(“Air” will stream on Amazon later this year meantime it’s opening in theaters.) The key, repeated line in writer Alex Convery’s efficient screenplay is Marketing Blather 101, and it works like a charm: “A shoe is always just a shoe, until somebody steps into it.” The movie is a project made under the new Artists Equity production banner, which Affleck and Damon launched in order to set up new and artist-friendlier revenue-sharing models in this gushy, uncertain age of streaming content. There’s a hidden layer of meaning underneath “Air,” if you want to look for it. Like Affleck’s Oscar-winning “Argo,” “Air” has a true knack for shamelessly effective audience manipulation en route to a happy ending. Why do I resist this sort of thing? Am I just un-American or something? I can only say I tend to resist such things right through and including the moment I don’t. “Air” does have a full share of hogwash moments, including Vaccaro’s buzzer-beater entreaty in the climactic pitch meeting to seal the deal with the Jordan family. In the wake of the latest NBA draft, Vaccaro hunts for affordable rookies to endorse the company’s merchandise, which is strong on running equipment but perilously weak on basketball.
Screenwriter Alex Convery covers three chaotic months in 1984. This is a story of middle- and upper-management gut feelings. In sports movie terms “Air” is the opposite of director Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball.” That film, a terrific one, told of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane scraped together a Basic Economy roster of promising nobodies through the use of sabermetric analysis. “Air” is also about spending money to make money, which would make it a period piece in much of corporate America today even if it weren’t, in fact, set 39 years ago. He’s the guy in the room everyone’s talking about, a wondrous, never-fully-revealed figure. We do not see Michael Jordan in “Air,” aside from a few shots of an essentially nonverbal actor’s back, or the back of his head.
It’s a docudrama - really more of a docucomedy-drama, with workplace banter and zingers for fuel - about how Nike marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon, convinced his boss Phil Knight, played by co-star and director Ben Affleck, to cough up the funds to make the pitch to get the basketball star for the ages to sell their shoes. “Air” is a good time, as well as a triumph of sports marketing in every conceivable way.
0 kommentar(er)
