He got superb performances out of Michelle Monaghan and his younger brother, Casey, in Gone Baby Gone, one of the more impressively fatalistic Hollywood thrillers of recent years it powers through its own clunky plot mechanics to a nearly wordless final scene whose pathos and ambiguity have a distinct ’70s inflection. Affleck isn’t a masterful filmmaker-or a subversive one-but he has a gift for pacing and working with actors. If The Social Network plays like a millennial Citizen Kane, Air is closer to the light and satisfying sensation of reading a Wikipedia article while shuffling through a good playlist. The common denominator across the three movies is the presence of self-styled disruptors reshaping various industries in their image-a rare and potent opportunity to yoke together seemingly opposed values of subversion and success. ![]() But there’s another, even more specific influence here in the form of Moneyball, itself a sort of Social Network clone, right down to the Aaron Sorkin script. ![]() With carefully curated production design and sterile, fluorescent aesthetics-a kind of ambient boardroom hum punctuated by a string of reliable I-Love-the-’80s bangers-Affleck’s film belongs to a contemporary subgenre of corporate origin myths whose gold standard is probably The Social Network. Such audience-flattering high jinks are de rigueur in movies of this type, and Air, to its credit, knows exactly what it is. Points are scored on broad pop-cultural reference points from WrestleMania to “Where’s the Beef?,” and characters’ trustworthiness is marked by how they talk about NBA stars whose legacies are long since settled (all that’s missing is a line about Sam Bowie being the next Kareem). Suspense and drama become subordinate to a kind of cozy superiority: The big moments have the exhilaration of windmill dunking on a 6-foot rim. We, of course, do know it, and the pleasures and the limitations of Air are bound up in the essential, irresistible frictionlessness of this 20/20 hindsight. ![]() He doesn’t know it yet, but his philosophy shrewdly anticipates the larger cults of personality that would come to define American pop culture in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond-the idea that people everywhere would pay a premium if they could be like Mike. Sonny is driven by the poetic, distinctly nonutilitarian idea that the shoe matters less than the person who wears it. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. Ideally, the amount is to be split among three potential spokesmen, but Sonny, who’s got a paunch and a gambling problem, wants to blow the whole wad (and more) on Jordan, whose game he deconstructs, Zapruder-film style, en route to the unshakable belief that the kid is the next big thing. Thirsty for market share, Knight instructs in-house hoops guru Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to get thrifty and creative with a minuscule $250,000 budget. ![]() When he gets to the office, he stares down his basketball division’s downward sales curve while Run-DMC trumpets the greatness of their Adidas. Phil Knight (Affleck) isn’t just the company’s CEO, he’s his own best customer, cruising through suburban Portland in an array of colorful tracksuits. Air works nicely on those terms, as a limber, vigorous jog over familiar territory. There’s a recurring joke in Alex Convery’s screenplay that, circa 1984, Nike was best known for its comfy workout apparel. History is written by the winners, and Ben Affleck’s glossy new docudrama, Air, about Nike’s unlikely and ultimately paradigm-shifting shoe deal with a lanky shooting guard named Michael Jordan, is the cinematic equivalent of a victory lap.
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