Who knows how Josh “wackadoodle” Safdie‘s Marty Supreme will play as a feature? Trailers never lay their cards on the table. They always lie.
But the trailer is certainly telling us that Marty Supreme isn’t a ping-pong competition movie, but a film about the power of positive thinking…confidence, swagger, self-promotion. There’s one little snippet of a ping-pong game — the rest is about Timothee Chalamet‘s Marty Reisman seducing or otherwise selling himself to women, businessmen, everyone.
I’m especially looking forward to the supporting performance by Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary.
The only “uh-oh” element is in the final clip…a massively obese guy (a Josh Gad lookaike) saying that the tangerine-colored ball is “an original [ping-pong] ball for an original guy. It’s the Marty Supreme ball, not the Marty normal ball.”
The problem is that by the standards of the late ’40s to mid ’50s, which is when table tennis maestro Marty Reisman was peaking, fat guys weren’t the size of circus tents. They looked like Jackie Gleason or Andy Devine or Oliver Hardy for the most part, and not like Jabba the frickin’ Hut…350-pound sumo wrestler types were pretty much confined to travelling circus side shows.
