Challengers Ridge
Recent movies confound me
The academic year is off to its usual hectic start, and there’s also travel baseball taking up a bunch of time, but I have managed to take in a bit of pop culture here and there. Two of the recent movies I’ve seen surprised me a bit, at least in the sense of not quite being what I expected.
On the good side, this weekend The Pip and I watched the new Netflix movie Rebel Ridge, featuring Aaron Pierre as a veteran who runs afoul of the corrupt police department of a small Southern town, headed by Don Johnson. This looks very much like a righteous vengeance movie, in the vein of First Blood or Reacher or the original John Wick: bad guys mess with the wrong dude, who trashes them all in cool ways. My one hesitation was that the casting of Pierre and Johnson as the leads, and the word “Rebel” in the title made me slightly worried that it would have a heavy-handed Take on racial politics.
I don’t want to spoil the movie too badly, but neither of those turned out to be right— if anything, the corruption is surprisingly lacking in racial elements. I was expecting the Bad Cops to be way more overtly racist in their presentation. It’s also much less kinetically violent than I was expecting— it’s not that there isn’t action, but Pierre doesn’t leave a huge pile of corpses in his wake the way I was expecting.
These are, as I said at the top, diversions to the good side. It’s more of a slow burn thriller than an action spectacular, but once your expectations are properly (re)calibrated, it’s very well done. Pierre is terrific as the stoic and put-upon protagonist, and Johnson excels at smarmy evil. And the disposition of the final stand-off caught me by surprise in where it chose to extend grace. I definitely recommend it.
On the less-good side, on the plane back from London, I watched Challengers on demand, which is the Tennis Threesome Movie from earlier this year. This has Zendaya as a sort of Serena Williams figure who is courted by doubles partners Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, told largely in flashbacks some years after their initial meeting when Faist and O’Connor end up facing each other in a low-level tournament.
This got a ton of buzz back in the spring, with the movie podcast I listen to going on and on about how wonderful it was. It’s not the kind of thing I automatically seek out, but since I was stuck on the plane anyway, it seemed like a decent opportunity to see what the fuss was about.
And… I don’t really get it. I mean, I understand that these are three very attractive people, and the movie is very well shot and acted. But everybody in it… kind of sucks? But not in an exciting way, if that makes sense? It’s all extremely mundane relationship drama, but none of them are good enough to want to root for, or nasty enough to want to root against.
Maybe it was content-edited for playing on an airplane, removing a bunch of racy stuff, but I didn’t see the usual big disclaimer about that. Or maybe being on an airplane robbed it of the grandeur it would’ve had in IMAX or whatever. Either way, it failed to blow me away; it’s a fine enough example of a thing I don’t especially care for, but not good enough to make me care about it all that much.
Anyway, there’s your extremely brief commentary on recent-ish pop culture, for whatever that may be worth.
Just a quickie post while I’m waiting for students to maybe show up to office hours. If you want more of this kind of thing for some reason, here’s a button:
And if you want to argue with either of these takes, the comments will be open:
Agreed. It seemed like two main things were going on... (1) they were trying to sell the cinematography, like "here's this extremely beautifully-shot movie" for all the film nerds out there... which is totally okay, but also just kind of incongruent with the core content they paired it to... and then (2) they were trying to do that whole "look at how PROGRESSIVE we are, we showed a WOMAN being EMPOWERED and forcing TWO MEN to fight over her and even have a THREESOME!".
Which, okay, whatever, I'm always like you do you boo, break whatever barriers you want... but also don't ask me to congratulate you for putting like half your pinky toe across the line and then acting like you really stuck your neck out on this one. For my entire life, Hollywood's always been up its own ass on what it thinks stretches boundaries, and in my fourth decade of this shit I simply can't work up the interest to be impressed. I mean, there are already arthouse movies where the actors have real sex with each other but it's not porn... the boundaries are gone, and have been gone for a long time. Try just making art?