"Marty Supreme:" Not Lacking in Incident

The Ping Pong movie is pretty good.

Marty Supreme is, sort of, a highly fictionalized biopic set in 1952 about ping-pong pro Marty Reisman (1930-2012). It’s another in director Josh Safdie’s series of movies about pushy Jewish New Yorkers, following 2019’s Uncut Gems that he made with his brother Benny about a sports gambler played by Adam Sandler. (Since the Coen Brothers made 19 movies together before sibling rivalry finally overcame them, it’s been widely assumed that it’s only natural for brothers to be auteurs. But my guess is that it’s actually quite difficult.)

Timmy Chalamet (I’ve given up trying to reproduce the extremely French spelling of his first name) plays 23-year-old Marty Mauser, who wants to make his fortune as the face of table tennis.

For unexplained reasons, after agreeing to cash in by touring Europe as an opening act for the Harlem Globetrotters, he’s broke when he gets back to New York. He needs to raise $1,500 in a few days to get to Japan for the world championship. So over the frantic last two hours of this rather long movie he comes up with a lot of sleazy ideas like holding a gangster’s dog for ransom and stealing the diamond necklace of a Vivien Leigh-like actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) who is starring in a Tennessee Williams play on Broadway with a Marlon Brando/Paul Newman-like Method actor.

Complications ensue.

It’s like Anora with more plot twists.

Critics assure us that it’s good because, “It’s not a ping-pong movie!”

And yet, I’d like to see a ping-pong movie.

Sports movies have been found to be the most stand-alone genre of movies in terms of which personality types they appeal to. There are two poles of personality: jocks and aesthetes, and films tend to appeal more to the latter. The chief exception is the sports movie genre.

Personally, however, I like sports movies. And I would especially like sports business movies if there were more.

Reading up on the history of ping-pong, I realized that Safdie was likely tempted to make Marty Supreme into …

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