Air: A Review - Who Knew That Shameless Corporate Ass-Kissing Could Be So Entertaining?

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A rare treat of a well-made movie for grown-ups. Not life changing but undeniably entertaining.

Air, the new movie about Nike’s push to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal in 1984, is, to quote Kris Kristofferson, “partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction”.

The film, which is directed by Ben Affleck and stars Affleck as well as his old buddy Matt Damon, is the rarest of rare things in our current culture in that it’s a movie featuring movie stars, made for grown-ups in which everyone involved is exceedingly competent at what they do.

Ben Affleck’s direction, the cast’s performances, first-time screenwriter Alex Convery’s script and Robert Richardson’s cinematography are all, at a bare minimum, competent and often much more than that. For this reason alone, the film is undeniably entertaining.

It’s a testament to Damon and Affleck’s star power, and the professionalism and skill of everyone involved, that even though viewers know how the story ends, Air is still a compelling and captivating story that at times is remarkably exhilarating and even moving.

Matt Damon is terrific as Sonny Vaccaro, the guy leading the charge to get Michael Jordan to sign up with the then basement-dwelling, third ranked basketball sneaker company, Nike.

Damon has always been a top-notch movie star actor, and he brings all his skill to the fore as the lovable loser Vaccaro. Damon is a pleasant and oddly charming screen presence who effortlessly carries this story from start to finish.

Viola Davis, who plays Michael Jordan’s mom Deloris, is outstanding in her supporting role. With minimal screen time Davis imbues Deloris with a silent authority that dominates the drama. Every time she is on-screen, she is subtly the center of the universe. It would be difficult to imagine a scenario where Davis doesn’t get nominated for an Oscar for this performance.

Ben Affleck is very good too as Phil Knight, the very strange founder of Nike. Affleck is fantastic at being unintentionally funny and if Phil Knight is anything it is unintentionally funny.

Affleck’s direction is solid as well. His decision to not make Michael Jordan a major character in the film, and to not show Jordan’s face, were pretty brilliant as the movie could have easily spun out of control and turned into a rather cheap, made-for-tv type of project with a Jordan imitator joining the festivities.

All that said, there are some things about Air that leave a decidedly bad taste in my mouth.

The first of which is that this movie is undeniably a piece of corporate propaganda and hagiography. This isn’t just a film about American capitalism and corporatocracy, it is a celebration of American capitalism and corporatocracy.

The movie bends the truth to some extraordinary degrees in order to pretend it isn’t celebrating the rather deplorable parts of American capitalism and corporatism symbolized by Nike, and to act like it’s actually a tale about the working man fighting against corporate power.

Jordan is made out to be a pioneer who broke the mold regarding shoe contracts by demanding profit sharing and his mother Deloris makes the case that “young black boys will pay a lot for this sneaker and that money should go to my son!” She also says that workers like Vaccaro, and black athletes endorsing sneakers, are exploited by companies like Nike, and Converse and Adidas and they deserve more of the profits.

This is all well and good and is a nice bit of drama for the film, but the fact that Nike pays slave wages to third world workers in order to make their sneakers goes unsaid and unacknowledged. Also unsaid and unacknowledged is the fact that Nike sell their status symbol shoes at exorbitant prices that are so high that in the 80’s and 90’s they often caused crime and violence by young black men against other young black men in order to get them.

In addition, it is also a bit unnerving that Sonny Vaccaro, who is widely considered by many in the know to be one of the sleaziest people from the amateur basketball scene back in the 70’s and 80’s, is made out to be the good-hearted, kind, lovable hero of the movie.

Vaccaro was a shark who was deeply involved in all sorts of shady shit back in the day, and to see him in the film and in the film’s prologue, portrayed as the champion of the good, the noble and the right is a bit much.

There’s an interesting monologue in the film about the Bruce Springsteen song “Born in the USA”, which was enormously popular in 1984. The song, which was co-opted by Reagan as a flag-waving theme song, is actually a lament about the brutal decline of America, but because its morose lyrics are accompanied by the energized music of an uber-patriotic anthem, the song’s meaning gets lost and its artistic power usurped.

It could be that Affleck uses the “Born in the USA” monologue to let astute viewers know that he is trying to hide his critique of the insidious nature of American capitalism and corporatocracy in plain sight in this hagiography. I’d like to think so…but Air feels too weak in its criticisms and too vociferous in its praise of Nike (and all that it represents) to pass that test, and thus feels like just the anthem part of “Born in the USA” without the existential lament at its core.  

The reality is that Air is really a movie about marketing that is itself a piece of marketing. The film, with its fantastic soundtrack of 80’s music, looks and feels like a two-hour commercial for Nike. In this way it is almost an extension of The Last Dance, the ten-hour Michael Jordan docu-series that was so gloriously received by everyone but me back in 2020. That docu-series was shameless legend cultivation and brand buttressing of Michael Jordan and was produced by…you guessed it…Michael Jordan. But our culture is so enamored and addicted to narcissistic self-promotion and propaganda, that no one cared they were being fed a piece of self-serving bullshit.

Speaking of shameless marketing and self-promotion, it is strange that Damon and Affleck are out pounding the pavement selling this movie and pretending this is their first reunion film since their smash hit Good Will Hunting back in 1997, for which they won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Damon and Affleck’s last actual on-screen and writing credit reunion was Ridley Scott’s underrated 2021 film The Last Duel. The Last Duel was overlooked by audiences and snickered at by critics, but I thought it was very good, so to see Damon and Affleck pretend like it doesn’t exist is somewhat bizarre…but makes sense in terms of marketing as the Damon-Affleck reunion card is being played again. As they say, everything old is new again…apparently even on-screen reunions that already happened two-years ago.  

Also a bit odd is the fact that this movie is the first from Damon and Affleck’s production company Artists Equity, which is all about paying workers above and below the line fairly and with equity in the film.

That the narrative of Air somewhat reflects the business model of Artists Equity is clever, as is Affleck talking up how he looked out for first time screenwriter Convery and promised him he’d get full credit despite some rewrites.

But that “looking out for the working man” narrative feels like window dressing when the movie it is placed in is an embarrassing ass-kissing of sweatshop masters Nike made by the deplorable demons at Amazon. I mean…yikes…you’d be hard pressed to find two companies as destructive to working people and our culture as Nike and Amazon. This insidious approach is somewhat reminiscent of the Best Picture winner Nomadland, which told a tale of the working poor on the fringes of society yet disgustingly managed to portray Amazon - which is well-known for its abuse of workers and labor practices, as a friend to the working man and wonderful worker’s paradise.

And yet, despite the rather repulsive pro-corporation politics and economics on display in the movie, Air is an irresistibly entertaining and unrelentingly enjoyable movie, which is a testament to Affleck and Damon’s talent and star power.

In conclusion, Air is in rarified air in that it’s a movie for grown-ups that features movie stars confidently filling up the big screen. I highly recommend it and can guarantee that while it won’t change your life, it will definitely leave you satisfied.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Matrix: Resurrections - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dreadful, awful movie that does nothing but undermine the brilliance of the original.

At the very end of Matrix: Resurrections, the movie perfectly sums up its sole reason for existing as well as what is so dreadfully wrong with it.

Back in 1999, when The Matrix came to its conclusion after its astonishing action sequences and mind-expanding/blowing storyline, the song “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine blasted out of studio speakers as an aggressive rallying cry and call to arms. It was a stunning moment that perfectly captured the volcanic frustration born out of the ennui and malaise of post-cold war and pre-9/11 America.

In contrast, after two and a half hours of impotent fight sequences and flaccid philosophical musings in Matrix: Resurrections, the fourth movie in the Matrix franchise - which is now in theatres and streaming on HBO Max, the same song, “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine, plays once again, but this time the ferocious and rebellious growl of Rage Against the Machine is replaced, and the song is played by a flaccid cover band, Brass Against, and the singer is a woman.

To give an even deeper context to that music cue, Brass Against is a watered-down, truly shitty cover band, and they’ve only ever made the news once, for an incident where their female lead singer literally urinated on a male fan on stage during a show.

Chef’s kiss.

It would seem, with all of the ridiculous, gender-based changes made to the Matrix in Matrix: Resurrections, the girl power revolution will most definitely be televised, but it will also be an abysmal, derivative and boring fucking show that’s only redeeming value is that it is almost instantaneously forgettable.

What grates about Matrix: Resurrections, is that it apparently only exists in order to undermine the story, meaning and power of the original film. In Matrix parlance, it’s like the filmmakers want their audience to vomit up the red pill and gobble up the blue pill.

This of course would seem to be an asinine course of action for the filmmakers, who have never made anything even remotely worthwhile since The Matrix. But when seen in context, it all makes perfect sense on a meta level, as the creators of the Matrix have literally castrated themselves and now have succeeded in castrating their greatest work, The Matrix, as well.

You see, the Wachowski brothers , who wrote and directed the ground-breaking The Matrix in 1999 and both of its dismal sequels in 2003, are now in 2021, the Wachowski sisters. Lana Wachowski, who was Larry Wachowski back in the day, directed this new Matrix movie solo as her former brother and current sister Lilly (formerly Andy), wasn’t involved in the production.

Obviously, a lot can change in the Matrix over twenty years. Besides brothers becoming sisters, action sequences that were once so revolutionary back in ‘99, are now just derivative and dull and the original mind-bending Matrix story is now reduced to a masturbatorial homage driven by limp cultural politics and painfully inert and cliched narratives.

Back for Resurrections are veterans of the original trilogy, Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann-Moss, but gone for no discernible reason are fellow trilogy vets Laurence Fishburn and Hugo Weaving. But at least Matrix: Resurrections casts heavyweight Doogie Howser…oops…I mean, Neil Patrick Harris, in a critical role. Yikes. Was Urkel/Jaleel White not available?

Keanu, always an understated actor, seems to sleep walk through the film and Moss looks oddly detached from the foolish festivities into which she wanders. I understood their weariness, as I too fought to stave off slumber.

I’d recount the specifics of the plot of Matrix: Resurrections, but its just so supercilious and self-defeating as to be inane if not insane. The brilliance of The Matrix was that it was narratively complex without being complicated. This was why it was so effortless to fall under the spell of the film and go along for the ride. Matrix: Resurrections on the other hand, is needlessly labyrinthine but also remarkably stupid. It repels audience interest by building barriers of banality cloaked in contradictions and incoherence.

I remember when I first saw The Matrix in ‘99. I was going to London the next day and took my lady and a friend to the movie after we had dinner in Manhattan. I had extremely low expectations as I considered Keanu to be a bit of a joke at the time. I left the theatre a few hours later gobsmacked. The movie blew me away. And what made it all the more fascinating was that as the days, weeks, months and even years went by I thought more and more about the movie. Quite an accomplishment for what I assumed was just an action movie.

Unfortunately, the sequels to The Matrix, Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix: Revolutions, were abysmal disappointments, with Revolutions in particular being nearly unwatchable.

Besides the original Matrix movie, the Wachowski’s filmography reveals them to be quite dreadful filmmakers. Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending is a murderer’s row of cinematic dogshit, and Matrix: Resurrections is an equally odious addition to that line-up.

I’ve read that Lana Wachowski wanted to use Resurrections to take back The Matrix’s “red pill” symbology that had been pirated by right-wing radicals, most notably during the Trump years. This strikes me as a sort of “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” type of situation.

The Matrix: Resurrections seems like an attempt to retroactively ruin a classic film, The Matrix, in order to piss off the original’s fans who found meaning within it, because the meaning they found wasn’t what the filmmakers intended.

I’ve heard this Matrix right-wing conundrum equated to when Ronald Reagan usurped Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” back in the 80’s. Springsteen wrote the song as a protest about the injustices against the working class in America. Reagan used it as a patriotic rallying cry.

The problem with “Born in the U.S.A.” is that while the lyrics astutely lament America’s treatment of the working class, the music accompanying them is written like an anthem. The music is a celebration, while the lyrics are a lamentation. (To see how the musical context changes the song, listen to Springsteen’s sterling acoustic version on the 1999 album 18 Tracks)

Music, like movies, makes people feel first, and think second. Audiences of both Born in the U.S.A. and The Matrix responded to the pride and anger respectively of those two works.

Trying to reverse the effects of that is near impossible, and no matter how much Springsteen corrects the record regarding his song, or the Wachowski’s try and go back and change the meaning of The Matrix, the cat is already out of the bag, the horse is out of the barn, and the genie is out of the bottle. Audience response is solidified and deeply held and there’s nothing that can change that.

Ultimately, Matrix: Resurrections is wrestling with a ghost, and while that may be interesting for the ghost and for the wrestler, to outside observers it just looks like an idiot having spasms during a psychosis-fueled conniption.

My advice is to skip Matrix: Resurrections. It is truly awful. Don’t see it. Don’t even acknowledge it exists. Stay stuck in the delusion that only The Matrix exists and all the other Wachowski films are just bad dreams to be brushed off and forever forgotten.

©2021