What are the best films in which the action occurs within two hours or less? (Which basically means movies told in real time.) HE picks are as follows:
1. Sidney Lumet‘s 12 Angry Men (’57) — 96 minutes
2. Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove (’64) — 94 minutes
3. Robert Wise‘s The Set-Up (’49) — 72 minutes
4. Richard Linklater‘s Before Sunset (’04) — 80 minutes
5. Fred Zinnemann‘s HighNoon (’52) — 85 minutes
6. Steven Knight‘s Locke (’13) — 85 minutes
7. Joel Schumacher‘s Phone Booth (’02) — 81 minutes
8. Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run (’98) — 81 minutes
9. Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope (’48) — 80 minutes
10. Louis Malle‘s My Dinner with Andre (’81) — 110 minutes
Last night I saw Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes‘ Challengers (Amazon, 4.26), and as far as “tennis pros engaged in romantic triangle” flicks go it’s fairly out there, man.
Challengers hasn’t been written and shot in my preferred style (like King Richard, my all-time favorite tennis movie) but I respect and admire the fact that Guadagnino, the director, has made a jumpy, flourishy, time-skotching, impressionistic, mostly hetero but also vaguely homoerotic film that…what’s the term, broadens your horizons? Challenges you and wakes you up? Makes a dent in your psyche?
It doesn’t do the usual thing and certainly pushes a few boundaries, but I like that for the most part. I certainly prefer films that try different strategies over ones that adhere to predictable ones.
So, putting this carefully, I didn’t love everything about it (which puts me in a minority) but I loved the verve, the effort, the invention, the ballsiness. I was irked here and there but I certainly wasn’t bored. All in all the audacity and impulsiveness of Challengers makes it Guadagnino’s best film since Call Me By Your Name. Really.
One of the less predictable aspects…,okay, a vaguely annoying thing is the hopping-around timeline, which I lost patience with around the halfway mark.
Another unusual thing is that the three main characters — Zendaya‘s Tashi Duncan, Mike Faist‘s Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connor‘s Patrick Zweig — aren’t especially charming or likable or even attractive. Not to me, at least.
Compelling or intriguing actors are supposed to turn you on or at least engage your interest or empathy. Or arouse your blood.
If you’re a straight male you should either want to be like a straight-male protagonist or two on the screen, and you should be thinking about possibly fucking the lead actress. I had no such thoughts during Challengers (sorry), but others may feel differently. It takes all sorts, etc.
The story is a little confusing but here goes: Duncan, a former tennis player sidelined by injury, is now coaching Donaldson, her husband of a few years and a hotshot tennis star who’s on some kind of losing streak. Duncan met Donaldson and Zweig 11 or 12 years earlier and was attracted to them both, which led to some heated hotel-room smooching all around. (No — the dudes didn’t fuck each other.) Duncan married Donaldson but now Zweig is back in the arena and looking to beat Donaldson in a big match, and so Duncan is looking to somehow influence Zweig’s attitude or psychology or something…shit, I’m losing the thread.
Zweig is a bad boy with an impulsive, unstructured approach to everything outside of tennis…a guy who likes to fuck for fucking’s sake and otherwise enjoys poking at situational hornet’s nests. I didn’t “like” Zweig but O’Connor, a sinewy, dark-haired sweat beast who played Prince Charles in The Crown, has something…he’s the best of the bunch.
Challengers also the sweatiest film I’ve seen ever. I felt dampened by Faist’s sweat droplets.
I made a choice during last year’s Cannes Film Festival to sidestep screenings of Wim Wenders‘ Perfect Days, which I re-titled in my head as Toilet-Cleaning Guy.
It’s not that I was afraid of the subject…okay, I was a little bit. I might be an outlier in this regard, but I’m terrified of medium close-ups of turd-clogged toilets.
The film, of course, is about the spiritual (musical, literary, emotional, cosmic) life of Kōji Yakusho‘s Hirayama, and not his day job. Naturally.
Last month Katherine Maher, 40, succeeded John Lansing as CEO and president of National Public Radio (NPR). In contrast to many NPR predecssors, Maher has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization. She is, however, an adamant wokester Millennial, or she was, at least, four years ago during the George Floyd riots.
I’m presuming that under Maher’s leadership NPR will not be reverting to that mellow, thoughtful, sensibly measured news-and-reporting outlet that many of us knew during the Obama years and before.
Like much of the liberal realm, NPR began turning into a woke-talking-points platform when Trump took power on 1.20.17, and then veered into hardcore Stalinist woke-ism when the George Floyd riots happened in May 2020.
Maher (no relation to Bill) turns 41 on 4.18.24. She has an agreeably deep and somewhat raspy voice, and bears an obvious resemblance to Rachel McAdams.
I'm not much of a numbers guy, but Warren Smith appears to be. This straight-talk explanation video, focused on the alleged inability of Hollywood to sustain itself, is what I intended to post yesterday afternoon...until I got sidetracked. I trust Warren's eyes. Look at them as he's speaking.
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Bob Costas two days ago: “What I’m about to say doesn’t mitigate the crime that [O.J. Simpson] quite obviously committed.
“He was a hail-fellow-well-met, and everything changed on the night of June 12,1994.
“We can hold multiple truths in our head at the same time, even if some of those truths at [that] time confused people…people who are inclined to view it through an emotional prism” — i.e., O.J. murder trial juror Brenda Moran, a.k.a. “Brenda Moron” — “rather than a rational prism.
“It is simultaneously true that there’s a long history of injustice by the [Los Angeles] justice system toward African-Americans, and that continued well into the 1990s and to some extent continues today.
“Plus the Simpson situation was not long after the Rodney King situation…the beating caught on camera and then those officers acquitted…there was a lot of tension, to put it mildly, between the African-American community and the LAPD. All these things are true.
“It’s also true that Mark Fuhrman was a racist who lied about this and used the n-word. It was also presented that some of the chain-of-custody was mishandled. There were mistakes there.
“All those things can simultaneously be true, and it’s also true that it’s impossible to even postulate that anyone other that O.J. Simpson committed those crimes. The evidence, both circumstantial and hard evidence, is simply overwhelming, and there’s no other explanation.”
There’s really, really something wrong with college-age males who are into sexual choking. Ditto the young women who are also allegedly into it, as choking does nothing to heighten pleasure or bring about orgasm.
Yes, this is an actual thing, and there’s something truly foul and psychologically fucked up in the hearts and minds of the eager-beaver perpetrators. I’ve lived a vigorous sexual life for many decades, and I’ve never so much as flirted with even the idea of choking…are you kidding me?
“For the past four years, Dr. Debby Herbenick — one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior and director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University — has been tracking the rapid rise of ‘rough sex’ among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking.
“Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized ‘major Midwestern university’ said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.
“As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk q & a at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, ‘How come boys all want to choke you?’ In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, ‘Why do girls all want to be choked?’ They do?
“Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.”
Comment #1: “It’s so strange how a song called Perfect Day is one that I find myself wanting to listen to when my day is everything but perfect.” Comment #2: “This is what having fun with depression is like.” Comment #3: “After listening to this I have a sudden urge to clean toilets in Tokyo.” Comment #4 “You made me forget myself…I thought I was someone else, someone good” might be the most relatable lyric in history.” Comment #5: “This song is like watching something beautiful die.”