Monday, July 07, 2003
Fun Movie News. #002:
PING PONG is about friends, heroes, competition, ambition, purpose, direction, affirmation, love, passion, dedication and PING PONG!
[Update: I got this on DVD via eBay and while it's not quite as glorious as Hyperbole Harry thinks it is, it's a damn good ping-pong picture/coming-of-age-sports-drama genre riff. It's overlong at nearly 2 hours and some of the key matches are not as gripping as they should have been (impressive debut for director Fumihiko Sori, but I wanted more wide shots of fierce rallies and less close-ups/freeze-frames of individual shots), but it's full of fun characters and mostly delivers the goods on the pong scenes. Homage is paid to countless films, such as The Karate Kid (contentious Larusso/Miyagi thing going on; a character gives a victory kick using the "crane technique" after a winning shot; there's a rival squad a la Martin Kove's Cobra Kai villains; and late in the film, a key match involves an injured leg. Unfortunately, no Beth Shue!). As the Knowles quote in my original post indicates, the film explores common themes, and it's very effective at capturing the intense desire to be the best at something (at one point, a character echoes a line from The Natural where Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs states that his goal was to walk down the street and have people say there goes "the best there ever was in this game.") without being a jerk about it (e.g., the generous sportsmanship of the Josh Waitzkin character in Searching For Bobby Fisher). The biggest find here is Yosuke Kubozuka as Peko. It's a fantastic performance, played nicely against the more reserved, somber Arata as Smile, a better player who lacks the competitive drive needed for the highest levels of the sport. For most of the film, Peko is a fast-talking, comic spirit (I laughed out loud in one scene in which he's listening to Springsteen on his headphones and yelling "Born!", ignoring Smile's pleas to finish it with "in the USA."), but there's a part in the middle where Peko becomes disillusioned with pong, grows his hair long and starts smoking and I thought of Jackie Earle Haley's magnificent work in The Bad News Bears films. I think Kubozuka may be Asia's answer to Gael Garcia Bernal.]
posted by Linus |
7:39 AM
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