Ping Pong

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2005)

When you watch so-called date movies, its often more fun to pay attention to how the writer solves the challenge of the genre. After all, movie love is pretty thin stuff when you boil it down.
So about a decade ago, date movie scripts started borrowing from other genres. In particular the writers borrowed the trick of focusing on the audience instead of the couple in question. The reason is that you can only go so far in making the couple appealing and attractive. So if you want to make the audience closer to caring, well you just relocate the audience.
Therefore, we have a slew of date movies set in public arenas so that the audience can have a clear surrogate on screen. Usually this is done by setting the movie in movieland. This way we can have a movie audience watching a movie/TeeVee audience watching the couple. When they cheer, we cheer.
Perhaps the most closely engineered of these was "Notting Hill." In that case a popular actress plays a popular actress. She has a constant on-screen audience not unlike the audience in the theater who were drawn to the film because of Ms Roberts.
These projects must have a climax where the love (after some screwup) is proclaimed to the on screen audience. They clap and cheer. We clap and cheer. We've had these with Meg, Julia, Sandra, Catherine and so on, each in turn.
Okay. Here we have the latest refinement. They are not about to play with the general shape: two people fall in love in instant movie fashion; they are pulled apart by some events; he announces his love in a very public manner to an on-screen audience thereby making it "real." The boundary between movie love and real love is crossed and we leave the theater feeling happy.
The innovation here is the crossing with a sports film using an internal narrative. You can just hear the machinery dropping into place as the screenwriter thought of the formula. Or perhaps he just went to one of the several consultants (like myself) who come up with these schemes.
The internal narrative is clever indeed. Usually in a sports movie we (and our screen surrogates) watch the performer, only inferring what is going on in his (usually his) mind. The less we know explicitly the better because our imagination is usually stronger than what they can display. Think of "Bull Durham."
But here, we are sometimes in the male's mind (literally hearing his thoughts), sometimes in the normal audience's and sometimes in the on-screen audience's (including the hackneyed announcers-in-the-booth). Shifting back and forth (mirrored by the back and forth of the ball) and adding the idea that he himself is a watcher and wonderer is pretty clever.
But the whole thing falls apart at the production level. There's some stuff about a dysfunctional family (or two) that falls flat. Dunst is no longer pert and charming. The direction is clumsy.
Too bad.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.