tennis is a conversation (subtext: tennis is FUCKING): a thread for luca guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS

Always a good place to start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbEbG5T-4fs

Wesley Morris and Alissa Wilkinson chew on the ending:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/movies/challengers-ending-zendaya.html

Not surprisingly, I thought the ending was the best mainstream movie ending I’ve seen in many cycles (last line of BARBIE probably pretty close)

(Oh I guess THE FABELMANS’ ending was also great)

Have you seen the emotional home run scene from The Natural?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQvUjK27ybk

👍🏻

To be honest, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what these characters want (maybe because I went back and saw it again!). Art wants Tashi, and he wants to rest. Patrick also wants Tashi, and he wants Art, too, but he also wants to crush them both a little, so that he feels like he’s reintegrated into their relationship. And Tashi just wants to win at tennis, because to her that is a relationship. That is love. She says as much the night they all first meet.

I think I fall on the side that Tashi won the match, because the scream of “Come on!” she lets out just before she smiles is precisely the same scream she lets out when she was winning the junior U.S. Open all those years earlier. But I think you’re also right, and that whatever happens right there at the end will result in expulsion, and probably it doesn’t matter. The whole point was for Art to get his groove back and Patrick to feel like he’s back in the game — that is, the three-way relationship — and they got that, too.

sounds right

I love Ron Shelton's good movies, and obv he would've been a less formally sassy director for this material -- but then his movies are cheerfully heterosexual. Morris misses that point, I think.

this looks like an insurance advert https://t.co/sRsok9Oz3b

— joolsd (@joolsd) May 19, 2024

He makes very pretty advertisements too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pObRIP1H4us

I'll buy it

god i loved this ridiculous movie

https://i.imgur.com/gf3udlL.gif

My wife went to see this and she thought it was so bad she walked out!

what insurance adverts involve a live tennis ball cam

My wife went to see this and she thought it was so bad she walked out!

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Monday, May 20, 2024 1

how well do you know her

xp I don't think something seeming like a stylized commercial or music video is an indictment! A lot of directors and cinematographers started out doing that (or do so as a side gig) because you get to do a lot of interesting action camera work and the budget per minute is higher than a movie would be.

The reason entire movies tend to not be that punchy is it'd be tiring and expensive.

That tennis ball thing just seems pointless. Like, there's no possible way it can serve a narrative function that could not have been served in any other way. It's just the director (or, more precisely, the VFX department) jacking off.

Or having fun! (Not that jacking off and having fun are mutually exclusive.) I enjoyed it in the moment, it was in keeping with the dizziness of the whole thing.

(Not that jacking off and having fun are mutually exclusive.

on ILX I guess they are

every camera choice must serve a narrative function

but it's also one of the last shots of a tennis exchange, and the tension has been building over the whole movie to this point, so yeah i'd say it serves a narrative purpose, given that these two are only communicating their totally repressed love for each other through the medium of a tennis ball. why am i arguing with someone who hasn't seen the movie

the audience i saw this with were audibly enjoying themselves throughout the movie but they really lost it during that scene

every camera choice must serve a narrative function

YES. That function may be "disruption, because narrative coherence is a bourgeois construct," but every shot in a movie must carry meaning, whether textual or subtextual.

but it's also one of the last shots of a tennis exchange, and the tension has been building over the whole movie to this point, so yeah i'd say it serves a narrative purpose, given that these two are only communicating their totally repressed love for each other through the medium of a tennis ball.

So it's a cumshot? Why didn't you say so? That, I get.

Do they love each other? I'm not sure. They'd fuck each other blue, yeah. It's all in the game.

yeah i think i meant to type "repressed longing"

I know this is small fry, but, god, to watch a mainstream movie reeking of sex and whose camera kept leering at totally willing male actors was such a trip.

It is obvious subtext needed to be text, ergo, the final shot of the movie would have to involve one ramming a churro down the other's throat since they left that plot point hanging uh wait.

The churro scene is great because it's so on the nose, it's like a porn movie parody and it's hilarious.

down to the powdered sugar on the nose