PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Apr 28, 2024 21:58:32 GMT -5
What an introduction to Luca Guadagnino this was for me. In fact, the more I think about this movie, the more I love it. Challengers, at first glance, seems like a fairly low-stakes movie -- the film is even centered around a low-stakes challengers tennis match, for crying out loud. But those "low stakes" become all the more gripping the more the film goes on. And by the time Challengers reaches its Third Act where the tennis match and emotional stakes collide together, I felt like I was in the throes of a truly suspenseful action scene where the consequences could be dire. And I just have to marvel at that. In many respects, the fact that the trailer for this paints it as the next titillating erotic drama is a disservice to the final product. There are no sex scenes in the movie, yet it's the horniest movie I've seen in a while. And it's all derived from the central love triangle relationship, which is thoughtfully and emotionally layered and complex and interesting and just all around fascinating. The way the whole film is structured adds to that, too. The film's whole framing device is this one match, as the narrative constantly jumps back and forth through time to show the relationship between its three main characters across its entire thirteen-year lifespan. The jumps are constant, yet they inform so much of what we're seeing in the present, and there are callbacks/payoffs to things set up early on in the movie that are woven in at the end pretty masterfully. First-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes deserves a lot of the credit for this, absolutely, because the plot never becomes confusing or belabored in its structure. But Luca Guadagnino, too...his filmmaking grows more and more kinetic as the film goes on, and by the end, the energy and camera techniques he and his cinematographer employ left me kind of breathless during the climax. And let's not overloock the acting, either. Mike Faist and Josh O' Connor effortlessly sell this deep friendship torn apart by Zendaya's tennis pro, and the dynamic between all three is great, yes, but the individual performances are also strong. Zendaya, in particular, might be the best I've ever seen her, playing a character gradually consumed by ambition and the fear of irrelevancy. In fact, if Challengers hadn't been delayed by the actors' strike last year, I think Challengers would have a significant Oscar player on many fronts. This is equal parts tense, dramatic, thoughtful and riveting, proving that if you have the right material, you can make a pretty great movie out of any material. Even tennis.
****/****
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Apr 28, 2024 23:52:00 GMT -5
Challengers(4/22/2024) For the last ten years Zendaya has sort of been Schrödinger's movie star in that she very obviously has a huge following but has essentially been untested as an actual leading lady in a theatrically released motion picture. She gained a bunch of Gen Z popularity through a handful of Disney Channel productions in the early 2010s which seems to have been what gave her all her career momentum and she really became a star amongst the non-teenybopper population through her Emmy winning work on HBO’s “Euphoria,” where she plays a cynical teenage drug addict. Unlike her co-stars Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney though she hasn’t really sought out star vehicles on the big screen, possibly because hustling in indie roles almost seems beneath her. She’s instead opted to appear in blockbusters like Spider-Man: Homecoming and its sequels or the Dune movies but in supporting love interest type parts, which have certainly added to her resume but in typical 2020s fashion those are projects where the franchise is the bigger star than any of the actors in them. Her only real starring role in a movie has been in the two person pandemic era Netflix movie Malcolm & Marie, from “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson, which is perhaps not coincidentally one of the only projects she’s made to date where she isn’t playing a teenager. Of course it’s hard to gauge how popular a streaming movie like that is so it remains to be seen if she can be a draw unto herself and be the huge Gen Z movie star she seems destined to become. That is until now, as she’s finally found a star vehicle working with director Luca Guadagnino on a film called Challengers, which will be something of a test both for her drawing powers and if non-genre cinema for adults can have much of a life at the box office at all.
Challengers begins in 2019 and converges on the final match of a small scale “challengers” tournament occurring in New Rochelle, New York between a guy named Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and another guy named Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor). These two are in very different places in their careers. Donaldson is a major star player whose won Grand Slams but is recovering from an injury and is playing in this rinky dink tournament largely as an exercise to get his confidence back by beating some scrubs who aren’t on his level. Zweig on the other hand is a formerly promising player whose descended into mediocrity and is only barely a professional at this point and is having trouble scraping together enough money for a hotel stay. The two have a lot of history, however, much of it involving Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a formerly amazing player whose career was cut short before it began due to an injury. She once dated Zweig but left him for Donaldson, to whom she is now married and also coaches. This single match between Zeig and Donaldson will serve as the framing story through the movie as we get flashback to both the events immediately leading to this match and also to the three character’s shared past and their history of competing with each other both on the courts and for the affection of Duncan.
Challengers was written by a playwright and novelist named Justin Kuritzkes and while this is his first screenplay cinemagoers will still have a sort of familiarity with him as a person through the work of his wife Celine Song, who made the film Past Lives last year which featured a character played by John Magaro who was almost certainly based on Kuritzkes. So you’ve got both husband and wife writing back to back movies about love triangles amongst ambitious well off professionals who come in and out of each other’s lives culminating in a present tense meeting. It does not take too much imagination to conceive of this screenplay emerging from whatever insecurities the events Past Lives depicted brought out in Kuritzkes, at least as a starting point. The two of course approach the topic in very different ways with Past Lives having clearly been an autobiographical with a rather chill and realistic feel while this is a bit more heightened and involving a lot more direct competition between the two men who are literally and figuratively competing for the affection of the woman in question and also some subtext (and text) implying that they may be a bit into each other as well.
Directing this screenplay is Luca Guadagnino, an Italian filmmaker who has largely been working on English language productions starring American and British actors for the last ten plus years but whose films retain a certain intrinsically European sense of wealth, decadence, and sexuality just the same. His last film Bones and All was a bit of an exception to this as it involved a road trip through Middle America, but this film set in the wealthy world of tennis and its related institutions is a bit closer to what I’ve come to expect from the guy. This has been sold as a fairly sexual movie in which Zendaya has a threesome with these two guys during their younger years, but that’s not really the case. That potential threesome gets aborted and while sex and sexual jealousy are a theme through the movie but there isn’t really that much skin and I don’t think there’s even a single actual completed sex scene to be found. But that’s not to say that the film doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of these characters’ intense three way horniness and the ways it evolves over the course of their lives and affects their competitive drive on the court.
There were stretches of Challengers that felt like it was among the best films of the year, but I did feel like it fell short in a couple of places. For one, I think Guadagnino got a little too cute in places and went way overboard in trying to pull a few too many tricks out of his bag, especially when filming that final tennis match. It feels like he thought simply letting tennis play out would get boring and instead tries a bunch of camera tricks that make sections resemble a series of Nike ads more so than a straight drama. I’d also say that while I quite liked Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music as tracks unto themselves I did find them a bit louder and more intense than they needed to be and felt like this movie might have benefited from a bit of a lighter touch in the music department at times. This should not, however, obscure the film’s many other strengths. Kuritzkes’ screenplay is very fun as a piece of writing unto itself and this rather impressive young cast does a lot with it, successfully portraying their characters at various ages and allowing the audience to like their characters flaws and all. It’s exactly the kind of hip mid budget filmmaking for adults we’ve been begging Hollywood to give us and the movie mostly delivers on that in exciting fashion. **** out of Five
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Apr 29, 2024 2:46:51 GMT -5
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PG Cooper
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And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
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Post by PG Cooper on May 19, 2024 21:56:06 GMT -5
Loved this. Quite possibly the movie of the year thus far.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on May 19, 2024 21:58:12 GMT -5
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on May 19, 2024 22:01:28 GMT -5
Nice. I love "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." |
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on May 20, 2024 16:42:50 GMT -5
Loved this. Quite possibly the movie of the year thus far. Agreed. |
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