BFG Podcast #149: 'Challengers,' writers intimidate PEN America, and a new memoir from Salman Rushdie
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Welcome, everyone, to the Book and Film Globe podcast. I am your host. I am Neil Pollack. I am the editor-in-chief of Book and Film Globe, www.bookandfilmglobe.com. We cover the worlds of books and film and streaming TV and much more. We have a thought-provoking show for you this week. Stephen Garrett will be along to talk to me about the new movie, Challengers. It's a

tennis melodrama, love triangle melodrama starring Zendaya. And so a couple of guys, a couple of cute guys who she has a love triangle with and plays tennis with. And it's a lot of fun. And Stephen will be here to talk to me about it. I'm also going to talk to Sharon Vane about continuing efforts by members of Penn America to shut down the organization that was founded to promote free speech and awareness of free speech and the importance of freedom of

to write and to speak your mind. But many members of PEN are saying that PEN America is too soft on Israel, and so they are refusing to participate in festivals and in awards ceremonies, and it's really annoying. And Sharon will be here to talk to me about it. In addition to that, when Sharon and I talked,

Penn had not yet canceled its World Voices Festival, which was founded by Salman Rushdie, who recently suffered a near-fatal attack on his life. And I am going to talk now about his new book, Knife, a memoir about his attack. And we will be right back after this brief musical interlude to hear my review of Knife. And then after that, I'm going to talk to Sharon about problems at Penn America.

All right, so let's talk about Salman Rushdie. Specifically, let's talk about Knife, which

which is Salman Rushdie's new brilliant but also exasperating new memoir about his near-fatal stabbing in August 2022. It's a harrowing tale of physical survival and moral and intellectual courage in the face of an insane and violent attempt to silence one of the world's preeminent symbols of free expression. And it's also a carnival of snobbish name-dropping that drips with privilege. Rushdie is nothing if not contradictory."

In the summer of 2022, in case you're not familiar with the story, Rushda was giving a lecture at Chautauqua, which is a literary community in upstate New York, on the, quote, importance of keeping writers safe from harm, a gig he took in part because he believes in the cause deeply and in part because he needed the money to replace his home's failing air conditioning system. That's relatable. When a young fundamentalist Muslim radical attacked him

with a knife, severing tendons in his left hand, destroying his left eye, and puncturing him in several other places. As you probably know, this was not the first attempt on Rushdie's life. The Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Rushdie after the publication of his blasphemous novel, quote-unquote blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses, in the 1980s. But unlike other attempts, this one came very close to succeeding. Rushdie asks in the book,

To be fair, Rushdie was 75 years old, severely overweight, and completely unprotected by security.

So he follows up the description of this attack with an extremely detailed description of his recovery, which spans more than a year. Anyone who has a taste for medical narrative will find lots of juicy material, as Rushdie describes the mental, physical, and emotional pain of enduring metal stitches, catheter insertion, endless sessions of physical therapy, vision loss, and the dull sleeplessness of life in a hospital bed. It's the best description of pain, to my mind, in English-language letters since Philip Roth began moaning about his middle-age discomforts.

For instance, when Rushdie comes off a ventilator, he describes it as, quote, having an armadillo's tail pulled out of your throat. That's vivid.

The book is also an extended love letter to Rushdie's wife, the much younger poet and writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who Rushdie calls Eliza and describes as an almost impossibly beautiful and talented superwoman, which is a description that actually fits several of his previous wives and girlfriends. They met cute after Rushdie walked into a glass door at a swanky rooftop literary party during a festival in 2021.

Eliza stands by her gravely wounded husband with strength and resolve. Until this book, he'd kept their relationship and marriage somewhat private, uncharacteristic for post-Fatwa Rushdie, who'd been living his life as an aging but happy lit tabloid party boy. When it becomes clear after a couple of months that he's going to live, definitely, he begins to think about next steps very slowly.

quote i was in no state to talk about freedom he writes it was a world that had become a minefield ever since conservatives started laying claim to it liberals and progressives had started backing away from it toward new definitions of the social good according to which people would no longer be entitled to dispute the new norms protecting the rights and sensibilities of groups perceived as vulnerable would take precedence over freedom of speech

Now, these are interesting and subtle and important points, but Rushdie rushes over them. My desire to protect the idea of freedom from these new things was beyond my power to articulate, he writes. My voice was weak and faint. My body was in shock. Talking about miracles was about as much as I could manage.

Now, that's all very fair, of course, but that observation comes at page 63 of a 212-page book. 60 pages later, we're still hearing about Rushdie's UTI infection and about how his adult son has to quarantine so he doesn't catch a mild case of COVID from Rushdie and Elijah. Meanwhile, freedom of speech has come under unprecedented attacks from the left, but its foremost literary defender, though aware of the problem, is still changing his bandages.

The emotional and intellectual centerpiece of Knife comes two-thirds of the way through with a 26-page imagined dialogue between Rushdie and his imprisoned attacker, who he calls The A, short for Assailant, or much worse, Asshole. During these empty, sleepless nights, I thought a lot about the knife as an idea of Rushdie Wright's. A knife was a tool and acquired meaning from the use we made of it. Language, too, was a knife. Maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.

Rushdie slices and dices the A to the quick, leaving nothing left, completely eviscerating his ignorance and the ignorance of all religious fundamentalism. The chapter is a tour de force, unequaled in Rushdie's work, and probably the greatest extended pages of imaginative philosophical nonfiction since Philip Roth hung up his spikes. But

But while it's understandable that Rushdie focuses on his personal situation, it's also disappointing that from there, he barely opens up the lens to see beyond it and to the dangerous assault that, quote, progressive writers are currently waging on his turf and partially in his name.

Among Rushdie's vast resume credits is a former presidency of PEN America, an organization devoted to promoting an international climate of free speech. He's the founding light of the PEN World Voices Festival, which was set to honor him this year. But PEN has canceled the festival because PEN writers are protesting Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in the ongoing war with Hamas. Rushdie in Knife makes mention that literary people have grown soft on Islamic fundamentalism, refusing to condemn the terrorists who attacked the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo,

drawing clear parallels to his fatwa and his own attack, but he pulls up short time and again in this book. He quotes from a speech, no one loves to quote themselves more than Rushdie, invoking, quote, this moment when books and libraries as well as authors are so widely under siege.

It's pretty clear in that speech that he refers to the current right-wing vogue of restricting middle school access to books about sex and gender. But he pulls up short of criticizing his direct peers who are enjoying an unprecedented season of returning awards and refusing public appearances in support of a population whose leadership committed the most violent and disgusting mass murder of Jews in a generation.

Knife is not a book about the Israel-Hamas conflict at all, but in issuing his warnings about censorship, Rushdie seems loath to admit that the true danger to freedom of expression may already be inside the house.

Up next, I'm going to talk more about Pan America, maybe not about Salman Rushdie, but definitely about Pan America and their sort of anti-democratic, anti-free speech tendencies. Sharon Bain will be along in just a second, and we will have an engaging and thoughtful discussion.

America, and really the world, is embroiled in a lot of debate and protests and controversy and turmoil, embroiled in turmoil over the Israel-Hamas conflict and the tragedy that is unfolding in Israel and Gaza. There are very loud and somewhat violent protests going on at American universities from coast to coast. And we are not going to offer—I have opinions about those, but we're not going to offer our take on that.

those today, because that's not really in our coverage area. What we do talk about is this controversy from time to time as it relates to the worlds of literature and film and other entertainment. And Sharon Vane, our frequent contributor, wrote an excellent summary of the controversy currently embroiling, another embroiling controversy, at PEN America, which is

an anti-censorship, pro-free speech, pro-writers freedom organization based in the U.S. And they are really, really stepping in it right now. And they are really in the midst. They're on one, as you would say. Hello, Sharon. Hello. Hello. Yes, they have embroiled themselves in this, I think, just by trying to please the

who are not necessarily going to be pleased. There's been a barrage of open letters from all corners. And, you know, as you said, Pan America is probably best known amongst our audience for the fights that they have taken on to preserve intellectual freedom and against book banning. But they have come under fire from many writers and members of the literary community for

their stances or some would say lack of stances on the war. I think there's a big community that wanted PEN America to say the war is wrong and Israel is wrong. Israel is bad.

is bad. And Pan America is all about free speech and has spoken out in numerous arenas, protecting the right of free speech on campus and speaking up for faculty members who had been, you know, fired or censored after they had spoken out in favor of Palestine.

But there was just, there has been a consistent month-long outcry that has resulted most recently in PEN America having to cancel or deciding to cancel its literary awards after more than half of the nominees pulled out. To me, that's just insane. Like, I don't think anyone's going to fault PEN America for, say, standing up for the rights of Palestinian writers or Palestinian American writers to speak or to write or to express themselves. I

I support that as well. I mean, freedom of speech is freedom of speech, even if I don't agree with the speech, but the

But the idea that a literary organization whose expressed goal it is, you know, to protect the rights of minority groups and groups under attack, the fact that like they're not taking the right political stance. And this isn't – these aren't even necessarily writers with an expressed connection to Gaza or to Palestine. These are just essentially –

progressive writers who just have this kind of groupthink mentality about the conflict in Gaza and are very anti-Israel. And I would argue, and I know not everybody agrees with me, in a lot of cases, borderline anti-Semitic. And I

As a literary author myself, I am tired of this, you know, one voice being offered up by quote unquote writers about this. And this this this Pan American, they're talking about canceling the Pan America World Voices Festival, which was founded by Salman Rushdie.

Right. And I think there have been several writers who have pulled out of that. One of the some moderators, a co-honorary chair to the point where I think it was nine past presidents of PEN America, including Salman Rushdie, said,

look, this is really important for us to come together as writers, as creators. We're not saying you have to agree with us, but let's have the conversation. Why can't we have the conversation? And for me, you can certainly have an opinion on the war that I don't agree with as a writer, but

as you say, the insistence on there only being one viewpoint that is acceptable. And I think we hear a lot in this conversation around, well, no one's going to argue with genocide and there are no two sides to genocide. And sure, in a vacuum, there aren't two sides to genocide. But

Is genocide happening? That's a great conversation to be having it, to have. And when we- Did they threaten to cancel the Pan America World Voices Festival when Assad was murdering 500,000 people in Syria? Are they threatening to cancel it over the ongoing massacre of Uyghurs in China? There are many other wars in the world, many other populations in danger.

Not to mention Jews who were murdered en masse on October 7th by Hamas. No one was threatening to pull their nomination for a Penn Literary Awards then. If they could have been honored in that time, I probably would have been in double honor for some of these writers. As you can tell, I'm being sardonic, and I'm also quite upset because I feel like

Obviously, Salman Rushdie, his latest book is a passionate defense of freedom of speech in the face of religious fundamentalism. But there are a lot of writers who appear to have lost the plot and forgotten why they got into this business in the first place. And it's not to advocate for the progressive cause of the moment. That's not why you become a writer as far as I'm concerned. Well, I think –

you know, they can certainly decide that they want to advocate for the progressive cause of the moment. Sure. Whether we agree with it or not, the free speech issue here is that traditionally the only time we are talking about absolutes are things like

Hitler was wrong and those sorts of just very clear dictatorship kinds of things. And so essentially by saying in this scenario, there is only white one right answer there.

It's essentially equating what is going on in Israel-Gaza to something that no one could argue with, like, who could plan as bad? And while I agree, I don't think anybody wants more people to die. I think everyone wants peace in the Middle East. We have different thoughts about how to get there. And

The insistence on this single point of view with no room for nuance, no room for conversation, it just shuts down.

reasonable discourse down. And that to me in the literary community is what feels most horrifying that, you know, you can certainly, you know, I mean, reasonable people, you know, absolutely advocate for a free Palestine, advocate for Palestinian rights. You know, no one's arguing that like, that's not okay to do, but we don't shut down the conversation with, you know,

reasonable people on the other side. And there are reasonable people that have differing opinions on this. And the fact that we can't entertain those is what's so disappointing in this moment. We are not...

meeting the moment as a literary community. No, we're not. And let me add too that, you know, as a literary community, I know quite a few writers who are not speaking out on the other side because they don't want to deal with the vitriol that they're going to get, especially online, from the writers who refuse to support open debate and freedom of speech. I wanted to quote from your piece a

these open letters that these writers wrote to PEN America leadership. One of them, they called out what they called the group's disgraceful inaction and lack of proportional empathy. They said that PEN America's statements, quote, were often laced with ahistorical Zionist propaganda under the guise of neutrality. Neutrality is a betrayal of justice. Now, that is not writing to me. That is jargon.

I'm sorry. You know, that is absolute jargon. That is just college speak, and it has no place. Shame on the many signatories. Not many. There were a couple of dozen signatories who signed this thing. I mean, what writer would sign something that sounds like a Maoist denunciation? These are pen nominees. These are award-dominated writers.

But I will argue that I think they really believe that. I think that there is a strong sense of kind of a crusading justice and that this is the only right opinion and it is our job to make this organization see this. And no amount of Pan America showing what they've done

you know, in multiple occasions related to this war and censorship and support for Palestinian writers. They've designated a hundred thousand dollars for Palestinian writers for an emergency fund. There are complaints about that. Yeah. I mean, that's more than I've done, you know, good for them. Well,

People are complaining that that's not enough and you can certainly have that conversation, but we're never going to move forward in this discussion if we just shut it down. And one of the pieces that I hyperlinked

In the story, it's the first hyperlink of open letter. It's a column that Roxane Gay wrote for the New York Times about kind of the value and the lack of value sometimes in open letters, where essentially she was saying that you

you get to the point where you're not in dialogue. You're just having your open letter to say what you want to say without actually having to engage in critical debate or discussion with the other side. And I think it's so on point here because that's what's happening. Again, you know, I don't have to agree with everybody. We don't all have to agree, but

can we not discuss, can we not have a reasonable debate? Um, we don't need to be demonized for having a thought that Israel should exist or, you know, I, I don't want Israel to be wiped off the face of the map. Well,

Well, we know we're in trouble when Roxane Gay is now the voice of moderate reason. But you also – because she's a very far left voice in my opinion. But, I mean, these writers are – they're so far to the left of the general population and even the general literary community that it just kind of sounds to me, I mean, like Maoist gobbledygook as far as I'm concerned. And that is just –

I'm just trying to – as a writer, like, I want open debate. I want to hear the voices of pro-Palestinian – subtle pro-Palestinian voices maybe. And I want to hear nuanced reports out of Israel and from Israeli writers and from Jewish writers and from –

from other countries who might have a different perspective than someone like me. I want to hear that. What I don't want to hear from people who supposedly share my passport are condemnations of freedom of speech and of an organization to which I have at times been a dues-paying member of, condemnations for insufficiently being part of

whatever revolution they think this is. It just makes me mad. It makes me mad. It makes me depressed that what we call writers have gone so far off the trail here that the values that I was raised with seem to have been lost.

Well, I think we also, you know, you sort of expect that community in the same way that we expect the university community to be able to hold multiple truths at once. And I feel like we hear that phrase a lot in other arenas and other topics.

But apparently this is the one arena where we are not allowed to hold multiple truths. And that's what really bothers me. Yeah. And I would really, you know, and I really want to encourage other writers and I'm going to continue to encourage other writers to, you know, speak out against this,

way of thinking, not the way of thinking about the Israel-Hamas conflict or about the war in Gaza. People are free to think about that any way they want. But this way of thinking about free expression and about what the quote-unquote duty of literary organizations is, I think that's dangerous. And I think it's just bad

for whatever remains of literature in America. And, you know, one thing you can count on is that you and other writers from Book and Film Globe and me will continue to cover this and stay on top of it. I'm going to, you know, make it my mission to do whatever little I can to hold these people to account because I just don't think it's acceptable. Well, there'll be more stories to tell on this front, I believe, sadly, and we'll be here to tell them.

Yeah, and thank you so much for staying on top of it. I really appreciate it, and so do our readers. Sharon Vane, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Tashi Duncan is going to turn a whole family into millionaires. Unfortunately, my only skill in life is hitting a ball with a racket. I want you to be my coach. I want you to be my coach. How often does this happen? Going after the same girl?

He's not in love with you. What makes you think I want someone to be in love with me? Our movie of the week is Challengers. It is a romantic love triangle tennis melodrama starring Zendaya and Mike Feist and Josh O'Connor. And it is burning up screens and burning up eyeballs as we speak. And Stephen Garrett, my rival in film criticism and love...

is here. Where's my churro? I want to eat it in front of you. You're right. We want to guzzle that churro homoerotically. So I never could pronounce the name of this director, Luca Guadagnino, who made Call Me By Your Name and then has made some other movies since then, but Challengers is sort of his first big movie.

movie, I would say, since Call Me By Your Name. And I don't know. I mean, I was extremely entertained by this film, Stephen, I gotta say. Yeah. Oh, good, good. Yeah, no, me too. I mean, it really is a crowd-pleasing sort of

It's a kind of, I don't know, is it fair to say, I don't want to romanticize the 70s, but this felt like the kind of fun, big, very accessible, but still adult drama that you never see studios make anymore. Yeah, it wasn't, I mean, I will say this. It had a nonlinear narrative structure, which I don't approve of, as you know. It did work fairly well in terms of this story. You know, he did it for reasons.

Yeah, but it strained a bit. I got a little worried. Enough. It was enough. It was like three minutes earlier, 10 hours earlier, 13 years earlier. Six years later...

Four years after, you know, and I was just like, all right, I can keep track of it because it's essentially a three-character play. Barely anybody else has any lines. And so you're able to kind of keep track of it. But I didn't think it was really necessary. That said, you know, it is still a really fun movie, and I felt like all three of the leads were terrific.

I thought they were – yeah, they're absolutely tremendous. I think what's really interesting is that they're really using the strengths of each of these. They're not necessarily likable people, right? Like Josh O'Connor basically looks like he never showers and doesn't care about his kind of –

He's sleazy. He's sleazy. He's a sleazeball. He's a really sleazy guy, but he's really magnetic, you know? And then there's Mike Faced. And Mike Faced, last seen in West Side Story. West Side Story, yeah, which was, he was great in that. This is a very different character. It's not as showy, right? I mean, he's a little more mousy. He's the ice and the fire and ice combo between these two guys.

but he's really frustrated and he's truly in love. I mean, if any character's truly kind of gobsmacked, you know, romantically in love with anybody, it's him with Zendaya and Zendaya does not, I mean, as she says in the movie, like she doesn't want to love anybody. She doesn't even know if she can love anybody. All she knows is that she loves tennis. That's the only relationship that she wants to have or understands. Right, right. So everything gets funneled through that, right? Doesn't she say at one point when she's fighting with,

Josh O'Connor, like every, he's like, I don't know when you're talking about tennis or not. And she's like, I'm always talking about tennis. Exactly. So Zendaya plays this sort of teen prod, tennis prodigy who has a injury while in playing college tennis at Stanford. So she can no longer, she cannot become one of the Williams sisters, which, you know, she's sort of a stand-in for those types. And she ends up becoming the coach for Mike Faced's character who goes on to be a, you know, a,

Not a U.S. Open champion, a Grand Slam champion. And Josh O'Connor, I think his character is more interesting because he is a bottom feeder, right? He has to win these sub-tournaments in order to become a qualifier for the majors. He's in the top 300 tennis players in the world, which sounds great to you and me, but in reality, it means he is broke. Yeah.

And has to, has to like, and is looking, always looking for an angle. So I don't know. I found in some ways that's why I found him relatable. You sleep in your car a lot. No, I have slept in my car occasionally just for 20 minutes or so here or there. But, but I just, I just, his, I thought his arc was more interesting.

And he's certainly not the hero of the movie. I mean, I think Zendaya's character is the main character of the movie. But I found him to be... I felt like he was where a lot of the director and writer's energy went. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess he is... I was talking about romantic. He is the more romantic sort of character you find in movies. He's this self-loathing, unlikable, and yet incredibly magnetic...

you know, intense and attractive guy or character, you know? He's a bad boy. He's a bad boy. He's the bad boy. Exactly. And Mike Faced is more of the kind of soft romantic, honey, I love you. You know, he kind of, he wants to kind of retire and just live happily with her and she will never be happy if they retire kind of thing. And she's just somebody who is incredibly restless and won't let herself be

actually open up and relax enough to fall in love and be in love in a relationship, right? Yeah, and she has a lot of unfulfilled dreams. But let's talk about the sex in this movie because there is...

I mean, there's not a lot. There's not like a lot of naked sex. Yeah. There's a lot of kissing. There's a lot of kissing. A lot of kissing. A lot of, yeah, a lot of gender flu kissing. There's really, it's very PG, isn't it? PG-13. I mean, it's adult themes. It's adult themes because let's face it, the true love of these guys is not Zendaya. It's each other.

- Well, I mean, it is and it isn't. It's a bromance. It's one of those like, you know, I think, you know, it bubbles to the surface every so often, but these guys truly have a bond they love. I don't know if it's, you know, the kind of like, you know, hot love that, you know, I think it's a real- - It's not "Call Me By Your Name." - Right, it's not a gay romance. It's a homoerotic romance, if I can make that distinction. - Yes. - But these guys are truly brothers. Like, they love each other the way that brothers do, and they're competitive that way too.

and they resentful and they, they kind of hate that they love each other. I think that's for me, the motivating factor for all three of these characters, they seem to hate that they love and need each other. Yeah. And I, I wanted to, I wanted to once again, shout out these performances because half the movie kind of takes place when they're teenagers or college students and half takes place when they're slightly more jaded adults. And I felt like, unlike in a lot of movies where you don't buy it,

the age change. I felt like these actors really carried it off, even though I'm sure they're closer in age to the older versions of the characters. I mean, these are all excellent actors. You know, Mike Face, again, from West Side Story, Zendaya from everything. I think this is a performance where she's sort of her best performance as an actor. Right. And it feeds into, I think, the fact that she as an actor tends to play characters who are very chilly and stern and, you know, hiding their emotions all the time.

You know what I mean? Well, she also tends to play characters in blockbusters. Ha ha ha!

Namely Dune. That is true. Dune and Spider-Man. Spider-Man. So, you know, so she's like, you know, she is, she's as rich as Tosche Duncan or Tosche Donaldson. You know, she's rich. You know, whereas Mike Feist and Josh O'Connor sort of occupy a different level on the cinematic pecking order. And O'Connor, this is his first big, he was in Emma, the 2020 Emma. He was a kind of a comic relief character in that. But his main, biggest main appearance previous to this was as Prince Charles in

uh in the crown right um which i i have not seen um but you know i thought i don't know i to me he's the breakout star of this like i thought he was i thought he was great i think he's great he's also he's very similar to a character he played in this italian movie that just came out a few weeks ago called la chimera which he plays kind of a vagabond type uh savant you know so it is very similar that same sort of i think he just likes playing smelly characters

who kind of rejects society. I don't know. He's a bad boy. Yeah, he's a bad boy. So, all right. So, so yeah, I think, I think you can safely say that we both recommend challengers, but not too many reservations. I will say, let's talk about the music. Oh,

Well, I was about to say that became one of my reservations. The way that the time is shifting kind of bugged you. But at the end, first of all, there's this great synth score, 80s synth kind of score that Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch put together that is just... Atticus Ross, not Atticus Finch. Sorry.

All right, wrong literary illusion. Yeah, okay. Atticus Ross. These guys, I mean, it's as though Nine Inch Nails went back in time and did early 80s soft cell songs. You know what I mean? There's this aggressive teeth to these 80s synth kind of tinged tracks. And I think it's dynamite, and it's really overbearing in a good way until, for me, I don't know, I wanted to ask you, at the end, that big climax,

it almost felt like an SNL parody where it was just like, it stops, it starts. Yeah. Like that, that HBO tennis movie that Andy Samberg did. It was a bit, it was a bit, it was a bit much there. Um, you know, they milked it and the synth kept starting and stopping and starting. And I was just like, it had, this movie had the weirdest musical cues I've seen since May, December, you know, they would come up out of nowhere. Um,

But I did love the music, and I would say that I would actually want to go ahead and just listen to the score for Challengers on the earphones. And like you said, this movie reminds you of an 80s sports melodrama, like Personal Best, which I'm sure Luca has seen. And so it's interesting. I don't know. Why did it take them so long to release this?

This movie? Yes, I've been seeing, you saw it at festivals a year ago. Well, I actually, I didn't actually. Yeah, no, I mean, it was supposed to be at Venice. It was going to be the opening night film in Venice last summer. But then the actor's strike prolonged the ability for actors to go out and promote the movie. And they really felt like this movie needed the social media kind of following and interest that Zendaya could amplify.

And it's smart. So it ended up actually not playing any festivals. It was all teed up for that. - I've been seeing trailers for it forever. - Oh, forever. - At the Alamo. - Oh, better part of a year it's been going on. It's been taking forever. - And it didn't need to be since it takes place in the past. The furthest forward in time it goes is 2019. So it could have come out whenever.

I yeah, I would say that, you know, it is a it's sort of the last pre-summer movie we're going to get. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, no. And I mean, I think, again, this is just the logistics of I would imagine dealing with actors in this day and age. You know, Dune was supposed to come out in the fall to Dune got moved to March, March 1st or whenever it came out. Zendaya was clearly tied up promoting that. And I think they wanted some distance between that.

between Dune and Challengers so that she could come back to promote this in a way that didn't feel like it was too much Zendaya, if that's possible. Well, we are promoting it here. I like Challengers. I mean, I think that it is not...

It's not going to be for everyone, but it is not, you know, what I liked about it is that it is, despite some of the musical cues and the narrative time slips, it's not an avant-garde feeling movie. You know, it feels like a mainstream film for adult audiences. And I, you know, for one, I'm happy to go see films like that.

Me too. For me, and Luca Gattagnino has been around for the better part of 10 years or so. I think his breakout for Americans was this movie, I Am Love, which is just fantastic. His last movie was Bones and All. But you're right. These have been kind of arty movies. You imagine Call My Ma Your Name. That was maybe his biggest breakout. Yeah, it was Oscar nominated. And it was sort of a Timothee Chalamet breakout thing. It was his real breakout, yeah.

Yeah, it was. But this was, like you're saying, this is an arty director making a very mainstream conventional movie with, and frankly, we haven't talked at all, and we should, about Justin, I'm going to get his, Kurtz? Kurtzkees? How would you say it? Sure. The screenwriter. Yeah. The guy who wrote it. Yeah. Because it's a really smart script. I mean, the dialogue is really smart, but the insights into human nature and the way that people attract and repel each other

I think is so actually very mature. Yeah. And, and, and also the knowledge, just the insider knowledge of the way the tennis circuit works is, is interesting to those who aren't familiar with it. It's a real education in a good way. Yeah. It's a good movie. It's a good movie for sure. How's your tennis game? It's not as good as these guys. I can hit a ball through my legs the way that Joshua Carter did. What the hell? Those, those trick shots were ridiculous.

And I do scream like Zendaya when I dominate. When things go your way? When things go my way, I'm incredibly angry and I scream. When you really spike a review? Exactly. When you just nail it and you know you're the best? Yeah. All right, Stephen Garrett, thank you so much. Challengers is in theaters now. All right, thanks so much, Stephen Garrett. Challengers is in theaters now.

Check it out. Work on your tennis game. Maybe have a three-way. You'll have a good time. You'll have a good time at Challengers, at the very least. Also, thanks to Sharon Vane for stopping in to talk to me about the current antipathy when it comes to freedom of speech among literary writers, especially when it comes to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Very, very annoyed and dismayed at my quote-unquote literary peers for their attitudes and views.

I would kill to receive any award. I would receive an award from the Kiwanis Club, the local Kiwanis Club for my writing. I would never turn it in based off of a military conflict that has nothing to do with the award itself. That's just me. I'm Neil Pollack. I'm the editor-in-chief of Book and Film Globe, www.bookandfilmglobe.com. We cover the worlds of books and film and streaming TV and so much more. I will talk at you next week.