It’s so incredibly strange in 2017 to watch a movie about people going into a conversation on opposite sides of women’s rights and coming out of it as friends. Images courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.
8/10 Battle of the Sexes is one of those wonderful biopics that concerns much more than the events it depicts.
On the surface, the film chronicles the lives of Billie Jean King (Emma Stone), a tennis star in her prime, and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), who had been a two-time world champion in the mid-40s, in the leadup to their 1973 tennis match billed as the Battle of the Sexes. King had been fighting an uphill battle for equal pay for female tennis players, officially splitting off from the Association of Tennis Professionals to form the Women’s Tennis Association over the issue. Upon hearing this, Riggs, famously a businessman and a bit of a ham, challenged King to a tennis match, claiming that even at age 55, he could beat even the top woman player in the world. Drawing a global viewing audience of 90 million, their duel remains one of the most watched tennis matches in history.
Riggs’ chauvinism was widely dismissed as an act to draw attention to the match, and he and King remained friends until his death in 1995. Considered one of the best tennis players of all time, King came out as gay in 1981 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 for her contributions to tennis, women’s rights and the LGBT community.
As expected, Kingsman: The Golden Circle easily took the top spot last weekend with $39 million. Other new releases The LEGO Ninjago Movie and Friend Request disappointed, one much more severely than the other- 
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