Rad Miracle (Marcello Conte) learns about life and table tennis in Michael Tully’s PING PONG SUMMER
PING PONG SUMMER (Michael Tully, 2014)
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Opens Friday, June 6
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No mere homage to ’80s films, Michael Tully’s sweetly charming Ping Pong Summer was made as if it were a teen bully movie from the decade that gave us such Reagan-era flicks as The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, My Bodyguard, Revenge of the Nerds, and Three O’Clock High. Shot in Super 16mm by cinematographer Wyatt Garfield to give it an authentic period look, Ping Pong Summer is set in Ocean City, Maryland, in 1985, where the Miracle family spends its annual summer vacation. This year they are staying in a ramshackle house by the bay instead of the ocean to save money, but shy, awkward thirteen-year-old supernerd Radford “Rad” Miracle (Marcello Conte) doesn’t really care; all he wants to do is play table tennis and listen to hip-hop. Rad and fellow geek Teduardo “Teddy” Fryy (Myles Massey) hang out at Fun Hub, where kids play air hockey, arcade games like Pac-Man, and Ping-Pong, which, it turns out, Rad is not very good at, his skills about as adept as Teddy’s lame rapping. But after being bullied once too often by obnoxious rich kid and local Ping-Pong god Lyle Ace (Joseph McCaughtry) and his sycophantic right-hand man, Dale Lyons (Andy Riddle), Rad challenges Lyle to a match, which he immediately regrets. But with the help of local weirdo Randi Jammer (real-life Ping-Pong enthusiast Susan Sarandon, cofounder of the SPiN New York Ping-Pong social club), Rad decides it just might be time to finally stand up for himself.
Ping Pong Summer is an engaging, comic look at those clumsy and gawky teen years when nothing seems to go right. Writer-director Tully (Cocaine Angel, Silver Jew, Septien), whose family vacationed for one week a year in Ocean City for many summers when he was growing up in Maryland, gets the period drama just right, from the setting and dialogue to the clothing and soundtrack, which includes Whodini’s “Friends,” New Edition’s “Popcorn Love,” and John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band’s “Tough All Over” in addition to songs by Mr. Mister, the Fat Boys, and the Mary Jane Girls. (The great track over the closing credits, “Young Champion,” is actually a groovy new song by Of Montreal posing as a band called Hammer Throw.) First-timer Conte does a good job as Rad, embodying all the nervous energy that comes with being an adolescent, in this case dealing with a Goth sister (Helena Seabrook), a cheapskate state trooper father (John Hannah), an adoring mother (’80s star and Back to the Future mom Lea Thompson, who seemingly hasn’t aged), and the girl he likes, Stacy Summers (Emmi Shockley), who unfortunately is with Lyle. Sarandon clearly has a really good time as the oddball Randi, as do Amy Sedaris, Robert Longstreet, and Judah Friedlander in cameos. Reminiscent of another recent nostalgic trip back to the ’80s, The Way, Way Back, Ping Pong Summer, which won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival, is another small, intimate gem from an adventurous and unpredictable filmmaker.
In 1982, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman followed Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal on a five-week tour of Europe as the cutting-edge troupe traveled to Milan, Venice, and Avignon. “I was deeply touched by her lengthy performances that mingle in your head,” Akerman says at the beginning of the resulting documentary, “One Day Pina Asked…,” continuing, “I have the feeling that the images we brought back do not convey this very much and often betray it.” Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Je tu il elle) needn’t have worried; her fifty-seven-minute film, made for the Repères sur la Modern Dance French television series, is filled with memorable moments that more than do justice to Bausch’s unique form of dance theater. From 1973 up to her death in 2009 at the age of sixty-eight, Bausch created compelling works that examined the male-female dynamic and the concepts of love and connection with revolutionary stagings that included spoken word, unusual costuming, an unpredictable movement vocabulary, and performers of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Akerman captures the troupe, consisting of twenty-six dancers from thirteen countries, in run-throughs, rehearsals, and live presentations of Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me), Nelken (Carnations), 1980, Kontakthof, and Walzer, often focusing in on individual dancers in extreme close-ups that reveal their relationship with their performance. Although Bausch, forty at the time, is seen only at the beginning and end of the documentary, her creative process is always at center stage. At one point, dancer Lutz Förster tells a story of performing Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” in sign language in response to Bausch’s asking the troupe to name something they’re proud of. Förster, who took over as artistic director in April 2013, first performs the song for Akerman, then later is shown performing it in Nelken. (Bausch fans will also recognize such longtime company members as Héléna Pikon, Nazareth Panadero, and Dominique Mercy.)
