A ping-pong ball at top speed travels over 70 miles an hour — so fast it could zip across Manhattan in less than two minutes. Director Josh Safdie’s hyperactive, head-spinning “Marty Supreme” keeps pace. Set in 1952 New York, this deranged caper races after a money-grubbing table tennis hustler (he prefers “professional athlete”) named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) who argues like he plays, swatting away protests and annoying his adversaries to exhaustion.
Hounding his shoe-store co-worker to give him $700 from the safe, Marty hammers the poor sap with every trick he’s got — emotional pressure, physical violence, bribery, humiliation, revenge — until he hits one that wins. The high-strung kid is pure nerve and he looks like one, too; he’s the embodiment of a twitch. But with a paddle in his hands, Marty turns into Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” He could win a match swinging an umbrella.
The character’s inspiration is Marty Reisman, one of the so-called “bad boys of ping-pong,” according to a U.S. Table Tennis Assn. official in 1972, explaining why the rascal wasn’t invited to the USA versus China exhibition games referred to as “ping-pong diplomacy.” You may remember those matches from “Forrest Gump,” but Tom Hanks’ guileless sweetheart would never use the sport to smuggle gold bars out of Hong Kong, as the real Reisman once did.
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Reisman’s exploits, immortalized in his 1974 memoir “The Money Player,” are too outrageous to squeeze into one film, even for a chaos-feeding filmmaker such as Safdie, going solo after co-directing “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” with his brother Benny. (A trilogy, maybe.) Reisman’s biography opened with him fleeing French-occupied Hanoi, Vietnam, the day before it fell to the Viet Minh and detoured to a meeting with the Pope in Rome before drunkenly landing a plane in Brazil. The book was optioned shortly after publication. He felt it should star Robert De Niro.
That movie never happened and Reisman died in 2012 at the age of 82, still insisting he deserved to bask in the spotlight. He’d be happy to see Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” which time-travels audiences back seven decades to when American table tennis players were certain bright days were ahead.
As an athlete, Chalamet seems to have lost muscle for the role. Yet as funny as it is to see a guy this scrawny carry himself like Hercules, he leaps and strikes with conviction. His Marty yearns for prestige. Safdie even concocts a subplot in which he invents his signature orange ball solely so he can wear all-white like the posh jocks of Wimbledon. He starts the film desperate to fly to a tournament in London, in part to escape the walk-up apartment where he’s always squabbling with his mother (Fran Drescher) and uncle (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) and a nosy neighbor (Sandra Bernhard). Perilously, Marty’s secret lover (a simmering Odessa A’zion) lives with her jealous husband (Emory Cohen) in an apartment one floor below.
Marty and A’zion’s Rachel belong together, if only to quarantine their equally manipulative genes from the general population. Before the opening credits, the couple improvises a lie to get some privacy to mate. Cinematographer Darius Khondji sends the camera inside her body to see Marty’s most aggressive sperm wriggle to the finish line. Rachel’s egg becomes the moon; the moon becomes a ping-pong ball. Game on.
From this scene forward, Marty will dash around the city and the globe, chasing his dreams and out-running his parental responsibilities. Along the way, he trips over a gun-toting gangster named Ezra (Abel Ferrara), a faded movie star, Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow, sullen and aloof), and her callous husband Milton (“Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary), the chief executive of a pen corporation who thinks Marty can make him a mint in ping-pong-crazed Asia. O’Leary, a first-time actor, easily embodies the face of capitalism.
Flaunting that he can turn anyone into an actor, Safdie crowds his New York with bit parts played by big personalities: magician Penn Jillette, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, basketball player George “The Iceman” Gervin, highwire artist Philippe Petit, playwright David Mamet, journalist Naomi Fry and grocery tycoon John Catsimatidis. The musician Tyler Okonma, better known as the Tyler, the Creator, is great in his feature film acting debut as Willy, Marty’s gambling wingman. He was previously seen onscreen getting electrocuted by a piano in “Jackass Forever.” Okonma brings that same energy here and it’s perfect.
Marty’s main foe — and personality opposite — is a Japanese player named Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) who lost his hearing in the Tokyo airstrikes that happened seven years before and uses a deadly quiet foam-backed paddle. Marty’s friendliest rival, Béla (Géza Röhrig), survived Auschwitz, and in a jaw-dropper of a scene, shares a story of endurance that actually happened to the Polish player Alex Ehrlich. Imprisoned in the camps shortly after winning silver at the World Championships in 1939, Ehrlich was renowned for a record-breaking competitive volley that lasted over two hours, a back-and-forth so relentless that the referee quit with a sore neck. The rhythm of it could be a metronome for this movie’s plot — it whips us around to the point of delighted collapse.
The soundtrack is an unexpected backbeat of synth hits by Tears for Fears and New Order that bleeds into a Tangerine Dream-esque score by Daniel Lopatin — a startling choice for an era where people act like World War II happened yesterday. But to our modern ears, the music has its own vintage: It’s the sound of the greed-is-good 1980s, when movies rooted for ruthless strivers such as “Risky Business’” Tom Cruise, who opened a brothel in his parents’ bedroom.
Safdie’s script, co-written by Ronald Bronstein, is even structured like an ’80s movie that builds up to the big showdown, be it a ski race, a car-washing competition or a frat house decathlon à la “Revenge of the Nerds.” The catch is that Marty — not Endo — may be the bully who deserves to lose. How loudly are we willing to cheer for a callow guy who thinks of WWII as an opportunity for trash talk, boasting he’ll “drop a third bomb” on Endo’s fans? (In fairness, Tokyo promotes their rematch with a poster of Marty that looks uncomfortably close to antisemitic Nazi propaganda, a pointed choice by Safdie and the production designer Jack Fisk.)
Marty is convinced he’s a self-made success who doesn’t need anyone’s help; the people we see him squeeze and squash would disagree. He’s similar to Adam Sandler’s rapacious jeweler in “Uncut Gems,” except that scoundrel contained his damage to the Diamond District and people as shady as him. Safdie sends Marty out to bedevil the world, shipping him to Paris where he gets snippy with a maître d’ who doesn’t speak English and then to Cairo where he steals a chunk of the Great Pyramids.
Listening to a Japanese newsreel describe him as a villain referred to only as “the American,” you realize that “Marty Supreme” is more than a caricature of Reisman. It’s a biography of our national ego, with Marty brashly lecturing the British head of the International Table Tennis Assn. that a champion from the United States would boost the sport’s global reputation. After the commissioner makes this conceited Yank grovel, Marty simply replies: “It’s every man for himself where I come from.”
Like Marty, Chalamet was raised in New York City, and since he arrived on the scene, there’s never been a doubt he’ll win an Oscar. The only question is, when? To Chalamet’s credit, he’s doing it the hard way, avoiding sentimental pictures for pricklier roles about his own naked ambitions. For “A Complete Unknown,” he taught himself to play guitar like Bob Dylan while revealing that the bard was a rat, and in the even-better “Dune: Part Two,” played a naif radicalized into a galaxy-destroying messiah.
Here, Chalamet again fuses his personal drive into his performance, claiming that he spent seven years training to play ping-pong like Reisman, and unlike Tom Hanks in “Gump,” he’s doing his own stunts. Voters seem content to let the young talent dangle, trusting that he’ll continue flogging himself to make more great pictures like this.
The movie’s moxie makes it impossible not to get caught up in Marty’s crusade. We’re giddy even when he’s miserable. Performing with the Harlem Globetrotters in some of the most war-scarred, joy-desperate corners of the planet, his own shame prevents him from appreciating how much he’s entertaining the crowd. When you weigh his selfish desires against any other character’s needs, Marty is as hollow as a ping-pong ball. It really is all about his balls. Their embossing reads: “Marty Supreme — Made in America.”
‘Marty Supreme’
Rated: R, for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity
WASHINGTON — Four centrist Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday and signed onto a Democratic-led petition that will force a House vote on extending for three years an enhanced pandemic-era subsidy that lowers health insurance costs for millions of Americans.
The stunning move comes after House Republican leaders pushed ahead with a health care bill that does not address the soaring monthly premiums that millions of people will soon endure when the tax credits for those who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act expire at year’s end.
Democrats led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York needed 218 signatures to force a floor vote on their bill, which would extend the subsides for three years.
Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, all from Pennsylvania, and Mike Lawler of New York signed on Wednesday morning, pushing it to the magic number of 218. A vote on the subsidy bill could come as soon as January under House rules.
“Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.
Origins of a Republican revolt
The revolt against GOP leadership came after days of talks centered on the health care subsidies.
Johnson, R-La., had discussed allowing more politically vulnerable GOP lawmakers a chance to vote on bills that would temporarily extend the subsidies while also adding changes such as income caps for beneficiaries. But after days of discussions, the leadership sided with the more conservative wing of the party’s conference, which has assailed the subsidies as propping up a failed marketplace through the ACA, which is widely known as “Obamacare.”
House Republicans pushed ahead Wednesday a 100-plus-page health care package without the subsidies, instead focusing on long-sought GOP proposals designed to expand insurance coverage options for small businesses and the self-employed.
Fitzpatrick and Lawler tried to add a temporary extension of the subsidies to the bill, but were denied.
“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. Then, at the request of House leadership I, along with my colleagues, filed multiple amendments, and testified at length to those amendments,” Fitzpatrick said. “House leadership then decided to reject every single one of these amendments.
“As I’ve stated many times before, the only policy that is worse than a clean three-year extension without any reforms, is a policy of complete expiration without any bridge,” Fitzpatrick said.
Lawler, in a social media post, similarly said that “the failure of leadership” to permit a vote had left him with “no choice” but to sign the petition. He urged Johnson to bring the plan up for an immediate floor vote.
Path ahead is uncertain
Even if the subsidy bill were to pass the House, which is far from assured, it would face an arduous climb in the Republican-led Senate.
Republicans last week voted down a three-year extension of the subsidies and proposed an alternative that also failed. But in an encouraging sign for Democrats, four Republican senators crossed party lines to support their proposal.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., argued against the Democratic extension as “an attempt to disguise the real impact of Obamacare’s spiraling health care costs.”
Singapore Airlines’ ultra-long-haul route covers 9,537 miles – but it doesn’t come cheap.
This is the longest flight in the world(Image: SCM Jeans via Getty Images)
The world’s longest flight links America to Asia, with travellers buckled in for nearly 19 hours. Singapore Airlines currently holds the record for the lengthiest long-haul journey, operating from New York’s JFK Airport to Singapore Changi.
The epic 9,537-mile trek boasts a scheduled flight time of 18 hours and 50 minutes and first took to the skies back in 2018.
Singapore Airlines deploys their cutting-edge A350-900ULRs on this route, aircraft capable of remaining airborne for over 20 hours non-stop.
These planes achieve such endurance thanks to a specially adapted fuel system. This enhancement boosts the aircraft’s total fuel capacity to an enormous 24,000 litres.
Yet this mammoth journey isn’t available to all, as Singapore Airlines doesn’t provide economy seating on this route. The carrier instead provides 67 Business Class seats and 94 Premium Economy Class seats.
Premium Economy travellers can relish additional legroom, a footrest, and an adjustable headrest. Passengers also benefit from noise-cancelling headphones and WiFi throughout their journey, reports the Express.
Business class flyers experience ultimate privacy, with their seats transforming into completely flat beds for proper rest during travel. Singapore Airlines maintains that the A350-900ULR delivers passengers a “more comfortable travelling experience”.
The aircraft boasts a host of additional amenities including elevated ceilings, expansive windows and specially engineered lighting systems to combat jet lag.
The carrier maintains that the aircraft’s cutting-edge carbon composite construction also enables superior air quality throughout the cabin.
Prospective passengers will need deep pockets, as tickets routinely command prices well into five-figure territory.
Singapore Airlines’ chief executive, Mr Goh Choon Phong, has previously stated that the new service will provide the “fastest way” to journey between these two metropolitan hubs.
He said: “Singapore Airlines has always taken pride in pushing the boundaries to provide the best possible travel convenience for our customers, and we are pleased to be leading the way with these new non-stop flights using the latest technology, ultra-long-range Airbus A350-900ULR.
“The flights will offer our customers the fastest way to travel between the two cities – in great comfort, together with Singapore Airlines’ legendary service – and will help boost connectivity to and through the Singapore hub.”
