EPISODE 261: Challengers
Can you win without defeating someone? Gareth and Jett get into it with Luca Guadagnino's new action, (and love), packed tennis picture Challengers. Along the way they delve into James Cameron's The Abyss, sing the praises of Hovis Bread commercials, recommend Ridley Scott's The Duelists and Walter Hill's Charles Bronson-starring Hard Times and pull the curtain back a little into their conceptions of what love really means.
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This morning, I heard the whole thing. They say Colonel Canvey is closing in with his northerners, and no later than tomorrow that they'll be in the city. That's why these southerners are getting out.
You see, as soon as these cowards hear a blue shirt around, they run. These rebels have no will to fight. Poor things.
They'll soon be finished. We get rid of these bastards, then we begin making money on those Yankees. Take your gold, not paper dollars.
Thank you.
Oh my god, I can't believe it. Folks, I know this is going to be a very special episode of the Film Talk. I'm one of your hosts, apparently, Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins.
The conversation never ends. And Jett, I have to ask you, I have to ask you, you always start the show with such an abundance of joy, of delight, of excitement, of energy.
And typically, recently, you've been predicting that the show is going to be special, or indeed, I think in this case, did you say very special? And you said, I know this is going to be a very special show. How do you know?
Because this film, Challengers, answers one of the most long-standing questions in all of cinema, dear listeners.
What if Sergio Leone is the good, the bad, and the ugly, but tennis? And now we have the answers with Challengers. It's like, what if you do a home makeover show, but with people?
Gareth, what is Challengers? Home makeover. Wait, hold on.
We've got a lot more to talk about. First, we do have a little bit to do before we get into this in-depth exploration of Challengers.
Folks, if you're listening to this on Spotify, for instance, instead of looking at our Patreon page or on the Apple Tunes or whatever the heck they're calling it these days, we do have bonus shows you can sign up for.
What are some of the bonus shows folks may have missed out on?
Some of the bonus shows that people may have missed out on include our most recent inaugural episode of what we're calling 2B or not 2B. Not that we're advertising any particular free streaming service specifically.
It's simply a little play on words. All those services out there where you can watch movies with ads. Some of us like to watch them with ads.
Many of us don't, but it does allow you to get up, make a cup of coffee in the middle of them. What Jett has discovered is there is a veritable treasure chest, a treasure chest of classic and high quality movies on those free ad supported services.
Our first To Be or Not To Be episode was published earlier this week in which we discussed John Frankenheimer's political conspiracy thriller Seven Days in May, which Jett rather liked.
I did. Here's a clip.
Ah, yes. To be or not to be.
To be or not to be.
That is the question.
A very good one. It's to be or not to be, isn't it?
No, no. To be or not to be.
In our line of work, that's right up there with black holes, or to be or not to be.
Okay, that was just a clip of our To Be or Not To Be montage, and you'll have to listen to the episode to find out if Seven Days in May is a To Be or Not To Be. We also have another bonus episode coming up later this week. What's that, Gareth?
Well, amazingly enough, we looked back in our archive and discovered that long, long time ago, we did an episode dedicated to every single Batman film, thereto for Haveth, Beneth, Release, Release, Death.
Is that how we talk?
16 years ago. It's from 16 years ago.
To be or not to be.
Some of these are to be, some of them are not. So we reviewed The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, The Tim Burton Batman, the other Tim Burton Batman, Batman Returns, The Schumacher's Batman Forever, and Batman and Robin.
And we're going to release that episode later this week now. In all fairness, dear listener, I have not listened back. It's 16 years old, so I'm not going to avert the quality.
You were a mere slip of a lad.
Yeah, oddly enough, I was 17 years younger.
I'm not sure how that works, but that's, you know. So we're going to quickly, quickly, quickly move on with folks. Don't forget, go to patreon.com/ The Film Talk to sign up for those bonus episodes.
Okay, let's get to my favorite Sergio Leone-esque relationship picture yet.
Challengers, as many of you know, is a film about tennis and relationships starring Zendaya, Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist.
It's directed by Luca Guadagnino, who made Call Me By Your Name and I Am Love, which, have you seen I Am Love, Chet, with Tilda Swinton?
It's an operatic film about the drama of family and I think it's also important to mention that inextricably linked with the quality and the experience of Challengers along with the director and the actors is the music by Atticus Ross and Trent
We do have a clip.
This is our three protagonists and interestingly enough, they're almost the only ones that speak in the whole film. The movie could be a stage play. I could see a stage play.
Maybe they'll change the title. It'll just be called Tennis! They're on a beach.
The two guys, blondie and black hair are Riff from West Side Story and Prince Charles from The Crown are hitting on Chani from Dune and Chani, they're all tennis players. They haven't turned pro yet. They're all very young.
They're all basically teens and Chani is telling them, Zendaya is telling them, Prince Charles, why he doesn't actually understand tennis.
Hitting a ball with a racket is a great way to avoid having a job. Well, that's also your problem.
Because you think that tennis is about expressing yourself, doing your thing.
That's why you still have that serve.
It works. Yeah, but you're not a tennis player.
You don't know what tennis is.
What is it?
It's a relationship. And that is Challengers. I got to say, I had more fun in the theater watching this film than I've had in a long time.
There were moments where I felt these characters were boring and emotionally immature and irritating. And then I had to step back from that and go, that doesn't mean that the movie is boring, emotionally immature and irritating.
It's one of the category errors that lots of us make when we're watching films, reading books or whatever, that the characters being portrayed at what's going on in their lives and how they're responding to what's going on in their lives may not be
what the movie is advocating. And in fact, the movie doesn't have to advocate anything. It could just be describing, portraying or illustrating it. And frankly, the journey between 18 to 31, don't know about you, Chet, the journey between 18 to 31.
Surprise surprise is a moment for many people when they do a lot of growing up.
This exactly is why episode 30 from 16 years ago is going to be, because we were teens when we started, now we're in our 30s.
Which one of us is Prince Charles?
Folks don't get that reference. The actor is Josh O'Connor. Yeah, he played Prince Charles in The Crown.
And he's brilliant in The Crown and he's brilliant in this and Mike Faist is brilliant in this.
And Zendaya, honestly, I was watching this going 27 year old Zendaya is as good as 27 year old Meryl Streep and I'm thrilled at the prospect of watching her career. Folks, you've got to see the look on Jet's face.
Your eyes became as big as Kermit the Frog's.
I'm thinking Zendaya is our Elizabeth Taylor, but without all the boozing.
Well let's hope not. This is a film about emotional maturity and it's a film about relationships and it's a film about realizing, as in all the best sports movies, that winning doesn't have to be about defeating somebody else.
You can win without defeating. In fact, you can win without winning and all three of these characters win.
And of course, Jett, you know, I am always looking for stories in which the zero sum competition of one person destroying another person or getting one up on the other person in order for them to be satisfied that the only way for my tribe to be
satisfied is if the opposing tribe loses. I'm always looking for stories in which that is transcended into a kind of a win-win or the way the world actually works, which is that you can have your share and I can have mine, we might even be able to
share it together. I absolutely do not want to give away the ending of this film. I will just say that I had an experience in the last scene of this film where my body did something, I'm not sure it's ever done before at the same time. That is-
Oh boy, yes.
Oh goodness. Yes, yes. Podcasts can be intimate, so it's okay.
I know you don't want to spoil the end of this film, but at some point, I feel we need to talk about what happens in the film and so that by its very nature, it spoilers folks if you're listening to this and you're saying, I want to see Challengers,
go see Challengers and come back and watch it. It's not like the old days of over-the-air analog television where you had to watch it and wait for a rerun.
They can focus and come back because I'm with you 100% here, Gareth, and there's a reason why I mentioned The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
You don't want to hear the thing that my body did that it had never done before?
Well, you didn't wait to find out- That's a spoiler... .
about I Am Love.
Well, this is true.
You fist, you punched the air with your fist.
No, I will hold the description of what my body did that it had never done before for a few minutes because I really think I have jumped ahead of us here. I have jumped ahead of us. We haven't really described the premise or the plot of this film.
Would you like to do the course?
Well, no. We got a clip. I mean, folks, there's an infinite amount of stuff.
People can find out the plot of the film. Tennis players.
Tennis players.
You could just say, listen, Zendaya is- Hold on.
Love triangle.
Zendaya is in love with the black haired guy. Black haired guy is in love with the blonde haired guy. Blonde haired guy is in love with Zendaya, right?
Imagine the blackboard from Back to the Future II in which Doc Brown is describing what's going on. There's time jumps and there you go. But I'm with you 100%.
Here's the thing. There's a reason why I mentioned The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, not just because they're both that this film, Challengers and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are done by Italian directors.
The gander, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, sorry, spoilers. There is a gunfight and-
Ecstasy of Gold.
No, Ecstasy of Gold is the track that plays before the gunfight. That's when Tuco was-
It's leading up to the gunfight.
All right, spoilers for this 50-year-old film. So there's a gunfight between Lee Van Cleef, who's the Zendaya, right, Clint Eastwood, who's blondie, and then literally in the film, and then Tuco, who is the Josh O'Connor character.
All right, and so they're pointing guns at each other, and the scene cuts back and forth, this incredible soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, and how long does that scene last before they draw their guns, or they're just looking at each other the last
five minutes? It's incredible. Well, thanks for watching. I want that to play for the whole five minutes, honestly.
But what happens at the end, this is to Gareth's point, dear listener, they shoot each other at the end. What if at the end, instead, it's 60 years old, and spoilers for Challengers, what if instead they just embraced each other in joy?
And that's Challengers, it shows you can be positive, it's not a zero-sum game. What's the great thing about love, dear listener, is that there's not a finite amount of it.
You can love somebody fully, and then love another person fully, and it doesn't mean there's less love over here. It doesn't mean there's less love for blondie because you also love black-haired guy, and you hear what I'm saying. Challengers.
I do hear what you're saying, and what my body did was tears of joy came to my eyes.
I laughed out loud, and then I spontaneously, almost involuntarily, started applauding out loud. I was the only person in the theater to do so. I wish I had seen it with a big, big, big crowd of people who were feeling the same way.
I think you're absolutely right. This is a film that steps into the biggest story of all, that is the story of the evolution of love, and absolutely acknowledges there's enough to go round.
Early in the film, Zendaya's character says, I just want to see a great game of tennis, and something that I love, love, love about this movie is it jumps back and forth. It's got this, you know, that kind of timeframe jumping back and forward.
Again, back to the future too.
Yes, which gives it, which kind of keeps it moving, actually keeps it moving. And fair enough, some people have critiqued the length. It maybe is a little bit too long.
I maybe would have been fine if 15, 20 minutes had been cut out of it, but everything in it is so good. Why would you cut it? Why would you cut it?
When it's so entertaining the whole way through, I have a sense that she's observing these things happening to these characters at the same time as I am.
And that her joy, the very last image of the movie is her joy, is as much of a surprise to her as it was to me watching from the audience. It's too easy to say, to use the word great to describe films. I'm not even sure what that means anymore.
But if you like watching tennis.
I'm gonna stop you there when you say if you like tennis, cause I get a feeling probably if you like tennis, the film will drive you crazy because these are not professional tennis players.
So really, if you do not watch tennis, you'll probably love it more. And Gareth brings up a thing, the film does skip back and forth in time. And this is a great thematic device.
And this is a great way, a great illustration of how the making of a movie or the cutting of a film can enhance the thematic aspects of it, right? Because by cutting back in time, we're whiplashing back and forth.
And that's just like the tennis ball going back and forth, right? So the structure of the film echoes being pulled back and forth. We have to pay attention.
We have to pay attention to where we are. Where's the ball coming? Where's the next scene?
We have to keep in mind. We're having a relationship with the film that way. And I think that's part of the film's brilliance.
And also, of course, there's the obvious thing. When everyone's having conversations, the music swells up at this, just like the music swells up at tennis matches, because they're saying that every conversation, every relationship is a tennis match.
Zendaya in the film says that tennis is a relationship and a relationship is tennis. We're all constantly competing and challenging each other. But can the winner be love?
Is the answer love? And this film says yes. And that's why, and I will use the word great.
That's why this is such a great film. Now, there's another component of the film that we had not even touched on, which to me was equally important.
I'm eager to hear.
Orisa Alawalia from I Am Love. And he has a scene, he maybe only has one or two scenes. This is the director's other film, one of his other films.
And involves Tilda Swinton and she's married into a wealthy industrial family in Italy. And one of the big plot points is that they move from making and producing things. They then sell off their industrial processes.
And Alawalia, who's like managing this transfer of wealth, says you've now moved, he says something, I haven't seen the film since it came out, so apologies. He says something like, you're now free because you're now in the realm of pure capital.
So they are free from the earthly constraints of, I mean, they have to make anything. And this is a component, a huge component of Challengers because Challengers is set in a world free from material concerns.
Everybody in the film is wealthy, even one of the main characters who pretends that he's not. So we have right at the start, Zendaya offers to the riff from West Side Story, Face, the blonde guy. It's like, well, you don't have to play tennis.
We could just be rich people. They live in a hotel. There's times in this film it goes back and forth in time in which you go, wait, is that a house?
Cause like the daughter's bedroom was all done up and then you realize you see little sign on the door giving you escape routes. They're living in a hotel. They're incredibly wealthy.
They're surrounded by by products that they themselves endorse. And it's not a coincidence. What's Zendaya's character's last name in this film, Garrison?
Remind me.
It's Duncan.
And she's known as the Duncanator when she was at Stanford. Why is that? Because we see the characters drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee.
And there's no question that she had not injured herself in the film. She would have made a fortune as the Duncanator. We see her advertising Aston Martin.
We see products everywhere. Stanford is featured prominently. The logos of Stanford, the colors of Stanford.
Everyone is surrounded in capitalism, enmeshed with the products they are advertising and they are rewarded for their ability to advertise said products. The entire film exists in a world without culture. There is no movies.
There's no one's reading a book. They play tennis. They play an abstract version.
It's like Herman Hesse's, the book, The Glass Bead Game. Tennis is just an abstraction for relationships. There is nothing but money and the flow of money.
Even the character you think is poor, he sleeps in his car. We find out in a throwaway line, oh, we can just ask your dad for a job, you know, a seat on the board. So, we're talking multi-millions.
And this also comes back to this idea of growth and deception, because we think this guy is poor because his credit card is declined. He's at a counter in a hotel, right? And this scene is super broad.
It's almost ADR. And this goes back to Sergio Leone again, Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There's a scene in a hotel in which everyone is badly ADR.
That means you're dubbed, dear listeners, when they recorded those Italian films, they didn't record audio, right? Klaus Kinski is German. He's speaking German for a few dollars more.
Clint Eastwood is speaking English. Someone else is speaking Italian. And the guy on the counter goes, he pays with the Yankee dollars or something like that.
It's really bad. And it's the exact same scene in Challengers. The trail is very broad.
We have a gay couple come up. They're way over the top. It's super broad.
And why is that? Just because it's telling us this is all deception. The couple is way over the top, gay, even though Josh O'Connor, the Prince Charles character himself, he can't say he's closeted.
He's not representing himself. But he's also, we find out later towards the end of the film, he's lying. He has plenty of money.
The whole thing is deception. So it's all part of a piece. They live within an abstracted world of wealth, meaning that it is meaningless.
They live this basically meaningless life. So all they have is each other and love. Does that make sense, Karen?
It feels very much like a description of what it is to co-host a film podcast over an extended period of time.
Again, with the Kermit the Frog guys, all that we have is each other. Let's talk about how it parallels with other sports movies and how it doesn't.
As I've said, my favorite sports movies are ones that are not about who defeats or how defeat happens. They're not really even about the technique of the game itself.
They're about the relationships between the people and each other, and perhaps even more so the relationship between the characters and themselves. Rocky being chief among them, there's a movie.
I have a feeling we may have, did we review Warrior whenever we were in the first iteration of the film talk with Tom Hardy, Joel Ledgerton and Nick Nolte?
I don't know if we did, but I think we should have.
Maybe we'll do it as a bonus episode, a great movie that actually changed the experience of watching it changed my life and changed the relationship I have with my spouse. Let me tell you about that. Shall I tell you about that?
Given that I've already talked about how my body has done things it had never done before, I might as well talk about my marriage.
Well I don't think we ever talked about your marriage. I wasn't quite sure that you were married to be honest. Dear listeners, Gareth and I don't really talk too much.
Well, I knew you were in a long term relationship, but I don't, did I get a wedding invitation? Did I get an invitation? I didn't, did I?
You want to talk about wedding invitations?
You want to talk about, you did get a wedding invitation.
I did? Oh, geez. What was that?
Yeah, that's great.
How long ago?
Wait a minute. Hold on. This is a little behind, pull behind the curtain.
Because we only talk about the movies, we don't talk about each other's personal life.
Did I get a wedding invitation?
Which one?
Well, that's the thing. I know. I mean, I fully participated.
I fully participated in-
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been married-
In a marriage of yours.
Less times than James Cameron. So you can make of that what you will. You got invited to one of them?
Yes.
Weren't you the best man? These days.
Oh God, I forgot about that.
At least in name. At least in name. I don't know if I was the best man descriptively, but I try.
I try. Anyway, I'm sitting watching Warriors with Brian, or Warrior with Brian, which is a film about two estranged brothers who end up being-
Well, is he your husband? Folks don't know this. Is he your husband?
I don't know. I don't keep track of this business. I thought you guys maybe were in a long-term relationship with like Zendaya.
I'm sitting-
Dear listener, I want you to know, I'm looking, I'm gazing through the miracle of Zoom at my dear, dear, beautiful, beautiful co-host, Jett Loe, whose eyes continue to do this Kermit the Frog thing through this episode. And let's just say love wins.
Love is, there is, it's not a zero-sum game. Love is not finite. I'm watching Warrior with Brian.
It's a film about two estranged brothers who get flung together in a mixed martial arts competition. They have reasons to really not like each other.
And there's a climactic moment that, yeah, if I was to describe it to you now, it might seem a bit cheesy, might seem a bit superficial, but my experience of watching it was I found it deeply moving and I'm sitting there watching it and I'm crying
silently. And Brian turns to me and he's going to say, this film is so cheesy and cliched. And he sees that I'm crying. So instead he just reaches over and holds my hand.
And then on the way home, he says to me, I'd love to know what you thought about that film and why you liked it so much. And if you want to ask me what I thought of it, give it a couple of days.
And we'll talk about that then because he recognized something that it took me a long time to recognize.
And that is something can be beautifully life-giving to somebody else, even though I may have all the kind of, I don't know, film theory reasons or scholarly reasons or just opinionated reasons to be able to, to critique that film.
But if they're having a life-giving experience, why would I want to take that away from them?
And so, yeah, a couple of days later, we did talk about it and yeah, I can see that it's a bit cheesy and it's a bit cliched, but the experience I was having at the time was moving me deeply.
So, I learned a lesson, it changed, it changed the relationship, it also changed how I want to be present to other people that I'm watching movies with.
And I don't think it's a question of, you know, the integrity of being able to evaluate a movie if I don't like it and you've been moved by it. But I can tell you that later or I can write an essay about that or we can talk about it in the film talk.
But why would I want to snatch that experience away from you if it's life-giving? So Warrior would be the second of my three sports movies.
Well, then you've got to watch Tobe Hooper's Life Force. Because that certainly is the experience that I had. So getting back to the sports films, you'd recommend?
Yes, I'd recommend Rocky.
Rocky, okay, sure.
And then I have one other.
Okay, what's that?
Not usually thought of as a sports movie, but in much the same way as Challengers has multiple tennis matches over the course of, I think, 13 years.
There's another film that has multiple, I guess you could call them sparrings, sparrings over a period of years and is not ultimately about a zero sum game.
Although in the minds of one of the competitors, their entire life is a zero sum game and this film resolves that beautifully by not pretending that it's easy for this guy to move on after he realizes the game is now over because his opponent refuses
to play the game anymore and that is, of course, Ridley Scott's first film from 1977 with Harvey Keitel, Keith Carradine and Albert Finney, The Duelists. It's a much more serious game than a game of tennis when people are trying to kill each other
but if you've never seen The Duelists, I urge you to watch it. It's not a fun movie but it's an important movie and it's one of my three favorite sports movies. What about your sports movies?
Well, I just want to add to you on The Duelists, I mean it's interesting to see for film buffs if you're in a Fictionado. Ridley Scott made a fortune starting as a young man as a commercial director, directing commercials for TV, right?
Very famous for- For Bread. His Hovis Bread commercial was revolutionary.
What's so interesting is to see how he took the techniques of commercial commercials and then translated those to something that is extremely a non-commercial idea. The film is very, very slow.
It almost has stayed, but boy, it sure is beautifully shot. I would actually recommend The Duelists. Watch his famous original Hovis Bread commercial right before it.
I'm sure it's on YouTube. I would recommend, of course, an obvious choice, Color of Money, that involves another kind of- It's not a throuple.
It's not a throuple. Even Challengers is not a throuple. It's kind of a throuple.
I mean, the power dynamics are, I don't know, throuplacucular.
I don't know if that's a word, but I guess it is now.
Yeah, you got your young Tommy Cruise, you got your Pauline Newman, and then you got, what's her name?
Mary, don't say what's her name. Her name is Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.
I apologize for saying what's her name. She is so fantastic in The Abyss. I mean, The Abyss is not Cameron's best picture, not his best picture.
It is his best picture. It definitely has some of the best scenes when she has to decide to make a decision to drown and then Ed Harris has to bring her back. It's arguably the best thing that Cameron's ever done.
But Colorful Money has these shifting power dynamics. It has the questions of what is winning, what is losing, how do you lose so that you appear to win and vice versa. There's also the sexual elements as well.
So definitely Colorful Money. My other favorite sport film that I would recommend actually, and did I say sport film instead of sports? That's sort of like Mitt Romney, presidential candidate.
Mitt Romney asked about his favorite team and he said, I don't follow sport. But he then added, he has friends who own teams. So there you go.
The other film I'd recommend is Hard Times, Walter Hill.
The great Walter Hill we don't talk about enough, who was such a presence in the 70s and 80s for American cinema, his films with Charles Bronson as a depression air or bare-knuckles boxer, is almost an anti-challenger.
So rather than being involved in multiple relationships, he's the man alone. And rather than being independently wealthy, he does this because he has no choice.
So it's a great double bill with challengers as sort of an anti, as sort of the white to the black, the yin to the yang, the sauce to the meat.
I believe that Hard Times is available on one of those self-same free-to-air, ad-supported services. Okay, what about films that explore relationships that need help? That's what I was thinking.
You know, what's the, is the parallel here with throuples, as you've said, or friends, or, or indeed tennis players. I think actually the more generic category, the wider category is relationships that need help.
I have, I have a few here, but would you like to go first?
Let's just do, let's limit it to two.
I have, I have four.
Let's limit it to two.
Oh, well, I mean, if one of them is one that you've already mentioned, does that count as one of the two?
Yes.
Well, I was going to say The Abyss actually, because it's, it is a film about relationships that, that, that need help and Kramer versus Kramer. There was something interesting about Challengers that reminded me of Kramer versus Kramer.
I don't quite know what it was. It may simply be, I like films that are prepared to devote almost all their energy to something that at one level is very small and mundane. And that is the interaction between two or three people.
And at another level, it's one of the most important things of all. And so in that sense, Kramer versus Kramer and The Abyss are a nice double bill. One is massive.
The other is tiny. And they're both about something of potentially cosmic importance. So is Challengers.
Well, in The Abyss though, does the power of love, at least in the Extended Director's Cut, like the power of love saves the planet?
Or saves the people from the giant waves? It's the power of love, right?
No, it's actually the...
Sacrifice.
It's the fact that the alien beings who are going to destroy the planet or destroy humanity in order to save the Earth, they recognize that humanity is worth saving because there are human beings who are willing to sacrifice in order to protect the
vulnerable. An ancient message, if ever there was one. This is also why you're ambivalent about Interstellar, as I recall.
Well, I would like to apologize to everybody that went to the Los Angeles world premiere of Interstellar. I was there and when Anne Hathaway said, suppose she's playing a physicist and she says, maybe love is the most greatest power of all.
Is that how she says it? Well, that's an amazing Anne Hathaway impersonation. Would you quote another of Anne Hathaway's lines?
I yelled out, this is again, world premiere, I yelled out all for F's sake, but more expletive in the theater.
That's why Christopher Nolan hired you to ghost write all his future films.
Here's my relationship picture I want to recommend.
We're all familiar with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
One thing, and this is very curious to me, all the publicity, all the decades of research and the reappreciation of Eyes Wide Shut, very few people mention that there's two other versions that have already been filmed of it.
There's an Italian version and an Austrian version, and the Austrian version is more explicitly, it is based on the same novel. Yes, the Trommel novel, the dream novel. I would rate it's on YouTube.
You can watch it with English subtitles. Watch this version of a dream novel.
It is obviously incredibly similar to Eyes Wide Shut in so many different reasons, in so many different ways, and it's a wonderful, understated, pleasurable, bittersweet exploration of relationships. It's on YouTube.
An earlier version, if you could say it that way, of Eyes Wide Shut, dream novel.
Do you still not believe that the power of love could be mediated through a five-dimensional bookcase and help humans in the present save humans in the future?
Well, the film seems to posit that love is some sort of extra-dimensional or extra-human force that exists, right? And for all I know, love is just a byproduct of evolution. You know, Romans built these arches.
You know, the Romans built arches. And then when you build an arch, you have like a plank over it. It creates a little triangle.
There's a name for it. And then over time, the triangles started getting decorated in Roman culture. And, you know, they were beautiful and everything.
But they're not a thing in itself. An archaeologist might look at that and go, oh, what meaning do these have? They had no meaning.
They were a byproduct of building the arch. So what we call love may not even be an evolutionary reason for it. It could just what we call love could just be a byproduct of us evolving on the planet.
You know what I mean? It doesn't exist separate as a thing that Anne Hathaway can use to power a spaceship through the sun and go back to San Francisco and save the whales. You know what I'm talking about here?
I do.
And perhaps you're right. And I feel like I want to mention John Lewis, Congressman John Lewis.
I've heard that he was asked when he was being faced with agents of the state who were literally beating him with a club, I think on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the civil rights march that was the basis for the great movie Selma, that he spoke of how
he loved the person who was beating him. I'm not doing this to prove a point. It's almost like I'm lobbing the ball back across the net, because I'm not sure how important it is for us to arrive at a conclusion around this.
So somebody asked him on a radio interview, I believe it might have been Krista Tippett on being something like, how could you find the love within yourself to treat this man this way? And he said, the love was already there between us.
I just joined it. And I've heard people talk about people who are very practiced in contemplative silence, saying that it's a category error to try to summon up the silence from within us. But that silence may actually be a thing that already exists.
And that contemplative silence is more easily practiced if you choose to just join it. We shall never know.
Although I do think, in all honesty, it might be important to come to a conclusion about that, because if love was something that existed beyond us and could just be joined, that would probably change everything. So let's watch Interstellar again.
I think that was an episode of the Space Hippie episode of Star Trek, the original series, that love was some sort of thing you could enter and that it surrounded them. I could be wrong in confusing it with the Spore episode.
You know, love may be the ground of being round. I mean, because I don't think it's a separate thing out there in the ether.
I rather, I want to retain mystery. I want to stay within the mystery, just like there was a mystery that there was no one in the space. When I was in the cinema, when I saw Challengers, I was the only one.
I wanted to say with Challengers, movies are back. People love movies, but I was the only one in the entire giant ass screen.
I hate to suggest this, but do you think it might have something to do with, you might be on, because of what you did at the, was it really the world premiere, like the red carpet world premiere? Or do you mean like the opening night?
Like opening night. I don't think it was, I didn't do Christopher Nolan. I would have been like marched out of there.
You would have been removed.
I would have been shot, not with love.
With what?
I think that would be going too far.
And I just wonder if you're on some kind of watch list, that when theaters see you coming, they give you private screenings, because you're the guy that shouts back at Anne Hathaway.
I think I was banned by Warners, because I jumped the gun in my review of Marley and Me, starring Owen Wilson. That's a true story. Folks, this has been Challengers, a fantastic film.
Fabulous, wonderful, beautiful, gorgeous, sexy. The shot of Zendaya as she leans back and the camera goes over her as she watches Prince Charles and Riff from West Side Story make out is great.
Any final thoughts before we give the folks a teaser for next week's show?
I don't know how to describe it, other than if you like. Here's the thing, if you think this film isn't for you because you're more into action cinema, trust me, this absolutely is the best action film I've seen in a long time.
And I haven't laughed so hard since Robocon.
Whatever that may or may not mean. And Peter Weller, if you're listening to the show, we'd love to have a conversation with you. I've been watching videos of Peter Weller talking about things lately and that is an interesting man.
I think he has a PhD in fine arts in Italy.
I'm sure.
He could talk to his heart's content.
There is a four-part documentary on Robocop. And I don't know, dear listener, if you like the film or not, I think it's an incredible, fantastic film.
But this four-hour documentary is worth watching just for the clips of Peter Weller talking about himself and his life. So, yes, let's work on getting Peter Weller on the show. We can do a Peter Weller retrospective.
Do you want to tease? Do we know what we're doing with the next week's show?
Well, I'm looking at what's being released today and what's being released next week.
What is being released?
We should discuss. Well, there's The Fall Guy, the re-release of The Phantom Menace. I think it's gonna be Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
You think it is?
I think it will be that.
We'll see.
Love is not finite.
It's not.
It's all around us. It's in the air tonight as well. Folks, I love talking to Gary Thiggins about the movies.
That's why we do this show. Don't forget, you can always talk to us over on the Facebooks if you want to endorse that platform at facebook.com/ The Film Talk. We're on Patreon.
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Like cosmic, mysterious, metaphysically present love, The Film Talk is everywhere.
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Any questions or concerns about anything?
About love.
I've been Jett Loe, your relationship guru.
I've been Gareth Higgins. We'll keep talking, next time.