Temperamental, energetic, frenetic, aggressive, transgressive craziness.
A thumping heart, open-faced. Love comes in spurts. Cardiac-convulsions come consistently.
Timotheé Chalamet squirms and squeals off the screen as the fast-talking, over-confident, narcissistic, promiscuous, pernicious, borderline-sociopathic titular weasel and self-proclaimed ping-pong maestro Marty Moussen.
Chalamet is an endlessly crashing car burning the ground beneath him.
Sober but snowblind, idling at a hundred-fifty, forever in high-gear, screaming along without wheels, sparks flying. You can almost feel his sweat speckling you in your seat, almost as easily as you can smell his BS free-flowing.
Co-star Odessa A’zion is delightful like a three-legged dog.
She is top-shelf vodka in an Everclear bottle. Scroungy and scrapping, entirely natural, and effortlessly endearing in all her mania. Being Marty’s primary lady-lover, as a consequence of his actions, her character Rachel is repeatedly dragged through increasingly rough waters.
Unlike Chalamet, splashing and struggling through his tides of self-sabotage, A’zion seems buoyant, floating down the rapids, her head just above white-water, be it barley.
Gwynth Paltrow and Kevin O’Leary co-star with impeccable realism as a weird, older, sexually-frustrated actress and her husband a stingy, rich, capitalist-conservative.
Art imitates life I suppose.
Penn Jillette and Luke Manley are strange and interesting.
Tyler, The Creator has achieved an often attempted but rarely successful transition from pop music into screen-acting. I thought he was mostly very convincing and when he wasn’t convincing his sheer screen-presence made up for the stretches in realism.
Abel Ferrera, grizzled director of angry, incredible, blow-your-head-off eighties exploitation movies, shivs a man over a German Shepherd. No further explanation.
Overall, an almost endlessly watchable performance.
It is not a sports movie. The first twenty-odd minutes are.
After that it’s an amphetamine-addled tapdancer. The movie is always moving, always energized, always dancing. Dancing on daisies, on broken glass, on dynamite.
This is not an underdog’s passionate rise through a-typical athleticism.
This is a self-centered, street-weasel-Don-Juan’s fervid and furious odyssey of lying, cheating, stealing, seduction, self-destruction, maternity, murder, and of course, ping-pong. An unholy storm of rumination, rumbling, respect, reputation, redemption, and revenge.
The morally-murky marauders of Marty Supreme move in panicked and ragged rotations around each other, like chickens without heads. Only one chicken, Marty, is so confident that not only can he get his head back, but also get the heads back of the other chickens whose heads were lost as a result of his headless pandemonium. 7.5/10.
