'Air' Takes Us Back to 1984, The Good Ol' Days Of Film
#221: "Air," "Showing Up," "Born On The Fourth Of July," "Gone Baby Gone"
Edition 221:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Affleck and Damon team back up to sell a bunch of shoes. Kelly Reichardt made a movie that leaves a top movie critic floored. And apparently HBO Max is about to go extinct. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Christopher Abbott chance to finally break out once and for all.
Air
This movie would love for you to believe the year was 1984, a fact made abundantly clear in a minutes-long opening montage cutting together stock footage clips of every 80s pop culture moment you can think of.
It would also love for you to believe we still live in a world where a star-driven, low stakes adult drama can be a blockbuster. Receipts show it’s no more than a bug on the shoe of Mario’s Italian boot.
But the desire goes even a level deeper. This movie desperately wants to return to an 80s filmmaking sensibility that appears to be resonating, at least with critics and the 98% of Rotten Tomatoes audiences. I’ve been trying to figure out what that is exactly, ever since I saw the movie this week.
Of course, we should all be rooting for the movie Air. As the fledging project for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s new production studio, promising to offer back-end equity to both cast and crew as a way to incentivize making the kinds of adult dramas we complain don’t exist anymore, its success would be good for movie lovers everywhere.
That doesn’t mean the movie isn’t fundamentally and necessarily a two-hour commercial for Nike. It certainly is. The movie is a glorification of a bunch of corporate executives signing an athlete to an endorsement deal. The company’s core tenants are literally the interstitials that divide the chapters of the movie, for goodness sakes. To deny that would be incredibly naive, and to fight against it would be equally futile. Those are the rules of the game in 2023, and by now it’s only interesting to examine what someone can do within that framework.
Enter Affleck, an under-appreciated director when it comes to high-minded yet widely accessible popcorn movies (Argo, The Town). Whether or not it was his new business model or his clout that convinced this group of overqualified actors to occupy the world, he assembled a murderer’s row: his pal Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis, Chris Messina, Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayans.
His filmmaking superpower, and the thing I realized that makes this movie something between good and very good, is energy. We don’t realize how few movies have that these days.
Each scene carries an energetic quality that seemed so apparent in the light, breezy 80s — think Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, even a Scarface or Do The Right Thing. Those are movies with unstoppable momentum, propelling viewers onward not because of world-ending stakes or massive set pieces but because each scene feels…well, energetic. It’s a somewhat hard thinks to define, but it’s obvious on the screen.
This movie has that in spades. Damon’s schlubby shoe scout quips with Bateman and Tuckers’ marketing executives and Affleck’s goofy portrayal of CEO Phil Knight (I’ve always said Affleck and Brad Pitt are quirky character actors stuck in leading mans’ bodies). Viola Davis too is turned up to 11.
The story is incredibly fun, and easy to follow. It’s almost like a heist movie. They get the team together, come up with a plan and then have to execute it to perfection. The prize? Michael Jordan. A wink and a nod to how that turned out.
I’m a sucker for these types of movies, what can I say.
This year has its first four-star movie.
Something New
Showing Up (Theaters): The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who might be the world’s foremost movie critic after the retirement of A.O. Scott at the NYT, wrote the most glowing tweet review about this movie that I’ve ever seen in my life. I had to check it out. And one day, I hope to be deep enough to fully appreciate one of Kelly Reichardt’s movies (like First Cow), which are true arthouse indies in the fullest sense. There are no heroes, no villains, no three-act structure, no real stakes, and if I were to describe the plot to you it would sound like a whole lotta nothing.
Yet Reichardt is a master, and this is her best movie to date. Michelle Williams stars as a clay sculpture artist living in a community of artists near Portland. Her landlord, played by Hong Chau (The Menu, The Whale), is an abstract artist who is both more successful than her and, it appears, much happier too. But this story isn’t something like Amadeus, about jealousy. Instead it’s a reflection on an artist’s life. It’s about the things we need to do getting in the way of the things we NEED to do, and the reasons why we do those things even if they make us miserable. The movie is a visually and thematically cohesive feast, with each moment further explaining and enriching the previous, and more to be appreciated the more time one takes to understand it. I admit, I’m not fully capable. But when I read Brody’s full review he convinces me of this movie’s value.
Something Old
Born On The Fourth Of July (1989, Netflix): Oliver Stone’s epic feels like the essential origin myth of Boomer disillusionment. Those coming of age in the 1960s who weren’t radicalized by the counterculture movement and the siren song of Bob Dylan (whose music features prominently) were destined, in Stone’s estimation, to have their faith in the United States shattered by the terrors of Vietnam. Tom Cruise plays the ultimate gung-ho whose life basically moves from one living nightmare to the next, until he ultimately becomes an anti-war activist. It’s a tough watch, and it’s quite long (2hr25mins) but the quality is undeniable. Stone won his third Oscar for directing this, and it truly is the skeleton key that explains the entirety of his filmography (Platoon, JFK, even Wall Street).
Something to Stream
Gone Baby Gone (HBO Max): Rest in peace to HBO Max! As of May 23, Warner Bros. Discovery announced they will rename their streaming service simply “Max” when they finally integrate in the new Discovery+ content. So dumb. The fact that they removed the part of the brand associated with prestige, and…well, quality, probably doesn’t bode well for the direction of the streamer, especially considering the movies and shows people have noticed mysteriously disappearing over the past couple of months. For now, HBO Max probably has the best movie library of all the streamers.
One of those movies is Gone Baby Gone, which was Ben Affleck’s directorial debut in 2007. It stars his brother, Casey, as a Boston area police detective searching for a kidnapped young girl. It’s super dark and gritty and intense, with awesome acting performances including an Oscar-nominated turn for Amy Ryan (best known as Holly from “The Office), plus Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, Michelle Monaghan, Michael K. Williams and Titus Welliver. It’s an edge-of-your-seat thriller that will stick with you for days afterwards. Watch it while you still can!
Trailer Watch: Sanctuary
I can only write in this newsletter so many times that Christopher Abbott is the ‘next big thing’ before he has to, ya know, become the next big thing. Despite his youthful demeanor, he’s sneakily 37 years old. Now’s the time to make his move.
This movie looks like a true acting showcase, a mostly one-location, two-actor story opposite another rising star in Margaret Qualley. Regardless of what you might thing of the story material, which appears to be based around blackmail and potentially BDSM, this movie could launch both of them to another level.