Marty Supreme and Song Sung Blue plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

A Complicated Passion for Ping-Pong

and Diamonds in the Rough

        

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue below [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.

               

 (Above cartoon dutifully paid for.)

 As has happened so often in this still-young year last week was filled with a good many time-consuming events (especially in tedious preparation for meeting with my income tax pro, dealing with Nina’s laptop malware, and watching some of the Winter Olympics [those athletes are amazing]), so while I’m still on a mission to see whatever I can of the various Oscar nominees before the awards are announced on March 15, 2026 (go here and scroll down to view all of the contenders) I'm left with little opportunity to report back to you so here’s what I can share about my responses to a couple of them, while struggling to get this posted (no Spoilers from me, but some are in the links).

         

SHORT TAKES

                 

                         Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

                                           rated R    149 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

 This one’s piled up a lot of positive response already since being released to domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on December 19, 2025 (still in 465 of them with grosses so far of $94.6 million [globally $149.9 million]; you can also stream it with $19.99 rentals at Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV), featuring 9 Oscar noms (including Best Picture, Director, Actor in a Leading Role, Original Screenplay), although for me it runs too long, gets a bit lost with a subplot about a lost dog, and probably wouldn’t be my first choice in any of its Oscar categories—although it's strongest in my opinion for Lead Actor (yet, even there I lean toward Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025])—despite a clear disagreement from the CCAL with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 94%, Metacritic average score at 89% (quite high for them).  It’s somewhat based on Marty Reisman, a noted American table tennis champ (and hustler; more about him here [15:34 video; ads interrupt at 1:05, 4:35, 7:55, 10:40, 13:20]) with this version of such a mercurial character starring Timothée Chalamet (winning the 2026 Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy [an odd choice for this film in this category as there are few laughs in it, but One Battle … took their award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy over Marty …, another one without much fun, but still my choice at this point for Oscar’s Best Picture]) as Marty Mauser in 1952 NYC where working for his Uncle Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) as a shoe salesman is far from his goal of becoming table tennis World Champion.  

 

 Marty lets nothing stop him in his quest for triumphs at tournaments in London and Tokyo, getting into an affair with aging actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Palthrow) along the way (he’s got another one going with married childhood pal Rachel Mizler [Odessa A’zion]), eventually getting some financial support from her clueless husband, writing pen magnate Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), although Marty’s decisions about his dreams leave him constantly owing reimbursement for the various antics he’s used to further his ambitions.  You deserve more extensive plot details so go here to find them.  I’ll leave you with praise for Chalamet’s work and my usual Musical Metaphor, taken this time directly from the soundtrack, Tears for Fears’ "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (1985 album Songs from the Big Chair) because for Marty and his main competitors (along with Rockwell) “All for freedom and for pleasure / Nothing ever lasts forever / Everybody wants to rule the world”; decades later for so many politicians/tech bros the attitude remains the same, but Marty does wise up finally.

              

                        Song Sung Blue (Craig Brewer, 2025)

                                      rated PG-13   133 min.

Here’s the trailer:

 My attention to this movie was based on Kate Hudson’s Oscar nomination as Best Actress in a Leading Role, but in retrospect I think she has little chance at winning given the competition she faces with my interest toward Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025), along with all the good things I’ve heard (but haven’t verified with a viewing yet … but soon) about Jessie Buckley in Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025).  Honestly, Hudson has her moments in this story, especially in the later scenes, but I now see her as the least likely winner in this category, just as I can easily understand why this movie got no other nominations because, had I not known it’s based on a documentary also called Song Sung Blue (Greg Kohs, 2008; which you can get a summary of here [6:49 video] or watch the whole thing at this site) about the people depicted in the Brewer version, with the doc (which I haven’t had time to watch, if course) winning Jury and Audience awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, I would have found this to be too overly-sentimental to be interested in except for the enjoyment of Neil Diamond songs (loved his long-ago actual concert). 

 

 Basically, the situation here is long ago at the 1987 Wisconsin State Fair Don Ho imitator—who unsuccessfully demands to just perform as himself—Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) meets up with equally-dissatisfied Patsy Kline impersonator Claire Stengl (Hudson), leading to a partnership including an ongoing Neil Diamond tribute and marriage. Their act proves quite popular within the Midwest until various tragedies take their toll (many more plot details are available at this site).  For me, Hudson’s generally overshadowed by Jackman for most of the movie, their singing’s commendable in that they both do it live, and, in general, I’m not terribly taken with what’s presented here (although both lead characters’ determination to overcome their major problems is quite commendable, with the CCAL response a bit stronger than mine as RT positives are 78%, MC average is 61%; if you’re interested turn to streaming where you’ll find $9.00 rentals at Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, along with [unconfirmed by me] a freebee at Peacock [$10.99 monthly to subscribe]).  My Musical Metaphor will be the title song sung by Diamond (from his 1972 Moods album) with its lyrics appropriate for this movie: "Funny thing / But you can sing it with a cry in your voice / And before you know it gets to feeling good / You simply got no choice.”  Many seem to like Song … more than me, but for now "I'm [Not Quite] a Believer", as I don’t feel the Song … movie got down to the depths that I perceive the … Blue doc addressed about this couple's mega-miseries.

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list).  Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page.  We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!  Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.  You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us there in order to comment (FB procedures: frequently perplexing mysteries for us aged farts).

 

*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.

 

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please 

use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.

             

OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.

          

Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 32,041.  (As always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers.)  Below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

Think Things Couldn’t Get Worse? Think Again!

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue below [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party"  by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.

               If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

                                       rated R   113 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

 

If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy).  To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows: 

⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.

WHAT HAPPENS: Psychotherapist Linda (Rose Byrne) needs therapy herself—which she (unsuccessfully) attempts to get from her unsympathetic colleague (played by Conan O’Brien in an effective dramatic role)—due to her life increasingly falling apart, starting with the daily stress of trying to help her daughter (not named nor shown until the last scene; voice of  Delaney Quinn) gain weight as she’s suffering from some unspecified disease that requires a nightly ingestion of nutrients into her stomach, fed by a machine while she’s asleep.  (We don’t see much of the machine either, although we have to surmise she’s connected to it all of the time because Dr. Spring [played by director Bronstein] surprises Linda by telling her that when the girl can reach her needed poundage the tube will simply be pulled out rather than requiring any sort of surgery so obviously Linda doesn’t insert this device every night, then remove it the next morning; despite its necessary presence for the girl, though, this daily input works against Linda’s weight-gain goal by giving the kid a sense of rebellion, not actually eating enough during each day as she can depend on the machine to give her some sense of food so she doesn’t consume nearly as much as Linda tries to encourage her to do.)

 As if this situation isn’t enough to keep Linda distressed and preoccupied on a regular basis, here’s what else she has to deal with in the short time presented in this film: (1) The ceiling above her apartment suddenly has water pouring through from a large hole, forcing Linda and the girl to retreat to a local motel; (2) Her landlord just offers excuses why it will take some time to repair the ceiling: (3) The motel has a surly night clerk, Diana (Ivy Wolk), who keeps flinging attitude at Linda (4) Dr. Spring, at the clinic where the daughter spends her days with other children suffering from various problems hounds Linda for not attending sessions with other mothers of kids in the care of this place despite Linda’s inability to attend due to her other problems with the Doc implying Linda’s kid might have her care reduced if she doesn’t gain a couple of pounds by next week; (5) Linda’s husband, Charles (Christian Slater), a cruise ship captain is away for long stretches, criticizes her in phone calls for not handling her problems better; (7) Linda doesn’t sleep much at night due to the feeding machine’s noise so she goes outside the motel room to smoke pot, drink wine, leaving her compromised the next day; (8) New mom Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) is overly emotional and needy, runs away from her therapy session leaving her baby behind so Linda has to deal with that; (9) Even the simple attempt to get Linda’s girl a pet hamster ends in tragedy when it escapes the car, is quickly run over.  ⇒One night, Linda pulls out the feeding tube herself (though it’s impossibly long), then goes to the apartment where she finds Charles has returned, brought about repair of the ceiling.  They return to the motel where Linda freaks out, runs to the nearby ocean, tries to drown, but huge waves keep pushing her back.  When she revives, her daughter’s there as Linda promises to “be better.”⇐ If you want more plot details (there are several), you can explore this helpful site.

SO WHAT? I don’t have any clear explanation of this film’s title, although I assume it refers to Linda’s increasingly-debilitating frustration with her horrendous situation so I guess she feels like she wants to lash out (even more than with her angry hang-ups in many of her phone calls) in a physical way toward those she sees as her tormentors but she doesn’t because she lacks control of her life, what academics might call nonexistence of “agency.”  (How’s that for a high-falootin’ word?  Yet, I probably shouldn’t use it because it smacks too much of DEI concepts; you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime soon U.S. government agencies have to drop that word from their names, replacing it with something like “Patriotic Employees Group.")  As with my recent review of Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) where I felt Ethan Hawk’s constant command of the screen encouraged me to take an ordinary film situation up into 4 stars-range, so I feel the same way about Byrne’s powerful portrayal of a woman pushed to the brink (if not into the abyss) of madness, so another 4 stars-response from me here, thanks to the narrative-domination of 2026 Actress in a Leading Role Oscar-nominee Byrne.  (She’s won some awards already as varying versions of Best Actress from, among others, the Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Globes [oddly enough, in their Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy category, though I find little to laugh at in … Kick You], the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, but she faces tough competition for the Oscar [you'll need to scroll down into her category].)  

 

 Two other aspects of … Kick You I found interesting (though you may not, as with the Henderson review in this posting’s next section below) are how Linda is often shown in close-ups or even extreme close-ups so that the film frame boundaries give her almost no room to maneuver or even breathe, indicating how fiercely her life is confining her, and some scenes that are clearly fantasies in her mind put on screen to show us how traumatized she is in certain very intense situations, leaving us to wonder how much of what’s presented is truly happening, how much is disturbed projection (the most unnerving scene for me is when Linda’s pulling the feeding tube out of her daughter’s stomach with the device impossibly too long to have been inside of the girl’s abdomen; very creepy).

BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opened in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on October 10, 2026, is still playing in some of them, has grossed $1.1 million ($1.4 million worldwide) so far, and is most likely available to you via streaming where it’s free to HBO Max subscribers—sometimes pops up on HBO cablecast as well (that’s where I saw it)—or can be rented for #4.99 from Amazon Prime Video.  The CCAL, along with me, encourages you to watch with 91% positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, a 77% average score at Metacritic, although it becomes increasingly-depressing to subject yourself to these ongoing tragedies (despite Byrne’s fabulous performance), as even those who support it will admit, like Stephanie Zacharek of TIME: “Being a mother is perhaps the most sanctified role in human civilization. What woman would ever want to admit she’s botching it? […] We feel terrible for her, and we completely understand why she’s falling apart. But do we really want to keep walking with her every step of the way, even as she appears to be heading right over the edge? If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.”  Others, such as Odie Henderson of The Boston Globe, find considerably less to admire: “Cinematic endurance tests don’t work if you have no connection to the character being dragged through the wringer. People raved about “Uncut Gems” because they felt riveted enough to go on Adam Sandler’s arduous journey. I was not one of those people, but I get why the film was such a success. [… in contrast]] I found Byrne’s work intriguing at first, but ultimately redundant and routine. She’s either freaking out, cursing somebody out, frazzled beyond repair, or drunk/high. Every scene is some kind of argument, and that’s before the movie untethers itself from reality. Those surreal moments do not work at all; they make us question if the entire movie was a figment of Linda’s imagination. […] It overstays its welcome by at least 30 minutes.”  Or not, I’ll say, probably depending on audience endurance for character-misery.

    (Director Bronstein as Dr. Spring.)

 So, be warned; what you’ll see here shows overwhelmingly brutal personal situations which may accumulate to be more than you can digest, despite the cinematic impact Byrne brings to these events.  While you're deciding whether to experience that or not, I’ll give you another option by the use of my usual Musical Metaphor—which I admit is not a fully ideal one because unlike the person being sung about Linda doesn’t intentionally bring all of her misery on herself, though she does share the song's sense of someone's troubles—The Eagles’ "Desperado" (1973 album of the same name) which I’ve used 8 times already in these reviews, showing I’ve seen some miserable folks over the years: “Oh, you’re a hard one, but I know that you got your reasons / These things that are pleasin’ you can hurt you somehow […] And freedom, oh, freedom, well, that’s just some people talkin’ / Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone […] You’re losin’ all your highs and lows / Ain’t it funny how the feelin’ goes away? […] You better let somebody love you before it’s too late.”  We can’t be sure if it’s too late for Linda or not (Can we believe what we see in the last scene?), but maybe she can “be better” as she tells her daughter at the end, if she'll ever get some cooperation.

           

SHORT TAKES

            

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list).  Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page.  We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!  Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.  You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us there in order to comment (FB procedures: frequently perplexing mysteries for us aged farts).

 

*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.

 

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please 

use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.

             

OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.

         

Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 32,041.  (As always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers.)  Below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):