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\n\tOn Monday night, an auditorium of movie lovers at the New York Film Festival were treated to the secret world premiere of Josh Safdie\u2019s Marty Supreme<\/em>. Loosely based on the life of ping-pong great Marty Reisman, the film stars Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as the fictional Marty Mauser, a table tennis wiz coming up in 1950s New York City with the hyper-determination to become a world champion. The post-premiere reactions were nothing short of laudatory. Words like \u201cepic\u201d and \u201cmasterful\u201d were thrown around, and Chalamet\u2019s performance earned immediate Oscar buzz and praise such as \u201ccareer best\u201d and \u201cperformance of a lifetime.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTo those that got to see Marty Supreme <\/em>this week \u2014 I don\u2019t care that something good happened to you, it should have happened to me instead (as the saying goes). The rest of us will have to wait until the film comes out on Christmas, an excruciating 77 days from now. But if there is one balm, it\u2019s that the next two-and-a-half months will feature one of the greatest shows contemporary Hollywood has to offer: A Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet press tour.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnd it\u2019s already off to a rousing start. Following the premiere, Chalamet\u2019s first interview about the film emerged, with the actor telling The Hollywood Reporter <\/em>that he\u2019s spent the past several years secretly working on his ping-pong skills, even as he filmed other movies.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI had a table in London while I was making Wonka<\/em>,\u201d he said. \u201cOn Dune 2<\/em>, I had a table in Budapest, Jordan. I had a table in Abu Dhabi. I had a table at the Cannes Film Festival for The French Dispatch<\/em>. I got myself an Airbnb in a town [around] Saint-Tropez after The French Dispatch<\/em>, overlooking the water, and I was taking lessons there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t(Astute Chalamet watchers will know this means he was training while also learning the Bob Dylan oeuvre for A<\/em> Complete Unknown<\/em>. As noted in a Rolling Stone <\/em>cover story last year, there are videos of him singing \u201cDon\u2019t Think Twice, It\u2019s All Right\u201d while in his Paul Atreides costume, as well as playing guitar in his Willy Wonka outfit.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\tAll that said, interviews with trade publications are pretty standard press tour fare, especially this early on. The real<\/em> start of the Chalamet\/Marty Supreme <\/em>press tour came Tuesday night when the actor shared an incredible and absurd five-minute promo video. It\u2019s shot in a field at dusk, there are people in all black outfits with giant orange ping-pong balls for heads playing table tennis. Chalamet himself is locked in a glass box, wearing a similar orange head, plus a custom Marty Supreme <\/em>track suit, being pelted by ping-pong balls. All of this is soundtracked to a delirious industrial beat laced with samples from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back<\/em> quotes (most prominently, Jason Mewes\u2019 \u201cI am the clit commander\u201d monologue).\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEventually, Chalamet escapes his glass box, removes his ping-pong ball head, reveals a fresh buzz cut (possibly, probably, maybe for Dune 3<\/em>), and hoofs it over to a nearby warehouse. There, the music switches to distant, classical pomp and the actor takes a seat at a tidy press junket-style set. The camera zooms closer, the music cuts, and Chalamet finally speaks: \u201cMarty Supreme<\/em> is an American film that comes out on Christmas 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFolks, that\u2019s how you do it. Chalamet has rightfully received all kinds of plaudits as a generational acting talent, but he\u2019s also proving to be a generational celebrity talent: someone as fun to watch on the big screen, as all the other tinier ones we stare at every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhile he\u2019s always been good at this part of the job, it was last year\u2019s A Complete Unknown <\/em>press tour that showed Chalamet was operating on a different level from many of his rising star peers. He showed off his elite ball knowledge on ESPN\u2019s College GameDay<\/em> and discussed growing up in Mitchell-Lama housing on Theo Von\u2019s podcast. At one New York event, he cosplayed as Dylan from the 2003 Sundance premiere of Masked and Anonymous<\/em>, showing up with a blonde wig, blue beanie, and gray checkered scarf. He performed three Dylan deep cuts with James Blake on Saturday Night Live<\/em>, and filmed himself singing and dancing along to all seven-minutes-and-30-seconds of \u201cVisions of Johanna\u201d on a frosty NYC morning on a pier overlooking the Hudson River.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\tIt was goofy, it was fun, it was entertaining. And Chalamet never once came across as grating, obnoxious, or desperate. A Complete Unknown <\/em>was also, arguably, the first time Chalamet had the chance to lead a press tour like this, as the central focus and load-bearing star. Dune <\/em>and Dune 2<\/em> were bigger movies, but they also had Zendaya, large ensemble casts, and the oomph of one of the most revered sci-fi novels of all time. Wonka <\/em>was a kids movie based on familiar IP.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s not to suggest a rock biopic about one of the most lauded singer-songwriters of the 20th century doesn\u2019t come with some of the same built-in, risk-averse qualities. But Chalamet\u2019s press tour worked because it created some crucial distance from the self-seriousness that inevitably weighs down many of those films. Underpinning all his goofiness was an utterly sincere and infectious confidence and belief in A Complete Unknown<\/em>, and a genuine desire to share it with as many people as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tClearly, he feels the same way about Marty Supreme<\/em>. It\u2019s a movie he\u2019s been preparing for since 2018, and if it\u2019s going to succeed, Chalamet is going to have to sell the absolute hell out of it. <\/p>\n \n\tMarty <\/em>does have other things going for it, sure: It\u2019s an A24 release and the studio has its fans; it\u2019s Josh Safdie\u2019s first feature since Uncut Gems<\/em> (which he co-directed with his brother, Benny); and it\u2019ll boast Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s first on-screen film performance since Avengers: Endgame<\/em>. <\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\tBut it\u2019s also, effectively, an indie movie with an original story. Even if Marty <\/em>is loosely based on a real person and events, the NYC table tennis scene of the 1950s isn\u2019t exactly Greenwich Village of the 1960s; there\u2019s little shared cultural history for Chalamet to reference or play with. But this also leaves the promotional possibilities so wide open, it feels pointless to even speculate on what Chalamet\u2019s cooking for what could be the first real test of his star power.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA week ago, no one could\u2019ve envisioned the deranged ping-pong video set to the Jay and Silent Bob<\/em> remix. Well, except for maybe Chalamet. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Monday night, an auditorium of movie lovers at the New York Film Festival were treated to the secret world premiere of Josh Safdie\u2019s Marty Supreme. Loosely based on the life of ping-pong great Marty Reisman, the film stars Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as the fictional Marty Mauser, a table tennis wiz coming up in 1950s New<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[8451,8544,15771,746,4316,159,15988,2143],"class_list":{"0":"post-26748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-begun","9":"tag-chalamet","10":"tag-marty","11":"tag-officially","12":"tag-press","13":"tag-supreme","14":"tag-timothee","15":"tag-tour"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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