Am I the only one thinking it's a good movie???

I was kind of teasing about the "complaining," not serious, so I apologize if it came across differently. BUT, as awful as the tennis in this movie looked to you, it's hard to imagine it looked worse to you than some of the stuff looked to me in, for example, CENTER STAGE II. There are plenty of people who are not professional dancers, who would recognize some of the horrors, whether from knowing how things should look, or just recognizing that this or that aspect is awkward or ugly. Look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO5fcVopU_0, starting at about 1:20, or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Zk8YPCR_M, especially around 0:38, and tell me you really think that looks acceptable to represent a professional level ballet student. One ridiculous thing is the state of her shoes and ribbons in the first clip; whatever shortcomings she may have as a ballet dancer (there are many), the state of her footwear alone would have prevented her from being kept beyond the first ten minutes of that audition. Her hair, too, is in a very inappropriate state for such an audition, and almost everything she's doing with her body is terrible, in both clips. I suppose the director had some of these details on purpose, since she's supposed to be a relatively inexperienced, only self-taught dancer, who (of course) just has "it"--that special something that makes all these professionals look past her awful technique, bizarre personal presentation, bad attitude, and unpromising physique, to award her one of the few, coveted spots in their pre-professional class, which feeds into their company, one of the top ballet companies in the world. This is beyond ridiculous.

Re. tennis, I'm not uneducated as to proper form, or unfamiliar with how it looks when Djokovich or Federer or Serena W. play (or for that matter, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Ilie Nastase, Margaret Court, Arthur Ashe, or Billie Jean King--I'm very old!). Yes, there's no question that the stars of the movie WIMBLEDON did not play like champions. BUT, they did play tennis, and the awfulness of their representations of tennis champions was absolutely not up to the awfulness level of that Center Stage II actress's representation of a serious ballet dancer. Perhaps the rather lame WIMBLEDON representation really strikes your gut as strongly as really bad, just laughably dreadful ballet strikes mine. In both cases, we're supposed to believe these actors as among the best in the world at their characters' respective endeavors (well, in C.S. II, she's meant to be at a very elite student level, which doesn't alter the point). I will say, though, that top tennis players do sometimes do some of the craziest moves, going at times far afield from how their best, most powerful form would look, in the effort to somehow get to that ball, and get it back over the net. Because, in the end, it doesn't really matter at all how they look, as long as they can get the ball where they need it to go, and win the point, the set, the match. But in ballet there's no match to win, and what matters is how you look (appearance and movement), and how you make the audience feel. It's true, though, that the bits of matches shown in WIMBLEDON required a robust suspension of disbelief (which one might or might not be willing to employ, depending on how engaged one felt by the characters, outside of their tennis form), and it would have been considerably different--exciting at a whole different level--if we could have seen tennis of the quality of real-world champions. So, I've talked myself into a better understanding of your frustration with WIMBLEDON. But I still think you suffered with this similarly to how I suffered, watching, say BLACK SWAN, where they got a bit closer to a realistic performance, but still fell extremely short of the mark. Everything's relative.






Multiplex: 100+ shows a day, NONE worth watching. John Sayles' latest: NO distribution. SAD.