Yes, yes. Give yourselves a hand. Give yourselves a hand. Because we all just survived one of the most relentless film promo cycles of the 2020s. That would be for the new Josh Safdie film, Marty Supreme, starring none other than Timothée Chalamet.

Why am I talking about it? Well, it's not because I feel entitled to after seeing Timmy out with his balls more times than I can count. But there actually are a couple interesting musical tie-ins with the movie.

One, Tyler, The Creator stars in it, and he's a pretty good supporting actor, really one of the few bright spots in the film, even if, for the most part, it feels like he's playing himself. We also have the soundtrack of the film, which is done by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never.

And outside of that, Marty Supreme is essentially a highly chaotic drama set in the 1950s, at the dawn of ping-pong's relevance as an international sport sensation. With the opening scenes of the be speeding into the 19th British Table Tennis Open, where Timmy competes against the best players in the world, which sounds like a pretty epic backdrop for a movie that promises to dream big.

I was definitely getting a sense of that given the massive promo campaign behind this movie with all of the actor interviews, social media influencer tie-ins, and also some extracurriculars for Timmy, like sidequesting his way into remixing a viral track from Liverpool rap sensation and EsDeeKid, which when you look into the deeper history of it, is not an entirely random choice, given that for months now, there have been some funny rumors proliferating online that Timothée Chalmet and EsDeeKid are one in the same. And this essentially was a cute, funny way to play into the rumors, but also dispel them at the same time.

And of course, Timothy used this as an opportunity to further promote Marty Supreme and talk about how his dick is young and restless in some bars that aren't exactly up to snuff. All this for a ping-pong movie, a ping-pong movie that I went out of my way to go see.

And I walked away surprised to find that this thing wasn't really actually much of a ping-pong movie, though very few sports films are literally and directly about the sport that they revolve around anyway. They're usually more about the main character or group of characters, overcoming adversity, showing grit and determination.

But I didn't necessarily go into this movie expecting that, especially since the Safdie brothers are known for their out-of-the-box directorial skills, plus culturally savvy writing. I think we're just in an era where the formula of the film, sport, picture is being reinvented. I mean, just look at the fanfare and popularity around a movie like Challenges. So yeah, even though there have been some recent Timothée Chalamet films I haven't necessarily been crazy about, be it the Wonka movie or even the Dylan biopic, I still went into Marty Supreme with pretty high hopes, but came out massively disappointed, and personally thought it was one of the most overinflated pieces of crap I've seen this decade so far.

If I could start with my broadest critique, I would say that this movie really has no inner dialog whatsoever, very little in the way of any subtext, which is odd for a film of this length. And again, also shocking, considering the very well-struck balance of the social commentary and character development you get from a film like Uncut Gems.

And while Marty as a character does have interesting baseline characteristics, like the fact that he is an internationally competitive ping-pong player, we get no sense of how he came to this talent, how he maintains it, and he puts no real value on it himself throughout the movie. Again, he barely works at any point to hone it, and he thinks nothing of cheapening it for the worst short-term gain.

Also, never at any point does Marty display a love or obsession with ping pong or the intricacies of the sport. He only seems to care about it to the extent that he can leverage it to inflate his ego. I do simply mean inflate his ego because while Marty is obviously super talented, he's also a stupid fuck. Manipulative enough to get everyone around him to do exactly what he wants them to do by sheer rizz alone. But too stupid to strategize well enough to make any of these manipulations benefit him in any meaningful way. Because even when Marty does get what he wants at the end of the movie, the wind is hollow because he went about attaining it in the stupidest way possible.

And the table tennis scenes themselves, while they are some of the most interesting moments in the movie, the way they're shot and edited does lack a certain level of intimacy. I mean, they're about as engrossing as the ping-pong scenes from Forrest Gump, which are fine and fun for sure, but also very low stakes because the entire movie isn't riding on them per se.

However, Marty Supreme is riding on these moments, which is why I felt disheartened by this feeling that I was tired of seeing Marty's narcissistic ass on the screen by the time we hit the final match. Why is this, you may ask? Well, Marty, as a person, is a massive piece of shit, which isn't inherently a bad thing. I mean, sometimes evil does win, and I do occasionally love an anti-hero. But the thing is, Marty Supreme never forces Marty to reckon with his bad behavior, his evil ways, through either an inner dialog or voice or any serious consequences for his actions.

Actually, the plot and characters in this movie just straight up reward Marty for two hours as he develops into a shittier and shittier person. When I say shitty, I truly do mean shitty, but also ineffective, because I think the only thing that prevents him from enacting the greatest horrors we've ever seen projected onto a silver screen is the fact that he essentially spends the film being too irrelevant and powerless to create any large-scale damage.

Still, though, repeatedly, he does manage to be the type of person who essentially puts the life of any single person who decides to have anything to do with him at risk simply by virtue of being around him and being involved in his antics. And he seems more or less aware of this, but he doesn't care. If getting what he wants means the closest person to him dying, he wouldn't think twice about it.

Again, what makes this movie awful isn't just that Marty is a bad guy. It's that the film itself and the progression of events essentially okays this behavior and says, "Yeah, that's fine. If you just repeatedly act this way forever, it'll all work out." So yeah, going into this movie, the message, believe me, is not like, "Get inspired, be determined, hone a talent, and then one day you can dream big and be at the top of the world." No, the message is more like, "Hey, if you didn't know, you could basically force and rizz your way through any situation, so long as you're coercive enough and callous enough to just push people into the things you want them to do.

So by virtue of that, Marty just uses and abuses everyone around him pretty much in the same way that he uses and abuses his talent. And again, anyone who dares to get close to him pays for it through the nose. And not only is there never a moment where he stops to think about his actions, but also he's never really told no either, or he never hears a no that he doesn't instantaneously turn into a yes, even when he's being a total scoundrel and obviously spouting BS.

Sometimes the supporting actor's motives don't necessarily make sense. They repeatedly give in to his every whim, even when they know he is full of shit, even after they have voiced out loud that they know this and have very little to gain from helping him or getting involved with him, and they just do it anyway.

It's like if Sandler in Uncut Gems didn't read as annoying and awkward to any of the other characters in the film, and he never had to contend with his gambling addiction or how shitty of a partner he's been. And everybody around him was just so enamored with his aura that they did anything he wanted at any given time. Wouldn't really be much of a movie, would it? That would make Uncut Gems suck.

And yet that's pretty much how life plays out for Marty. And again, the concept of a ping pong champion with cheat codes could maybe be an intriguing or funny movie given the right script, or maybe if Marty's ambitions were set higher or his path of destruction were greater. But here's the thing: Marty as a character is a deeply boring, sniveling little fuck. If he's going to be this outwardly unlikable, could he at least also be smart beyond compare or conniving? Anything that would lead me to believe the other characters would actually just go along with everything he wants them to do, outside of just him being the main character. And if we all just say no to him, the movie stops.

As far as the progression of the movie goes, what progression? This film is actually more like ping pong than it is about ping pong. What I mean by that is I feel like we're just getting aggressively smacked back and forth from one scene to the next as we move from random sidequests to self-imposed injury or challenge that even though Marty does suffer a little bit for being a moron here and there, he just overcomes the difficulty instantly for no reason.

On top of it, there's all this random shit that doesn't really add that much to the main plot points of the film. Like, "Oh, we're falling through the floor. Oh, crazy. Marty, he's eating pussy now. He's Marty the Munch." And while I did like Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie quite a bit, if you actually cut everything out related to her subplot from the movie, it actually wouldn't take that much away from his progression and asshole behavior and what ultimately ends up happening at the end of the movie.

This film did not need to be over two hours in length. A tight 90 would have been much better. The only true bit of comeuppance that Marty sees throughout the entire movie comes at the hands of Kevin O'Leary. Yes, that Kevin O'Leary. Who essentially saunters into this film to play himself, which is ironic given that there is a line that Gwyneth Paltrow delivers that is a shot at the idea of method acting at one point. And yet you hired a capitalist dipshit to play a capitalist dipshit, and I guess paid this man to come on set and deliver some Shark Tank vibes. Except on an actual episode of Shark Tank, Kev probably wouldn't be convinced by Marty's bullshit and would not invest.

But yeah, I genuinely feel like the moral of this film is just be as impulsive and as stupid as you can possibly be, and it'll just be all cool. Don't worry. And Marty, even though he's a massive piece of shit repeatedly, at numerous points, over and over and over, he's still a good guy with a heart of gold. Look at him when he sees his own son through the glass at the hospital, he cries. Meanwhile, me, after watching what he had done for the past two hours, I'm thinking, "That kid is fucked. His dad's going to run out on him."

I would also like to mention the soundtrack of the film, which, again, given that we are talking about Daniel Lopatin here, I was really excited. And while I don't think any of his original works on the film are bad, in comparison with a movie like Uncut Gems, I just can't help but feel like Daniel was underutilized here, especially given there are numerous points in that film where his keys and those saxophone lines are just doing so much to address and reinforce the tension of particular scenes.

Meanwhile, in this movie, I feel like a lot of Daniel's compositions didn't necessarily get the shine they should have. Instead, a lot of that soundtrack capital went into these cheesy, tacky, predictable '80s hit needle drops because for whatever reason, Josh Safdie decided it would be really quirky to do a movie set in the 1950s, but have basically the entire soundtrack be the 1980s, which by the time I was hearing New Order in the soundtrack, I was thinking, "Okay, this is forced as fuck." And ending on "Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Is this a fucking student film?

Honestly, if you want to see a bunch of unlikable white characters competing against each other in a sport for all the wrong reasons, you can literally just watch Challengers. It's right there. And not only do you get Zendaya, but also a better utilization of your soundtrack star in the film and much more well-shot competition scenes. The sweat, those close-ups, the tennis balls. Some of the scenes in that film are very well shot, which I cannot say the same for, again, the ping-pong scenes in Marty Supreme.

Look, I don't want to say that everything about this movie is bad because that's not true. There are some saving graces and things about the movie that I think are good. Most of the casting choices are cool, even the smaller ones, like seeing Ted Williams in here was actually pretty fantastic. Most of the editing, especially during the dialog scenes and stuff like that, was quality. Costumes were good, acting generally was good, even if a lot of the supporting actor and actress motivations didn't always make sense.

I think these aspects of the film will be enough to wow and win over some viewers. But personally, and I know I don't get to talk about this a lot because I primarily just review music on my YouTube channels. But for a movie, whether or not a storyline is cohesive and whether or not a main character is captivating to watch, to me, these things are pretty pivotal, foundational even to the enjoyment of a film. And this is where I feel like Marty Supreme flops hardest. It has everything going for it except these things.

I think I'm going to leave it there. Let me know what you guys thought about all this in the comments. I'm sure you are.

And yeah, Anthony Fantano, Marty Supreme, the Forever.