Film Review: Air (dir by Ben Affleck)

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Air opens with a montage of the 80s. Ronald Reagan is President. MTV is actually playing music. Wall Street is full of millionaires. Sylvester Stallone is singing with Dolly Parton for some reason. Because the specific year is 1984, people are nervously giving George Orwell’s book the side-eye. Everyone wants an expensive car. Everyone wants a big house. Everyone wants the world to know how rich and successful and special they are.

What no one wants is a pair of Nike basketball shoes. All of the major players are wearing Adidas and Converse while Nike is viewed as being primarily a company that makes running shoes. CEO Phil Knight (played by Ben Affleck) is considering closing down the basketball shoe division. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), however, has a plan that he thinks will save the division. Instead of recruiting three or four low-tier players to wear and endorse Nike shoes, Sonny wants to spend the entire division’s budget on just one player. Sonny is convinced that a young Michael Jordan is destined to become one of the best players in the history of basketball and he wants to make a shoe that will be specifically designed for Jordan.

The problem is that Michael Jordan doesn’t want to have anything to do with Nike because Nike is not viewed as being a cool brand. Jordan wants to sign with Adidas, though he’s considering other offers as well. He also wants a new Mercedes. Even though everyone tells Sonny that he’s wasting his time and that he’ll be responsible for a lot of people losing their jobs if he fails, Sonny travels to North Carolina to make his pitch personally to Jordan’s mother (Viola Davis).

For it’s first 50 minutes or so, Air feels like a typical guy film, albeit a well-directed and well-acted one. Almost all of the characters are former jocks and the dialogue is full of the type of good-natured insults that one would expect to hear while listening to a bunch of longtime friends hanging out together. For all the pressure that Sonny is under, the underlying message seems to be one of wish fulfilment. “Isn’t it great,” the film seems to be saying, “that these guys get to hang out and talk about sports all day?” When Sonny runs afoul Michael Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), one is reminded of the stories of temperamental film executives who spent all day yelling at each other on the telephone. The efforts to sign Jordan feel a lot like the effort to get a major star to agree to do a movie and it’s easy to see what attracted Damon and Affleck to the material. Even though the majority of the film takes place in the Nike corporate offices, it deals with a culture that Damon and Affleck undoubtedly know well.

But then Jason Bateman delivers a great monologue and the entire film starts to change. Despite his reluctance to sign with Nike, Michael Jordan and his family have agreed to visit the corporate headquarters. Sonny has a weekend to oversee the creation of the shoe that will hopefully convince Jordan to sign. When Sonny shows up for work, he’s excited. But then he has a conversation with Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), the head of marketing. Strasser talks about his divorce and how he only sees his daughter on the weekends. Every weekend, Rob brings his daughter the latest free Nike stuff. His daughter now his 60 pairs of Nike shoes. Rob admits that, even if he loses his job, he’ll probably still continue to buy Nike shoes because that’s now what his daughter expects whenever she sees him. Rob compares Sonny’s plan to the Bruce Springsteen song Born in the USA, in that the tune sounds hopeful but the lyrics are much darker. If the plan succeeds, Nike will make a lot of money. If it fails, Rob and everyone in the basketball division will be out of a job and that’s going to effect every aspect of their lives. Rob points out that Sonny made his decision to pursue only Michael Jordan without thinking about what could happen to everyone else. Sonny says that success requires risk. Rob replies that Sonny’s words are spoken, “like a man who doesn’t have a daughter.”

It’s an honest moment and it made all the more powerful by Bateman’s calm but weary delivery of the lines. It’s the moment when the film’s stakes finally start to feel real, even though everyone knows how the story eventually turned out. As well, it’s in this moment that the film acknowledges that the Air Jordan legacy is a complicated one. Rob talks about how the shoes are manufactured in overseas sweatshops. Later, when discussing whether or not Michael Jordan should get a percentage of the sales, Jordan’s mother acknowledges that the shoes aren’t going to be cheap to purchase. They’re going to be a status symbol, just as surely as the Mercedes that Jordan expects for signing with the company. Air becomes much like that Springsteen song. On the surface, it’s a likable film about a major cultural moment, full of dialogue that is quippy and sharply delivered without ever falling into the pompous self-importance of one of Aaron Sorkin’s corporate daydreams. But, under the surface, it’s a film about how one cultural moment changed things forever, in some ways for the better and in some ways for the worse.

It’s an intelligent film, one the creates a specific moment in time without ever falling victim to cheap nostalgia. Matt Damon gets a brilliant monologue of his own, in which he discusses how America’s celebrity culture will always attempt to tear down anyone that it has previously built up. Ben Affleck plays Nike’s CEO as being an enigmatic grump, alternatively supportive and annoyed with whole thing. As for Michael Jordan, he is mostly present in only archival footage. An actor named Damian Delano Young plays him when he and his parents visit Nike’s corporate headquarters but, significantly, his face is rarely show and we only hear him speak once. In one of the film’s best moments, he shrugs his shoulders in boredom while watching a recruitment film that Nike has produced to entice him and, because it’s the first reaction he’s shown during the entire visit, the audience immediately understands the panic of every executive in the room.

Air is a surprisingly good film. It’s currently streaming on Prime.

4 Shots From 4 Films: The Goddess, Last Year at Marienbad, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Raise the Red Lantern

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

Four beautiful and talented actresses.

Ruan Lingyu in The Goddess (1934, dir. Yonggang Wu)

Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad (1961, dir. Alain Resnais)

Barbara Sukowa in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern (1991, dir. Zhang Yimou)

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #126: Veronika Decides To Die (dir by Emily Young)

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, here we are!

It’s been 9 weeks since we originally embarked on this journey that I called Embracing The Melodrama Part II. At that time, my plan was to do 126 reviews in just three weeks. It didn’t quite work out that way, did it? But still, I had fun doing this series of reviews and I hope that you’ve had at least a little fun reading them. If I’ve inspired you take a chance on any of the films that I’ve reviewed — whether it be Sunrise or An American Hippie In Israel or Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction or Calvary — then this has all been worth it!

So, for my final review in this series, I want to take a quick look at one of the most melodramatic films to be released this year so far, Veronika Decides To Die.

Veronika Decides To Die finally got an American release in 2015, six years after it initially premiered on the festival circuit. Years before it was available here in the States, Veronika played in Europe. Not surprisingly, the American release felt much like an afterthought, one final attempt to make a little money off the film before moving on. It’s spent about a week in theaters and two months later, it is now showing up on cable and Netflix. And while Veronika didn’t get many reviews, the few that it did get were rather dismissive.

But you know what?

I like Veronika Decides To Die.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a great film. In many ways, it’s a very silly film. The entire plot hinges on a character doing something that makes no sense. Frustrated with her life as an anonymous and lonely office worker, Veronika (Sarah Michelle Gellar) attempts to commit suicide. She survives the suicide attempt and, upon waking in a mental hospital, she’s told by a mysterious psychologist (David Thewlis) that, as a result of her attempt, she now has a heart condition that will kill her in a matter of weeks. And what does Veronika decide to do after learning that she’s going to die? She voluntarily remains in the mental hospital and goes to sessions of group therapy!

And you never really believe that Veronika would do that. But, if you can bring yourself to accept that one implausibility — well, you’ll soon be confronted by a lot of other implausibilities. You’ll meet Veronika’s glassy-eyed roommate (Erika Christensen) and a mysterious older patient (Melissa Leo). You’ll also meet Edward (Jonathan Tuker), who is mute but has such a sexy stare that he really doesn’t need to speak. And as Veronika gets to know her fellow patients, she starts to come to terms with her own issues of anger and regret and she realize that importance of embracing life and doing what you love.

Of course, that’s a little hard to do when you’re in a mental hospital. Luckily, there’s a piano that Veronika can play while Edward silently watches her. If you’re guessing that this eventually leads to Veronika sitting naked at the piano and masturbating in front of Edward, well, you’re right…

Listen, Veronika Decides To Die is one of those films that takes itself way too seriously and it ends with a plot twist that you’ll see coming from a thousand miles away. I can understand why the film’s release was delayed because the film’s tone is all over the place.

But, dammit, I liked Veronika Decides To Die!

When taken on its own defiantly melodramatic terms, it works. That’s largely because Sarah Michelle Gellar really commits herself to the role. You forget that you’re watching Buffy. Instead, Gellar truly becomes Veronika, this tragically sad and lonely young woman who finds inner peace by masturbating at a piano. Veronika Decides To Die is a movie that really shouldn’t work but Sarah Michelle Gellar saves it. When the film starts, she beautifully captures Veronika’s lonely desperation, her feelings of isolation and worthlessness. (I don’t care who you are, we’ve all felt like Veronika at some point in our life.) As the film progresses, she portrays both Veronika’s anger and her growing appreciation of life. She has a nice chemistry with Jonathan Tucker and, in the end, Sarah Michelle Gellar probably gives a better performance than the material really deserves.

Of course, another reason that Veronika Decides To Die works is because it is so silly and melodramatic. This is one of those films that goes so far over-the-top that it creates an almost heightened sense of reality. It becomes, almost despite itself, compulsively watchable.

It’s also the perfect film with which to complete Embracing the Melodrama Part II. I hope y’all have enjoyed reading these 126 reviews because I’ve certainly enjoyed writing them! To everyone who has read these reviews and clicked on the “like” button and occasionally left a comment or two, thank you so much! Love you! However much effort or work it may take, all of you make it worth it.

And now I’m going to go pass out for a little while…