning Slate ‘s Dana Stevens urged readers to consider Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme and Mary Bronte’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!

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** Ronald and Mary have a daughter, live in fucking White Plains.

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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.”

A day ago Drew McWeeny said in an HE comment thread that the notion about Bill Hader having probably ignited Nick Reiner’s rage is “fucking deranged”.

“It’s not deranged,” I replied. “Hader’s response to Nick’s ‘are you famous?’ taunt was one of curt dismissal. He basically meant ‘you’re obviously being hostile and I absolutely don’t want to talk to you, chubbypants, not to mention to anyone wearing a ridiculous hoodie outfit…piss off.’

“Hader, in short, gave Nick a brief reality bullet. The alleged fact that Nick took this badly — he reportedly responded with a silent Manson lamps glare that lasted several seconds — tells us that Hader had given him a taste of blunt real-world disdain, which is something that he almost certainly never got from his soft-touch parents. Hader’s dismissal was almost certainly triggering. A few hours later Nick exploded with homicidal rage.

“’Hader did it’ is too simplistic, of course, but he almost certainly agitated or ignited the demons in Nick’s head.

“For what it’s worth, if I had been at Conan’s and if Nick had asked me if I was famous, I would have said “that’s not a sincere question…it’s a provocation. And I’m not going to be provoked. Bother someone else.”

The basic message of Jacob Savage’s The Lost Generation is that DEI didn’t hurt while-male boomers or GenXers, but it really messed with the careers of white-male Millennial screenwriters, journalists and academics, to name but three professional categories.

Great quote: “It’s a lot better to actually know you’re about to get hit by car than to not know.”

We’re allowed to say that guys like Jeremy Allen White or Benedict Cumberbatch lack conventional attractiveness, but if you say this about any actress you need to be seized, thrown into a hungry wolf pit and torn into shreds.

Bill McCuddy to HE: If the movie is all tap dancing and bullshitty, who do you even care for? It’s not a film — it’s a series of sketches about a very unlikeable guy. And you can calm down about O’Leary who is just playing himself.

HE to McCuddy: Have you seen Marty Supreme? It’s the bolt and the buzz and the sheer fuckoff-edness, but Chalamet is not channelling Don Logan….he’s not playing a malicious psychopath but a pushy, charming pogo stick…a user, taker, grifter and tap-dancer. (Who plays a great game of ping-pong.) He’s a crazy artist, an obsessive believer, a go-go guy on the make.

Life is struggle, y’see. And Marty isn’t just an irrepressible life-force — he’s a metaphor. We all have to claw, climb, hustle, push, goad, seduce, charm. All he needs to do is acquire kindness, a conscience, a sense of decency. Which he begins to do at the end.

Safdie, as noted, ignores the ’50s period trappings and atmosphere by using ’80s music on the soundtrack, but you know what he should’ve also used, and for the closing credits in particular? “Hungry,” that mid ’60s Paul Revere and the Raiders song. Because the lyrics sorta kinda sum up the Marty ethos or attitude. Not exactly but somewhat.

“Girl, you got this need to know what I’m all about
And that there’s something that you dig
You can’t figure out

“Well, you wanna know what moves my soul
And what ticks inside of my brain
Well, I’ve got this need, I just can’t control
And now it’s, it’s drivin’ me insane

“Girl, I’m gonna have it all someday
If you’ll just hang on to my hand
And if I break some rules along the way
Girl, you gotta understand

“It’s my way of gettin’ what I want now
‘Cause I’m hungry”

Rob Reiner to Conan O’Brien on 12.13 (two or three hours prior to the start of Conan’s Christmas party): “My son Nick is really whacked out now, Conan. So whacked that I’m spending tens of thousands each month to have him professionally watched and cared for, but he’s also seething and fuming all the time and I’m afraid that if Michele and I leave him home in order to come to your party this evening, he might…Jesus, maybe whack out and destroy something or maybe even burn our house down….who knows?

“So is it cool if we bring Nick with us? He might agitate a few guests and he won’t be dressed appropriately and he might even pull his dick out and urinate on the plants, but we’re afraid of leaving him alone. I love my son, Conan, but he’s a fucking nutbag. On top of which he’s an ape…6’3″ and kinda fat.”

Nick Reiner to Bill Hader at Conan’s party: “Are you famous?”

Hader to Nick Reiner: “This is a private conversation”, which translates into “get away from me, fat babycakes…you’re obviously trying to piss people off by asking hostile questions, and you’re obviously not worth talking to.”

Nick Reiner to self: “That’s it…I’m just been figuratively spat upon by one of my father’s famous friends. That makes me very angry, and I might…well, who knows but I might want to strike back…return the pain that’s just been injected into my system.”

I know what I saw. I know what I felt. I know what Marty Supreme is on the surface as well as deep down. It’s an all tap-dancing, all bullshitting, antsy, ping-pong-driven bop-shoo-wop hellzapoppin’. It’s the bolt and the buzz. It got me off in ways that never even occurred to Paul Thomas Anderson when he was making OBAA. It isn’t a “story” or a “saga” as much a nervy, insistent, wild-ass heebie-jeebie ride in a stolen (okay, borrowed) car. I LOVE the early (70-year-old) Scorsese New Yorky vibe. I love that Chalamet is more or less aping or paying sustained tribute to Robert DeNiro’s “Johnny Boy” in Mean Streets. I love the plunging bathtub scene. I love that it’s set in the early ‘50s and uses ‘80s pop music (Tears For Fears) on the soundtrack. I love that scrappy, raspy-voiced Abel Ferrara plays a stand-out supporting role. I love that Gwyneth Paltrow is the ground-zero, cut-the-bullshit, shower-sex center of it all. Kevin O’Leary totally owns and occupies the adversarial but at the same time flabbergasted role of Paltrow’s ornery pen millionaire hubby. I loved the mouthy, pushy, emotionally open-hearted Odessa A’zion. I loved the Central Park necklace-cops-and-cunnilingus scene. I need to see it again right away.

35 or so years ago I read a pretty good “spec” script by the late L.M. Kit Carson. It dealt in ironic machismo and dry comedy, and the lead male character was called “Riggers”.

Warner Bros. will open Digger on 10.226.

Alejandro G. Inarritu to Deadline: