With Christy, David Michôd directs the story of Christy Martin, who single-handedly popularized female boxing from the early 1990s to the 2000s under the nickname coined by huckster-promoter Don King: “The Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Sydney Sweeney plays her in a performance that many critics have hailed as transformative. However, underneath frumpy clothes and an unconvincing wig, Sweeney never disappears into the role—it’s not, say, Linda Hamilton changing her physique to become a badass for Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). And as the standard sports movie template descends into a dark account of drugs and domestic abuse, Christy bears a curious similarity to Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, another underwhelming sports biopic this year with a showy performance at the center. Produced in part by Sweeney, the whole production screams Oscar bait in the most cloyingly pedestrian way. 

Raised in West Virginia, Christy, a sporto and closeted lesbian, clashes with her conservative, disapproving parents (Merritt Wever, Ethan Embry) who want her to see a priest to “get her straightened out.” Instead, she competes in an amateur boxing match “for fun,” with little knowledge of the sport: “All I knew was that I had to beat the shit outta that bitch before she beat me,” she remarks after her win. Soon, she meets a potential trainer, Jim (Ben Foster), whose creep factor is off the charts. Despite his being decades older and saddled with a beer belly and bad combover, Christy falls for him, ignoring his possessiveness and virulent anti-gay views while buying into his claims that he will make her “the greatest female fighter in the world.” Her mother certainly approves, believing Jim is her ticket to a “normal life.” Meanwhile, the viewer sees all the warning signs and awaits the inevitable fallout. 

Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes wrote Christy, and they adhere to a typical sports movie structure, charting Christy’s meteoric rise to fame while ignoring the real boxer’s early-career losses and draws in favor of presenting a seemingly flawless winning streak. Cue the typical training and fight montages, here set to Young MC’s “Bust a Move.” While building a name for her, Jim goes full Vertigo (1958) and tells Christy to cut her hair so it’s not so “butch” and puts her in an all-pink getup so she looks “cute.” Before long, they sleep together, marry, move to Florida (where else?), and present themselves as an ambitious Average American couple. “I’m just a regular wife who happens to knock people out for a living,” Christy claims. She also shuts down any feminist take on her success with the press, pronouncing she doesn’t care about advancing other women or getting more money for them; she only cares about herself and her own success. 

Christy’s brainwashing by Jim and her parents grows even more twisted when boxing doesn’t pay the bills, prompting him to arrange seedy hotel room fights for her with a 300-pound man for cash, and later, to record porn tapes with her for the underground market. That’s even after she becomes the first woman to fight on Pay-Per-View—a sequence shot in slow-mo and set to choral music, striking an ill-fitting tone compared to the rest of the movie. Additionally, very few of the boxing matches impress. They’re sloppily choreographed and shot by cinematographer Germain McMicking, who doesn’t bring any distinct visual flair to the proceedings. All the while, Christy is surrounded by people who don’t stand up for her, regardless of witnessing what’s obviously an abusive relationship. Her mother dismisses her claims that Jim has become violent (“You sound crazy,” she tells her daughter, in a maddening scene); she’s more concerned about keeping up appearances. Only Christy’s onetime opponent and later training partner—and later still, wife—Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian) can see Christy’s true self enough to question the pretense. 

“You make it real easy for people to dislike you,” Lisa observes. Indeed, she likes to talk smack in front of the press, calling out Lisa as a lesbian while passing as straight. That’s part of what makes her a success: performing for the camera. However, she doesn’t exactly endear herself to the viewer; I struggled to get on Christy’s side, which made the 135-minute runtime feel particularly long, especially in the repetitive second half. Although Jim’s domestic abuse, not only at home but also in the ring while sparring, gives us no choice but to empathize with her. Her only hope seems to be her former high school girlfriend, Rosie (Jess Gabor), who comes in and out of Christy’s life when the story needs her. Soon, drugs enter the mix, and the increasingly paranoid Jim reacts with a brutal attack that brings some finality to their marriage. 

Sweeney once again never convinces in her performance, which is becoming a theme in her work, looking at last year’s Immaculate and this year’s Eden. Foster and Wever fare better, but like Sweeney, they’re all wearing equally silly wigs that render their performances unintentionally funny. Similar to The Smashing Machine, which was based on an earlier documentary and sanitized in its dramatization, viewers might be better off watching the documentary on this subject. Released on Netflix, Untold: Deal with the Devil (2021) tells Martin’s complex story without the typical overdone sports movie structure. Michôd, once a promising Australian filmmaker behind Animal Kingdom (2010) and The Rover (2014), appears to have lost his edge in recent years, starting with War Machine (2017) and The King (2019). With Christy, his approach is annoyingly stuffed with big speeches and dialogue that sounds like a Hallmark movie, and its generic, familiar quality never gives way to something worth the hype.

If you walked past Joe Rinaudo’s house in La Crescenta-Montrose, you probably wouldn’t think anything extraordinary of it. You wouldn’t expect, for example, that it contains a 20-seat silent movie theater with a semi-complete organ, a mini museum dedicated to instruments of the silent cinema era, or an extensive basement workshop whirring with the sounds of power tools. And you certainly wouldn’t expect the 74-year-old Rinaudo seated at a century-old instrument, yanking pull-cords and pushing pedals while the machine in front of him whirs and whistles to a rag-timey tune.

The instrument is Rinaudo’s primary passion in life, an American invention that was key to the viewing experience of silent films in the early 20th century but has been forgotten by most of the country: the photoplayer.

A cousin to self-playing player pianos, photoplayers automatically play music read out of perforated piano rolls. During their slim heyday — from their invention around 1910 until about 1930, when the silent film era is thought to have ended — photoplayers delighted audiences (mostly in the U.S.) as accompaniments to silent movies, especially Buster Keaton-esque comedies. But then the talkies came, and photoplayers were rendered obsolete, slipping out of public awareness as quickly as they came on scene. Rinaudo, in love with these instruments and their role in silent cinema, has spent more than half a century tracking down, restoring and sharing the word about old photoplayers and similar instruments. And as he ages, Rinaudo hopes to guarantee the preservation of the photoplayer’s legacy with the creation of a nonprofit organization dedicated to the restoration of and education about these instruments and silent cinema.

Among the small community of people who adore the photoplayer, Rinaudo is something of a patron saint. “When people think of photoplayers, they think of him,” says Nate Otto, a restorer of player pianos and similar instruments including photoplayers in Anoka, Minn. Rinaudo’s notoriety is in no small part thanks to the visibility of the many YouTube videos of his playing, including a clip of his 2006 spotlight on “California’s Gold With Huell Howser” that’s been viewed 2.6 million times. Rinaudo is also a central connective figure for the dozen or so folks who actively restore or play photoplayers. “He knows pretty much all the American photoplayers that are currently being restored,” says Otto, “because all of us have contacted him for one reason or another.”

Preserving this slice of American culture and passing it down to younger generations is “my life’s work,” says Rinaudo. But it’s no easy task given how few exist today and how little access the public has to see them. Of the approximately 4,500 instruments produced between 1911 and 1926 by American Photo Player Co. — one of the earliest and most prominent photoplayer producers, and the brand of photoplayer Rinaudo is specifically passionate about — only about 50 still exist worldwide, and only about a dozen of them are in playable condition. Just one photoplayer, which Rinaudo restored and donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, exists in a public space. The rest are tucked away — some owned by people like Rinaudo who play them and put them to use, but most stashed away by private collectors.

Of the known remaining photoplayers, Rinaudo has either owned or helped restore about six of them over the years — and at one point he owned four at once.

Born in Santa Monica in 1951, Rinaudo grew up when silent movies still aired on his family’s black-and-white television. His parents had a player piano in the living room, and at a young age Rinaudo learned how to service it when it needed repairs. As a teenager, he thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if the player piano could play along with a silent movie?” But that wasn’t really doable. Player pianos have space for just one piano roll, so when the track you’re playing runs out, you’re forced into a moment of awkward silence as you wait for the instrument’s spool to rewind so you can swap in the next track. At first he tried jerry-rigging his own setup to accommodate two rolls. But then, Rinaudo recalls, “An old timer said, ‘What are you doing that for? Why don’t you buy one of them photoplayers?’ And I said, ‘What’s a photoplayer?’”

Joe Rinaudo has a museum area in his home dedicated to preserving the history of photoplayers and other bygone film accessories.

Advertisement

Rinaudo spent the next few years searching for one, cold-calling player piano sellers, theater owners and antique shops. When he was 19, he got his first real lead. Word was that the Hoyt Hotel in Portland, Ore., had a photoplayer and a performer who could put on a show. Rinaudo cajoled a buddy to drive them up in his Volkswagen van one weekend. “This hotel was fabulous,” remembers Rinaudo, with a ballroom styled like a turn-of-the-20th-century bar with gas lights. And then there was the photoplayer.

“I was blown away by the sound coming out of it,” says Rinaudo. “People were singing and screaming and clapping — it was just unbelievable. And I thought, ‘I’ve got to have one of those.’”

When the Hoyt shut down a year later, that very same photoplayer went up for auction. Rinaudo drove back up, but was outbid at $8,600 (limited as he was by a 20-year-old’s income). A year later, he got wind of a man looking to sell a photoplayer for $5,000. He went to go see it, but once again he “just couldn’t afford it.”

But providence kept giving Rinaudo chances. A year later, the seller of that photoplayer came back to Rinaudo and offered it to him for just $3,500. Rinaudo’s first photoplayer was secured, and he would spend the next two years restoring the instrument in the living room of his parent’s house. “At first they were a little worried,” he says, about how he was spending his time and the mess in their house, “but they came around.” To learn how to restore his instrument, Rinaudo enlisted the help of a mechanic friend who taught him how to fix all the valves, gears, pipes and bellows. (For work, using the skills he learned, Rinaudo entered the automechanic business, but later left to start his own lighting business, which he still operates.)

A collection of photoplayer rolls sits on top of Joe Rinaudo’s photoplayer.

Advertisement

As soon as his photoplayer became playable, Rinaudo sat and practiced every day. Now, “I don’t know of any other players that can perform like I do,” he says. And when a photoplayer is performed live, “the whole room vibrates,” says Bruce Newman, a restorer of pneumatic instruments, including photoplayers, in Oregon who had the pleasure of seeing Rinaudo play in his home about 25 years ago. “You’re feeling it in the core of your body and it’s exhilarating.”

Over the years, Rinaudo continued to hunt for photoplayers, incessantly putting out the word to whoever might hear of a lead. He finally managed to purchase the Hoyt Hotel photoplayer, which wound up in Arizona. Other adventures included traveling to a warehouse in Seattle, but he couldn’t afford the asking price; getting outbid at a Las Vegas auction; driving to an old theater in Fresno that was said to have a photoplayer, only to learn that the building had been torn down; hopping through antique stores in Bakersfield after hearing a rumor; and searching an old 19th century San Diego hotel and coming up empty.

While Joe Rinaudo mostly focuses on photoplayers, he also has other memorabilia in his home, including this old film camera and a phonograph.

“One time, one guy told me, ‘There’s a photoplayer buried in the belly of the Regent Theater in downtown Los Angeles,’” says Rinaudo. He tracked down the owner in 1969, who brought him inside the dark, rat-infested building with a sledgehammer. The owner smashed through the stage, but there was no photoplayer. “That was one of many wild goose chases that I had to go on, because you never know,” Rinaudo says. “It was like I was on a hunt, or an archaeological dig.”

As he searched over the years, Rinaudo found a community of restorers who shared leads, expertise and parts. He built up a reputation. “I do see him as an authority,” says Newman. “If I have trouble identifying something, I call up Joe and he can help me figure it out.” And when YouTube came along, Rinaudo started sharing videos of himself performing, which many photoplayer lovers, including Newman and Otto, credit as their introduction to these instruments. A few thousand loyal followers keep tabs on Rinaudo’s work and performances via Facebook or through his Silent Cinema Society blog posts and newsletter.

Despite these admirers, whether photoplayers will survive the coming decades is in question. Most restorers are about Rinaudo’s age. At 61, Bruce Newman is on the younger side, and at 36, Otto — who Rinaudo calls “the future” — is the youngest by far. As Rinaudo sees it, photoplayers are meant to be played and enjoyed, but while his videos have undoubtedly helped grow an international awareness of and enthusiasm for photoplayers, the pool of restorers is not growing. And the future of the instruments’ playability is at stake.

“I’ve taken it upon myself to carry that torch,” says Rinaudo. To that end, he and a few friends and collaborators are starting a nonprofit group, Silent Cinema Art and Technology, dedicated to the preservation of and education about silent films and instruments like the photoplayer. The hope is that the organization can be a sustainable vehicle for raising money to fund future restorations. Rinaudo plans to use his home theater and museum space — a temple to his passion — to put on shows and screenings for benefactors and offer limited group tours and educational opportunities for children. He hopes that the nonprofit can preserve and use the theater and museum even after he’s gone.

“It’s a calling,” says Rinaudo, referring to the desire to share the gospel of the photoplayer and keep the history of silent cinema alive. “My dad always used to tell me, ‘You must leave this Earth in better condition than you found it,’” he says. “Everybody has to find their path to do that, and I hope I found mine. I think I have.”

Joe Rinaudo hopes to host tours and educational opportunities at his home theater and museum through a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving photoplayers.

When it comes down to it, the main selling point of Isekai Quartet as a whole is watching characters from across entirely different series interact—and often in comical ways. Does this film do this as well as the TV series? The answer is a simple “yes.”

The film begins with our heroes being transported to a post-apocalyptic fantasy world and promptly being attacked. This, in turn, splits them into three main groups. The majority end up with Subaru—though notably without the rest of the titular quartet and Emilia. This allows for lots of humorous interactions between the characters as their leaders are all notably absent. At the same time, Subaru is forced into the role of de facto head of the class and serves as the main point of contact between our heroes and two of the characters already occupying this world, Alec and Pantagruel.

Meanwhile, Ainz and Kazuma (who make a great odd-couple pair) meet up with the final inhabitant of this world, a woman clad in the same style of uniform as Tanya, named Vera. She reveals that she had been isekai’d to this world and is attempting to return to her old world at the head of an army of golems to bring an end to the war. This has brought her into conflict with Alec and Pantagruel, as they wish to stay in this world and are against her returning to her own.

This brings us to the main themes of the film—loneliness and lies. Vera is a woman suffering from extreme betrayal. The Saga of Tanya the Evil world’s equivalent of a first-generation German-American, she suffered greatly once the war in Europe began. She found herself and her family shunned by the community she had grown up in—and vowed revenge on those responsible.

Yet, in this ruined world with Alec and Pantagruel, she found peace and a new family. Subsequently, being betrayed by them—being lied to about not being able to return to her old world—has made her even more distrustful of others and hyper-focused on her original goal.

However, Vera wasn’t the only one alone. Pantagruel spent 400 years on this desolate world as its only conscious inhabitant. With the arrival of Alec and Vera, she finally had someone to talk to—to live life with. Giving that up, even when she knew she should tell Vera what she and Alec had discovered about traveling to other worlds, was too hard for her to do.

Though this web of lies and loneliness puts Pantagruel, Alec, and Vera at the center of the film’s story, that doesn’t mean our heroes from across the Kadokawa multiverse are unrelated to it. The golems that populate the film are related to both the KONOSUBA and Overlord worlds. Likewise, Alec himself has deep ties with the past of the Re:Zero world that set up the problems Subaru and Emilia now face there.

Yet, the deepest connection in the film is that between Tanya and Vera. While Tanya does not know Vera, Vera most certainly knows about the infamous Tanya “White Silver” von Degurechaff. And through her, Tanya is confronted with her own role in starting a world war. But the real meat of their shared story is the question of how much, if at all, Tanya has changed since the start of Isekai Quartet. Is she still the overly rational, empathy-lacking, stickler for the rules she always was in her own anime? Or has she grown to the point where she can sympathize with the plight of a stranger—or, perhaps, even an enemy?

One of the best-selling points of this film is that it actually feels like a movie. Rather than the school setting of the series, we are instead treated to a true fantasy world of ruins, deserts, forests, and golems. Beyond that, the cinematography is greatly improved with surprisingly clever camera work and some legitimately striking moments of visual composition. And then there’s the big extended fight scene at the climax. It’s far beyond anything we’ve seen in the TV anime, and not only does it look good, but it also creatively uses the characters’ powers and backstories from across all the different series to achieve victory.

Isekai Quartet The Movie: Another World is clearly made by a group of people who have an insanely in-depth knowledge of all the series they’re combining. It’s full of fun moments and comedic beats—but also manages to delve into a surprising bit of heartfelt drama. Of course, the insane bar for entry is the weakest aspect of this film, as it’s best if you’ve not only seen all four main anime plus The Rising of The Shield Hero but also the previous two seasons of Isekai Quartet. However, if you’ve seen at least two of the big four anime Isekai Quartet is based on, I think you’ll be surprised at how much you enjoy this film.