“Marty Supreme”: The King Kong of Ping-Pong Is a Ding-Dong

Timothee Chalamet in period-piece mustache holding ping-pong paddle with American flag design, standing amid other players with paddles bearing their own homeland's flags.

Preening Putz Proud of Patriotic Paddle.

Everybody loves narcissists! They’re everywhere today! They’re an evergreen industry and a dominant species and we can’t stop throwing money and attention at them! They rule our reality shows, win our sports, determine our politics, influence our social media, hoard our headlines and flood our feeds! We’re posting about them nonstop and letting them live rent-free in our heads, comping them on head-utilities and buying them head-groceries! We just can’t stop talking, thinking, mocking, or mentioning and mentioning and mentioning and mentioning one of the most self-aggrandized narcissists of them all! We never seem to shut up about him in particular! And by “we” and “our”, I mean you ‘n’ yours — constantly feeding the troll, day-in day-out, exactly what Usenet newsgroups taught us never to do way back in the 20th century. I sure can’t wait for this century’s students to catch up.

Now’s the perfect era for a story like Marty Supreme — a slick all-American anti-fairy tale about an entitled motormouth who almost always gets his way thanks to his unspoken magical self-help affirmation, “Because I said so!” and tries to steamroll over every “NO” like the nice-guy twin to Ben Kingsley’s Sexy Beast human monster. It doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Academy Award Nominee Timothee Chalamet, that beloved Manic Pixie Dream Boy idol of millions who just turned 30 last month. Who wants to be mad at that face, as long as we viewers aren’t the ones suffering in his character’s self-absorbed path of destruction?

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“Uncut Gems”: Baubles, Balls, Bets, Beats and Beatings

Uncut Gems!

“Howard Ratner sent away to Africa / For a gem to pay for Hanukkah…!”

Prior to checking out the gritty new drama Uncut Gems, my total Adam Sandler film experiences ranked best to worst like so:

1. The Wedding Singer

End of list.

Now Uncut Gems makes two. I tossed The Meyerowitz Stories into my Netflix queue after the same director’s Marriage Story lanced my heart. Someday that’ll make three.

I admit Sandler was okay on Saturday Night Live (“The Hanukkah Song” was a keeper and Opera Man had his moments), but his post-SNL comedy brand has never been my thing. The Wedding Singer benefited at the time from above-average reviews for a Sandler film and a brief run at a second-run theater that used to be a couple miles down the road from us. It was nice to save a buck whenever we could.

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