Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme

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A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A young man with a dream no one respects pursues greatness.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Stress and humor. He made this film without his brother and frequent collaborator, yet still Josh Safdie delivers the freneticism, with a touch more humor, for which the duo has become known (e.g. Uncut Gems, Good Time).

→ Timothée Chalamet. If you had any doubt on whether he was more than a heartthrob — his performance in Marty Supreme will take those doubts out back and shoot them.

→ Rooting for flawed characters. It’s film acrobatics to convince an audience to root for Marty Mauser. I’m not sure of another way to put it.

What I liked about it.

Timothée Fucking Chalamet. The ping pong balls on this guy. His turn as Marty Mauser is a most daring, brilliant performance — one that might very well mark the point in his career at which the general public realized what he’s really capable of.

The film is constructed around the sport of table tennis, though Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is most certainly not a sports film. The tale of Marty Mauser is at once a series of hysterical misadventures and a deeply affecting character study about greed, fame, dreams, and ambition. Watching it gave this viewer the feeling of living beyond the constraints of gravity for the entire two-hour-and twenty-nine-minute runtime.

Marty Supreme belongs in conversations with every other great film of 2025 (e.g. Sinners, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Weapons, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, etc.).

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ Chalamet spent 7 years mastering table tennis to prepare for the role. Compare this to the five years he spent learning to play the guitar for A Complete Unknown. He even brought a ping pong table to the desert on the set of Dune in order to train in between takes.

→ Kevin O’Leary was cast because he’s an asshole. Now a somewhat controversial figure, O’Leary serves as the film’s antagonist. Of his casting, he says, “their words, not mine: ‘We need a real *sshole… and you’re it.'“

Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.

AN INCIDENT THAT MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BROADER IMPLICATIONS BUT IT’S PROBABLY A STRETCH.

It’s been eight years since I sharted on my bathroom wall and this author will never forget the shame that followed. Back then, my wife and I lived in a cute little town on the east coast near the water. Picturesque with cobblestone and historic buildings and dockside restaurants and old couples with sweaters tied around their necks. There was a tiny shop in town — one that made their own ice cream using milk from nearby farms — that probably looks exactly as you’d imagine.

The owner of the shop had a penchant for knick knacks, the highlight of which was a one-of-a-kind miniature snow slope complete with a mechanized lift to bring Tiny Adorable Penguins to the top in order to slide down the snow slope on their tummies. No matter what time of day, going to the shop meant waiting in a 25-minute line, practically pinned against the wall in what was a (very) narrow ice cream shop. We'd watch one-by-one as the TAPs adorned with plastic smiles slowly shuffled up the slope, before turning and tumbling forward and sliding headfirst down to the start of the lift.

The shop was famous for its Apple Pie ice cream, which was more or less a large bucket of vanilla ice cream with an entire home-baked apple pie folded into it. The night of the incident, I treated myself to a double scoop because I’d heard such wonderful things about it and I decided to ignore my tumultuous history with dairy. Around two or three in the morning, I rolled out of bed and grumbled my way over to the bathroom across the hall to go pee. I felt air building in my bum and gave it a gentle push. To my great shame, what followed was not a gust of wind, but a smattering of poo. To my six was a matte wall that looked as if it were decorated by a toddler swinging a wet paintbrush and I felt a deep sense of self-pity as I cleaned it all up.

A BIOLOGICAL IMPULSE WITH WHICH WE HAVE DECIDED THAT THE GROUP’S (i.e. SOCIETY’S) TRADEOFFS ARE NOT WORTH ONE PERSON’S INDULGENCE.

On average, people break wind between 14 and 23 times a day. This is to say: farting is a totally normal bodily function. As our bodies digest foods, extracting nutrients and such, they naturally produce gas (compounded with the air we swallow when we eat said foods). Much of the gas is absorbed naturally, but what isn’t needs a place to go.

Without a mechanism to expel gas from the body, we would be miserably bloated, inflamed creatures in near-constant discomfort. So, farting is the mostly-well-designed biological tool that provides a very useful solution to a clear and obvious problem.

But the wisest among us know that solutions almost always mean tradeoffs. In the case of your author’s (***unusual***) incident, the most extreme tradeoff was the very low likelihood that it was productive. Most often, though, the tradeoff every single one of us faces is the high likelihood that flatulence produces both an odor and a silly noise in mixed company.

And so this universal impulse that actually solves a critical biological issue has become a pariah — one that is one-hundred percent socially unacceptable — mostly because the tradeoff is quite uncomfortable for those around us. It’s gone so far that you might even feel a twinge of embarrassment if someone uses the bathroom (a perfectly appropriate place to smell bad) after you’ve imbued it with the odor of your waste.

Put another way, society’s verdict on flatulence is that one individual’s indulgence is not worth the discomfort of the stink on the rest of the group.

A LIST OF INDIVIDUAL INDULGENCES WITH (POTENTIALLY) GREATER GROUP TRADEOFFS THAN BREAKING WIND, EACH OF WHICH IS IRONIC TO SOME DEGREE OR ANOTHER.

(1) There are people who would be utterly ashamed to fart on a first date and also actually wear mullets.

(2) There are voters who are embarrassed to gas a dinner table and also unabashedly proud to vote for brazenly corrupt politicians who are hellbent on limiting the very same rights and liberties and democratic discourse that enabled them to run for office in the first place.

(3) Leaders of billion-dollar mega-corporations would be mortified to let one slip in a company all-hands meeting and also shamelessly lay off vast swaths of workers to make a much smaller population of investors 1% more wealthy.

(4) Writers of modestly-sized newsletters would prefer none of you ever smelled their wind and also are more than glad to have thousands of people read about the time they shit themselves in their mid-twenties.

A SEVERELY UNDERBAKED CONCLUSION (YOU ARE READING A NEWSLETTER) THAT PROVIDES NO PATH FORWARD.

The societal farting aversion probably isn’t only about tradeoffs. It can also likely be explained as the result of a kind of evolutionary weirdness — one which I’ve not bothered to fact-check or look up — consider that the smell of sulfur might trigger a primitive trip wire that sounds biological alarms for poison or danger or something.

No matter this argument, society has also (wittingly or unwittingly) evaluated the group’s tradeoffs resulting from one individual’s indulgences in public flatulence and mostly agreed that it isn’t comfortable to sit in a cloud of someone else’s fart. Politeness and shaming are each as good an influence on behavior as any, and so this has been the predominant mechanism with which we’ve stopped assholes from farting all over our spaces. I get it.

Now, how a little toot instigates more shame in an offender than any of the above-listed acts (mullets, voting for dummies, layoffs, sharting *in your twenties, etc.) is beyond this author. I find myself thinking: more than a fart, I suppose these individuals’ indulgences DO outweigh the group’s tradeoffs. And then I remember the obviously unaware-and-thoughtless TAPs in the ice cream shop and I get green with envy.