Tag: Marty Supreme

Deconstructing Marty Supreme

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I did not like the movie Marty Supreme. I think my dislike comes from how peripatetic the storytelling was. It was just event after event after event without any time for the beats to properly land.

This is different from a similar movie, One Battle After Another, which was far more of a slow burn. There were major beats, then a little bit of a breather and so forth.

Also, I really did not like the hero. I get that that was part of the point — that he was a snot nose kid making a lot of mistakes and the “hero’s journey” was him sort of spiraling out of control. But I just did not like or care about him.

Yes, he leaves a wake of interesting disasters behind him, but…so what? Why should I care?

I will admit that some of my annoyance with the movie comes from thinking it was going to be a rousing, crowd pleasing tale about ping pong. Sort of a “miracle on ice” only with ping-pong.

Instead, meh. Just meh.

Given how…low stakes…ping pong is, you’d think at least we would be given a likeable hero who, against all odds, won the big championship. I left before the very end, so….maybe in some sense he did? But from what I’ve read on Wikipedia, that does not, in any real sense, seem to be the case.

I just found the whole endeavor grating on my nerves. There was a good to great movie lurking somewhere in the plot of Marty Supreme, but too bad we got what we got instead.

I Did Not Like Marty Supreme From A Storytelling Perspective

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, I understand that the peripatetic nature of the plot of the movie Marty Supreme was kind of the point. And, yet, I just did not like the movie because there was all this stuff going on and each beat was not given enough time and space to breathe.

Contrast this with the much better One Battle After Another. Though the two movies are probably two sides of the same coin, I loved One Battle After Another while I fucking hated Marty Supreme.

The one thing that I will give Marty Supreme is relative to its storytelling it didn’t telegraph it’s structure. I was engaged enough that I didn’t think to myself, “Oh, so that’s the inciting incident,” or “Oh, so now we’ve entered the second act.”

So, if nothing else, it had that going for it.

Anyway. I don’t quite know why I found Marty Supreme so grating on my nerves. It just was really annoying and not at all what I had expected. It would have been a much better movie if it had at least attempted to be crowd pleasing instead of “subvert our expectations.”

I Really Did Not Like The Movie ‘Marty Supreme’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Where to begin with this one. I went into Marty Supreme largely blind. I knew it was a movie about ping-pong and that was about it. Well, jokes on me because it turned out it was more about the disastrous life of a 23-year-old asshole.

I was expecting a rousing, audience pleasing tale of a young man making it big in the world of professional ping-pong. But, lulz, that’s not at all what happened. It just seemed like a succession of poor decisions on the part of the hero.

I didn’t care about the characters. I didn’t care about the sport. So about 90% in I walked out. Maybe the last 10% of the movie gave me what I expected, but I had better things to do, so I don’t know.

Anyway, I struggle to understand why people think Marty Supreme is such a great movie. Every time I think I’ve gotten a handle on it, it slips through my grasp. The ending must have been a lot better than I expected for everyone to love the movie so much.

I just found the experience tiresome and grating on my nerves.