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Film

09.19.17 Tax Free Retirement Program

Game, set and spats a grand slam of tennis movies

Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Shia LaBeouf as John McEnroe go head-to-head this autumn. Our critic plays umpire

Tennis addicts can rest easy in the sense of staying up all night to watch tennis. Somewhere in the world an important tournament is under way and on subscription TV. The less seriously committed are faced with the long inter-slam drought between the US and Australian Opens. Fortunately palliatives are at hand in the form of two movies, Battle of the Sexes and Borg vs McEnroe.

The first film is about the 1973 match between Billie Jean King and the self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig and former world No 1 Bobby Riggs; the second focuses on the 1980 Wimbledon final. They are linked by the way that in 2000 Donald Trump offered John McEnroe a million dollars to play either of the Williams sisters at one of his hotels. As McEnroe recounted in his 2002 autobiography Serious, the sisters claim that they could beat ranked male players prompted him to respond that any respectable male player, be it a top college competitor, a senior player, or a professional, could beat them. Trump stumped up the money but the Williamses came to their senses and put out a statement that they didnt want to play against an old man.

That was the end of that until this summer when McEnroe published a sequel, But Seriously a book even well-disposed critics had trouble taking seriously and, possibly as a controversy-provoking way to nudge it up the rankings, ventured the opinion that Serena would be ranked around 700 on the mens tour. She volleyed back that he should respect her privacy at about the time that she had appeared naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. History has a way of repeating itself, first as farce and then as farce.

The difference is that the first time around, when 29-year-old King played the 55-year-old Riggs, it was precisely the farcical nature of the encounter that made it so serious. Riggs, as King understood, was a clown and a hustler, and the more ridiculous his antics the more demeaning it would be if she lost. Especially since he had already beaten Margaret Court who, exactly as predicted, wilted under the pressure of the occasion. So while Riggs did everything he could to publicise the forthcoming bout, King trained for it.

Since all of this build-up, match and aftermath was filmed, recut and retold in an excellent recent documentary, the question is whether there was any need to re-enact the story in a biopic. Perhaps the fact that there was no need freed the film-makers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris to come up with a striking piece of cinema in a way that the similarly superfluous Selma never managed.

Emma
Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs in Battle of the Sexes. Photograph: Fox/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Emma Stone is wonderful as Billie Jean (so wonderful as to make one wonder: was she quite so charming in real life?) and Steve Carells Riggs is a far more nuanced and tormented character than the cartoon sexist he gleefully set himself up to be. As BJK realises, Riggs is both a colourful manifestation of and an energetic distraction from the blazered patriarchy at work behind the scenes. More subtly, camerawork and design do not just capture the colours and textures of the early 1970s how can one not adore the sun-swept, traffic-less freeways of California? but also a broader sense of historic convergence.

An altogether less dramatic moment in the vexed history of the sexes occurs in Rebecca Wests immense book about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The author is in a restaurant in Pristina in the 1930s, when a man and a woman enter, the woman carrying the better part of a plough on her back. The sight of unrestricted masculinism of this kind is disgusting to West, less because of the effect on women who are always taught something by the work they do, but because of the nullification of the men. In a hectic schedule of publicising matches, flogging tickets, looking pretty and playing tennis with each other plus, in BJKs case, having her first lesbian love affair the rebellious women on the tour are seen having a high old time. With the exception of Billie Jeans devoted dude of a husband the most poignant scenes in the film show him taping ice to her aching knees and the gay costumiers on the womens nascent tour, the men remain imprisoned by what they unthinkingly thought they were preserving.

If anything the fact that the result was so clear-cut Riggs got his ass royally kicked in straight sets makes the waters seem less turbulent than they were. Contrast the well-orchestrated hoopla of the match in Houston with a debate on feminism in New York two years earlier, as preserved in the documentary Town Bloody Hall. Holding the fort in the name of well, himself really, Norman Mailer struggles manfully to fend off a gang of marauding brainy women including Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer and Diana Trilling. Its all just talk but the anarchic swirl and passion of the event make the Houston contest seem as decorous as a mixed-doubles match at Wimbledon. In Battle of the Sexes, Stone/King recalls how, as a little girl, she was excluded from a team photograph because she was wearing shorts. At that moment she decided to take up her racket-cudgel on behalf of womankind. This stand casts her as an infant Jeanne dArc, predestined for saintly and bespectacled greatness. That, I suppose, is part of the attraction of politically symbolic sporting events such as Jack Johnson v James J Jeffries or Jesse Owens v the Nazis in Berlin in 1936. They make everything simple, while life proves stubbornly resistant to resolution by knockout or tie-break.

Watch a trailer for Battle of the Sexes.

Still, better King v Riggs than Borg v McEnroe which seems entirely and for a tennis film fatally pointless. The outcome of the match is known in advance and nothing except that result is at stake unless you buy into the idea that somehow McEnroe, the kid from Queens, as the lawyers son never tires of describing himself, was somehow trying to bring down the English ruling elite as symbolised by the lawns of SW19 and the umpires who were their myopic custodians. The film retains vestiges of interest, only if one attends to everything except its titular match-up.

Waiting to come on court for the final, Bjrn and John sit on a bench beneath the famous lines from Kipling: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same Its as if the audiences doubts have been projected on screen! The film is really a Best Impostor contest, but its impossible to treat the contestants in the same way. Sverrir Gudnason looks so like Borg it makes one conscious of how unlike McEnroe Shia LaBeouf looks. Method-wise, LaBeouf would seem to have had the advantage in that he has acted like a jerk in real life, and McEnroes inner life has been demonstrably and repeatedly expressed on court and off. With McEnroe forever acting up contractually obliged, it seems, to reprise the role of his tantrum-prone younger self even on the senior circuit LaBeouf is left with little to do except brood on how his hair looks more like Bob Dylans than Johnny Macs. Borg, meanwhile, remains a mystery.

McEnroe/LaBeouf suspects that the reason his opponent sleeps in a hotel room with the AC turned up to arctic frigidity is not that hes an ice-borg; hes really a volcano about to erupt. We know this is true because of the scenes from Borgs adolescence where he seems to be getting in character for the racket-smashing role of forever-young McEnroe/Dylan. His trainer persuades him to harness those tears of rage and express them solely through forehands and backhands.

Where, to rephrase Eric Liddells moving speech in Chariots of Fire, does the rage come from? Partly because hes been told tennis is not for certain classes of person. More generally and the film is necessarily vague on this score from some non-specific Scandinavian malaise: an all-court rumble of Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Strindberg, barely held in check by a sweaty headband. (Or could it be caused by the headband?) So while LaBeouf is playing superbrat in a tennis flick, Gudnason wanders around as if marooned in an Ingmar Bergman film directed neither by Bergman nor his acolyte Woody Allen but by Janus Metz. Whats going on in that head of yours? people keep asking. No one knows and nothing in the script rivals the way the question was framed by the poet William Scammell when he wondered whether it was chess against a breaking wave / or just some corny Abba tune.

Which leaves us, as always, with the tennis. In this regard the critical heart of the matter was articulated years ago by my dad. I was watching a Woody Allen film on TV, a sequence in which Allens character plays squash. My dad had no idea who Allen was but after watching for a few minutes said, The lil uns not up to much is he! Its as simple as that. Can the tennis players in these films play tennis? Yes they can. I assume that this is a product of technology whereby the heads of the actors can be grafted on to the bodies of their doubles. But the issue is not only whether they can play tennis well enough. They have also to be able to play oldly enough. Compared with today, tennis of the 1970s looks a leisurely, almost sub-aqua affair, but any difference in overall quality is also a technologically induced illusion. Only pole-vaulting has been as thoroughly reconfigured by advances in equipment as tennis.

Watch a trailer for Borg vs McEnroe.

Stones last big hit, La La Land, negotiated a similar problem. Can she and Ryan Gosling dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? No they cant. The solution is to let the camera do the dancing. In the battle to replicate the actual tennis, Battle of the Sexes is more effective than Borg vs McEnroe for exactly the opposite reason. Whereas in the latter the camera is down there on court, moving in close and scampering after the ball, the former opts for viewing the match as though on TV: a reminder that although as a tennis match it was pretty silly, it was the spectacle seeing Riggs make a spectacle of himself in front of a television audience of 90 million that mattered. Aesthetically it also takes us back to the 1970s when cameras were not able to immerse us in every-angle HD closeups of the shifting narrative increments of a match.

Ironies abound. The celebration of womens tennis being taken seriously comes at a time when womens tennis is in danger of becoming seriously boring, as endless players from eastern Europe and beyond all these new -ovas, as Venus Williams wittily put it thump the ball into the middle of the second week. There have been quite a few one-sided semis and finals in recent years but the close-fought conclusion to this years tournament at Indian Wells between Svetlana Kuznetsova and Elena Vesnina was a prolonged exercise in endurance for anyone watching. The problem is not a lack of personalities; it is the surfeit of women whose games are all but indistinguishable from each other. Qualities traditionally identified as feminine grace, delicacy and beauty have become the exclusive preserve of the mens game. (The dudes even cry more than the chicks!)

I say preserve because those qualities have long been endangered in the mens game too. Watching John Isner, Kevin Anderson and Sam Querrey remains one of the less edifying sporting experiences available. We have become used to dads like Mike Agassi and Richard Williams pushing their kids to become players from infancy. The next move might well be to breed monstrously tall, big-servers in a laboratory. In spite of this, the mens game is presently more pleasing to the eye than the womens. This was not always the case. Mischa Zverev is lauded as a throwback to the serve-and-volley heyday of Wimbledon but hey, that day often comprised serve minus volley. To go from Ivan Lendl plying his joyless trade to watching Steffi Graf play was like seeing the covers coming off after a rain delay had somehow assumed human form. And then to cut a long story short along came Roger Federer, who was blessed with power, subtlety and grace. David Foster Wallace famously described Federer as Mozart and Metallica at the same time.

Womens matches these days often resemble a mashup between Metallica and a Metallica tribute act. Lacking equivalents of the unpredictable Gal Monfils or the dreadlocked Dustin Brown, the womens game remains deadlocked in the power phase. Lets put it as simply as possible. Since the retirement of the glorious Justine Henin-Hardenne none of the top women play with a single-handed backhand. Without single-handed backhands the potential for beauty in tennis is severely cramped.

The final irony is that one emerges from Borg vs McEnroe fascinated not by the rivalry, but by the legendary tie-break after which, as Tim Adams memorably put it in his book On Being John McEnroe, Borg came out for the fifth set as if nothing had happened. That, as Adams writes, was one of the great moments in sport. But a great film could potentially be made about the nothing that did happen, after Borg retired at the precocious age of 26, after he turned his back on everything that gave his life meaning, or kept the lack of meaning at bay: a film, that is, about what happens to volcanoes after they opt for extinction. It could be so boring. It could be Bergmanesque.

Borg vs McEnroe is released on Friday; Battle of the Sexes is out on 24 Nov.

Geoff Dyers latest book, White Sands, is published by Canongate (16.99). To order a copy for 15.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/battle-of-sexes-borg-vs-mcenroe-two-tennis-films-geoff-dyer

09.19.17 Credit Cards

Would you kill my mother for me?: a dark case of abuse and revenge

Dee Dee Blanchard forced her healthy daughter Gypsy to use a wheelchair and fabricated endless medical emergencies for her. Then Gypsy found a boyfriend, and made a grisly plan to escape her mother and start a new life. Erin Lee Carr tells a deeply disturbing story of Munchausen by proxy and murder

I have four VHS tapes in a large ziplock bag. They are family home movies, but not of my family. The label of one tape reads simply Gypsy. A little girl appears in the centre of the frame, her eyes are large and brown, her hair almost white blonde. She is gazing up at the camera, asking for Mama.

Born in Louisiana in 1991, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was raised solely by her mother, who was known by family and friends as Dee Dee. When the baby was three months old, Dee Dee told doctors that she didnt seem to be breathing properly. Gypsy was diagnosed with sleep apnoea and given breathing apparatus. Dee Dee was convinced that something else was wrong. When Gypsy was seven, Dee Dee met with her extended family and told them the bad news. The little girl had a chromosomal disorder and her range of motion was limited so using a wheelchair would be a necessity. After that, the health troubles seemed endless. A feeding tube was put in when Gypsys weight was too low. When she was diagnosed with epilepsy, the doctors prescribed the drug Tegretol, which made her teeth crumble from inside her mouth. Gypsys grandparents wondered to each other if their granddaughter would even make it to adulthood.

Dee Dee often clashed with her family about Gypsy and the care that she thought the girl needed. After it was discovered that Dee Dee had opened up credit cards in her fathers name, she left her familys house in the middle of the night, leaving no forwarding address.

Gypsy
Living a lie: despite her many supposed health problems, when prison doctors recently examined her Gypsy was given a clean bill of health

Later, Gypsy and Dee Dee were forced to move from Louisiana to Missouri when Hurricane Katrina ruined their modest apartment. Dee Dee added an e to Blanchard and reinvented herself. In Springfield, Missouri, Dee Dee was known as a generous, God- fearing caretaker of a sick little girl. According to neighbours and family members, Gypsy and Dee Dee were best friends, one never seen without the other. At local events, they would be spotted chatting noisily with fellow neighbours, smiling and holding hands. True, the illnesses seemed rough on the family, and they needed all the help they could get, but they got through it without complaining. They had Jesus on their side.

Dee Dee and Gypsy appeared on local TV news shows, the perfect feelgood story for the community. Dee Dee talked about how grateful she was for the hospital treating Gypsy, and that she would be lost without them. Nonetheless, Dee Dee was sure to leverage her daughters sick condition to enjoy the maximum amount of kindness from strangers.

When she was seven, Gypsy was crowned queen for the day during a local Mardi Gras parade. As she grew older, the pair were gifted several trips to Walt Disney World. Money was an issue. Dee Dee hadnt worked since Gypsy was a baby Gypsy was home-schooled, as her mother said the girl was developmentally challenged. When mother and daughter were given backstage passes to a Miranda Lambert concert, Dee Dee orchestrated a photo op between the star and the little girl, and Lambert would end up sending Dee Dee a series of cheques, totalling $6,000.

The hospital visits grew exponentially and, in the videos, Gypsy looks like she was ageing in reverse. Pictures from 2015 show a Gypsy who looks like a little old lady rather than the young woman she hoped to become.

It was a difficult and painful life, but the teenager got through it with her passion for Disney films. She watched Beauty and the Beast, Tangled and Lilo & Stitch on repeat, losing herself in cartoon daydreams. The world was a colourful and beautiful one, where the princess always got rescued and the villain always got what she deserved.

Fairytale
Fairytale princess: Gypsy loved Disney films and she and her mum were gifted many trips to Walt Disney World

In 2013, Gypsy decided it was time to try to find her own prince. She created a profile on a site called Christiandatingforfree.com. After a couple of lacklustre responses to her winks, sent on the site, she received a message from a young man named Nicholas Godejohn who thought she seemed pure. After a couple of conversations, they knew they had found true love. Gypsy explained that she was in a wheelchair, but led a very active and fulfilling life. She was worried her honesty had ruined her chances with such a young, good-looking guy. Much to her surprise, he told her he didnt mind.

The online communication intensified between Nick and Gypsy. He requested that she always be sure to capitalise his name and be respectful towards him at all times. In order to hide the relationship from Dee Dee, they shared a private Facebook page where they could post messages for one another. Nick kept angling for an in-person meeting but Gypsy was terrified what would he think when he saw her in her wheelchair? There was something she had to tell him before they made the IRL leap: a terrible secret.

When I met her in 2016, for the documentary I made about her life, Gypsy told me how nervous shed been, calling him. He was the first person to whom shed revealed the truth she didnt need the wheelchair, her mum forced her to use it. She could walk just fine, but no one could ever know the truth.

They moved forward with their love affair. Nick and Gypsy met in person in early 2015 for a screening of Cinderella at a local Missouri cinema. Gypsy went with her mum and planned the rendezvous to look as if she was just meeting Nick for the first time, and they snuck away to consummate the relationship in the bathroom. When Gypsy got out, her mother was furious and forbade her from ever seeing Nick again.

On 14 June 2015 Dee Dee and Gypsys Facebook status was changed to THAT BITCH IS DEAD. In the comment section it read, I fucken SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO FUCKEN LOUD LOL. Dee Dee was found murdered in her pink bedroom, the duvet piled on the body as if to hide it from view.

Gypsy
In handcuffs in prison: Gypsy took a plea deal and received a 10-year sentence for the crime of second-degree murder

After the Cinderella screening, Gypsy told me, her mum had become less of a best friend and more of a cruel captor. Gypsy felt weak and helpless, as if all the doors were shutting in front of her. This feeling made her ask Nick a desperate, terrible question. Would you kill my mother for me?

She said they would call it Plan B and it would take place on 12 June 2015. Dee Dees killing was graphic and bloody. Gypsy claims Nick entered their pink Habitat for Humanity (a housing charity) house late that night and says she handed him the blue gloves and giant serrated knife. Afterwards, he texted her to get your ass to the bathroom, and she claims she obeyed dutifully, crouching on the floor naked, listening to her mum being murdered mercilessly by her boyfriend. This was not the Disney movie she was expecting her life to be. But at last she could be free well, for a couple of days.

The couple fled to Wisconsin, to his parents house where they planned on starting a new life. Worried that her mothers body would rot, Gypsy decided it would be best to write a confession on Dee Dee and Gypsys shared Facebook page to alert authorities. She hoped that the police would assume a random person had done the killing. But the police traced the IP address of the Facebook status to Big Bend, Wisconsin and her story fell apart right away. At first, she lied to investigators and said she had nothing to do with it. They knew better.

Gypsy tells me all this the same day she pleads guilty to the second-degree murder of her mother. She can now speak freely, without fear of further legal repercussions. At 2pm, she walks into the darkened courtroom, set up for our interview. She has attempted a braid on the right side of her head, but the hair has fused together giving a her a harsh appearance. She is 24 years old, much older than many who knew her realised. Dee Dee registered her with different birth dates. There is no hot water in the jail, which has made it impossible to shower. I unclip a hairpin from my own head and make a move to help her, but the bailiff calls out to me: no touching.

Partners
Partners in crime: Nick Godejohn and Gypsy. The pair met online on a Christian dating site and soon realised how compatible they were. Photograph: AP

My first question to her is a simple one: How would you describe your mum? She looks down and thinks hard for a couple of seconds and then smiles and says: Unique? If I had to say one word about her it would be overprotective.

Gypsy is a mystery explaining another mystery to me. During the pre-trial hearings, much is hinted about Gypsy inheriting her mothers duplicity. After careful investigation I just dont believe that she set out to murder her mother and cover it up. That would have been a simple story this is anything but. Gypsy was a young woman who lived in a false reality. Her life was filled with public playfulness and private abuse. There is no way for us to know what it was like inside that little pink house, nor would it be fair to judge her actions.

When I spoke to Gypsy in interviews at the local jail, she said Dee Dee had told her that her father, Rod, had abandoned them. In fact, it emerged, Dee Dee hid Gypsy from her father for years, promising visits that were always cancelled at the last second due to Gypsys medical emergencies. According to Rod, whom I interviewed on tape, he was careful to send her Christmas and birthday gifts. He would find out later that Dee Dee would open them and present them to Gypsy as if they were gifts from herself. And still, Gypsy tells me that she misses her mother. For a long time, Dee Dee was the only other person in her life. Her mum created her reality of the world, as many parents do.

Gypsy took a plea deal and received a 10-year sentence for the crime of second-degree murder. Prosecutor Dan Patterson cited her medical and physical abuse as being a huge mitigator and the reason for receiving such an unusually light sentence. Many have brought up the notion of self-defence as a response to this case. The slaying did not happen during an altercation: it appears to have been planned and she alleges it was executed in the middle of the night by a man whom Dee Dee had only met once.

The law could not see it as self-defence, and nor could Gypsy. After taking the plea, Gypsy told me that it is a comfort to know she will be out in under 10 years she was frantic about the possibility of receiving life in prison. Her remaining family believe the sentence to be harsh and wonder what would have happened had she gone to trial. Nick, the person who is accused of actually committing the grisly act, is still awaiting trial in Missouri. There have been numerous discussions about his mental competency. The former couple do not communicate at all.

When Gypsy first arrived at the Greene County Jail she was sent to the infirmary to determine the best course of treatment for her epilepsy and the myriad other illnesses she had been treated for her entire life. The doctor gave her a clean bill of health.

It wasnt just the wheelchair that was a lie, it was everything. Gypsy will be eligible for parole in 2024. I finished filming in 2016, but I cant stop thinking about her, and wondering what other tapes were left behind.

Mommy Dead and Dearest, directed by Erin Lee Carr, is available from 4 September on iTunes

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/27/would-you-kill-my-mother-for-me-murder-abuse-film-crime-erin-lee-carr

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