Monthly Movie Review: May 2024:
For my second monthly movie review, I’d like to focus on my two favourite movies I saw in May, Challengers directed by Luca Guadagnino, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga directed by George Miller. These were both such great watches in their own ways, but both shared a great energy that really left an impact on me this month.
Challengers (2024)
I watched Challengers in theatres with my brother as part of an all-day movie watching marathon. Starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor as three talented Tennis pros, the film cuts between the main setting of the final match of a Challengers Tennis tournament in New Rochelle in August 2019. As well as between various points in our three main characters’ relationships with each other over a 13-year span. What is interesting here is that the movie is broken up into parts corresponding with the various sections of a tennis match, and flashbacks occur in thematically relevant parts of this Tennis match. This choice worked well for the movie, helping to slowly build the tensions over the course of the movie until the final sequence of the match reaching a fever pitch, finally breaking at the last possible second with nearly no falling action, capturing this one near perfect moment at its apex. The triangular relationship between the three is predominantly heterosexual, but there are strong homoerotic undercurrents between O’Connor’s character (who is very briefly confirmed as bisexual), and Faist’s. All of these contributing to a very sexy movie. I wanted to first start with the performances, each one of which is great, but especially Zendaya's. I'm really starting to love her as an actress, and she played this part so well. Her character, Tashi, is a struggler, a striver, and a manipulator, who is constantly messing with Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), in part due to her own Tennis ambitions being stunted by a major injury. Josh O’Connor’s Patrick is also a great, skeezy portrayal of a man who comes from a privileged background, who has a lot of talent, but only just coasts by due to an apparent lack of real ambition. Finally Art, played by Mike Faist is another kind of rich kid coasting, although he does have more ambition than Patrick, by the time of the Challenger Tournament he has lost his passion for playing and want to retire from his Tennis Pro career after this season. Art is also a bit of a bad guy, trying to end Tashi and Patrick’s relationship in college by lying to both of them about the other. The music was also phenomenal in this film, especially the original piece “Challengers” this throbbing electronic piece, often playing when there is an argument between two characters, served to heighten the tension. I listened to “Challengers” a lot while writing this retrospective, and I’d recommend giving the movie soundtrack a listen. The camera work is my second favourite part of the movie, which was incredibly ambitious. There were lots of rapid movement of the camera going back and forth to mirror the nature of a tennis match, at one point even taking the perspective of the ball itself. The camera felt so alive, especially in tense moments where it started to move in such intense ways. There are at least two shots from this film where they have Patrick and Mike playing tennis on top of a court with a glass floor and the camera is facing up at them from below. God there are so many wild moments with the camera its hard to cover them all. Also, congratulations to Justin Kuritzkes for writing the script, which was apparently the first script he wrote that became a movie. This movie is a must watch, I cannot recommend it enough.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
Directed by George Miller, who also dircted all other Mad Max's, this movie is a sequel to 2015's 'Mad Max: Fury Road' in much the same style and vein. Furiosa was an interesting dive into the eponymous character, who despite the title, was also pretty much the main character of “Mad Max: Fury Road”. The movie has a distinctive visual style that was also present in “Fury Road”, which I grew to admire over the course of the film, really making it stand out. The film itself is a revenge story, where a young Furiosa is kidnapped from her home in a place of abundance in a post-apocalyptic Australia, and her mother is killed rescuing her and keeping their home a secret from the biker warlord Demetus. As she grows up she becomes a lieutenant of warlord Immortan Joe and seeks revenge on Dementus. The film is filled with bombastic action and incredible set pieces that serve as a backdrop to the evolution of Furiosa from a vulnerable child to a hardened wasteland killer. The main performances of Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a child Furiosa and Ayna Taylor-Joy as the older version), Furiosa’s mother Mary (Charlee Fraser), Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), and Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) were all great. I was especially impressed with the Alyla Browne and Charlee Fraser. Alyla Browne was a great child actor, one who also happens to look like both a young Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlize Theron which was doubly incredible. She was the main character for roughly half of the movie and played it so well, most of her acting was non-verbal and she did such an impressive job for such a young actor. Charlee Fraser was also incredible, appearing only in the first fifth of the movie she left a strong impression as a fierce, capable mother who sacrifices herself to keep her daughter and her community safe. Chris Hemsworth also did a great job, but he also had such a good opportunity to play this heinous character, who also undergoes a subtle shift from the first half of the film to the second. I mentioned in my review on the Cafe of the eerie feeling I got from this movie. I’ll try to expand on that here without repeating myself too much, but I really did love it. Even though there are almost no pre-apocalyptic ruins or structures in this setting except for an oil refinery and iron mine, it still feels as if the ghosts of a fallen world are all around the characters. The movie almost feels haunted by this sense of decay and death, with only a much-diminished humanity still struggling on. I felt a sadness for a world gone by and for a new one that replaced it which barely survives. People are either causally or purposefully cruel in response to an incredibly cruel natural and human world, making compassion and kindness feel near extinct. The sense of boundless emptiness also heightened this sense, the world felt so wide and open but full of nothing. Only the smallest pockets of people existing like they were frightened mice living on the corpse of some decaying giant. I am so sad that “Furiosa” was pulled from theatres before even a month had passed, I think it did not get the recognition it deserved and I hope that you who is reading this can watch it and appreciate it. It is such a stark film, and I think it is a great watch.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed, and I hope you watch “Challengers” and “Furiosa”.