Challengers, The Fall Guy and Love Lies Bleeding

 

When Challengers ended we never knew the outcome of that tennis match. Somewhere it said "it was never about who won". But that is exactly what tennis is all about. I enjoyed director Luca Guodagnino's Call Me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash, but this three hander was not my kind of film. Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor do their best with a good screenplay but awful story. Worst of all was the awful music, if you can call it that, because it overpowers the dialogue. Thank goodness there was not too much tennis, although the director's trick of filming the tennis balls coming right at you was, perhaps, the most memorable thing in the whole film. Beatrice Loaza in Sight and Sound says it is " a hot and heavy drama, but it's also full of breezy wit and bizarre, borderline uncanny touches that, if they don't always work, at least keep you on your toes, entertained".

Another movie where the sound dominates everything else was The Fall Guy. But what I liked best were all those scenes where we see all the people involved behind the camera. And there were lots of them. Of course there was the undoubted chemistry between the two stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. And the selection of songs was fine. It was just that the one over a sequence of clips showing the pairs early relationship was over far too quickly. However, I thought the main plot that only involves Gosling was pretty pathetic so there was not enough of the two stars together. And then the ending is pretty daft even though it just wants to show us what a stunt man can do. Reasonable fun. Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound adds "They all bring characterful flesh-and-blood mischief to what could otherwise have been a calculated mirror game of reality and illusion".

Director Rose Glass is on a roll. I watched her creepy Saint Maud on TV even though I normally avoid these kinds of movies. And now her latest Love Lies Bleeding is the closest to a Coen Brothers film I have ever seen. Kristen Stewart brings that kind of unease we saw in Personal Shopper. Why she would fall in with bodybuilder Katy M. O'Brian is anyone's guess. Well we are in 1989 where Kristen's father (Ed Harris is streets ahead in acting terms) owns a gym. As expected, things turn nasty. Tom Shone in the Sunday Times said it was a "hard-knuckled, hard-boiled B-movie on steroids". As different as it could be to Glass's Saint Maud.