Air movie

Ben Affleck's pacy, adept portrayal of Nike's pursuit of Michael Jordan, co-starring Matt Damon and Viola Davis, kneels at the altar of high capitalism.

“I-90 and I-87 go right through the middle of it.” As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). All of this lends a fresh and menacing overtone to the mantra with which he signs off at the end of his show: “Thank you for going to a special place with me.” What’s peculiar about McAdams’s film is the mildness of Nargle’s comeuppance. Rather, he ends with the revelation that Nike sold a hundred and sixty-two million dollars’ worth of Air Jordans in the first year. Give Affleck a clear story and, as he demonstrated in “The Town” (2010) and “Argo” (2012), he will stick to the beat. Nargle is not a fraud, but his creative powers are of the tiniest. If anything, the sequence in “Air” is yet more intense, because Davis is filmed in the tightest of closeups. (Too much ambiguity unnerves him; witness the sullen bafflement of “Gone Girl,” in 2014.) “Air” is pacy, adept, and entertainingly well drilled, and his cast, which includes Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, and Marlon Wayans, has a clubbable warmth. Thus it is that, to the Krakatoan fury of Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), Vaccaro shows up uninvited at the home of Jordan’s parents, James (Julius Tennon) and Deloris (Viola Davis), in North Carolina, and pleads with them to consider Nike for their son. It’s a heroic saga of the marketing of a shoe. Whether or not Affleck is atoning for the shame of playing Batman, in the DC franchise, it’s pretty sporting of him, in his own film, to set himself up as a comprehensive jerk. That was the case with “Steve Jobs” (2015), which unfolded the creation myth of Apple; with “The Founder” (2016), which did the same for McDonald’s; with “Tetris,” now on Apple TV+; with the upcoming “BlackBerry,” which is not, alas, about the harvesting of soft fruits; and with “Joy” (2015), which gave us our first chance—pray God it not be our last—to watch Jennifer Lawrence trying her hardest to sell mops. The latest example of a ready-branded film is “Air,” the product on this occasion being the Air Jordan.

Even without showing much of Michael Jordan, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis and other stars capture the drama of Nike's blockbuster sneaker deal.

Ben Affleck directs a movie that tries (and fails) to squeeze dramatic tension out of the origins of the Air Jordan. Matt Damon and Viola Davis star in this ...

With Air – which concludes with subtitles pointing out how the lush benefactors of this sweet, sweet deal have donated money to good causes in the years since – there's no there there, no feeling to latch onto besides, "Why was this made?" Yet there's something ultimately hollow about trying to extract FUBU mentality from what amounts to a two-hour ad for Nike and the uber-rich, especially in this economy. A Black man disrupting the historically racist system that undervalues Black talent by forcing that same system to run him his bag, and then some – this will undoubtedly appeal to a certain demographic that still reveres the old-school definition of the American Dream and celebrates Black billionaires as meaningful "progress." Air is convinced there's enough nail-biting tension to be gleaned from this conundrum and enough audience buy-in of the Jordan mythos and brand to overcome such a flimsy premise. And on the subject of Jerry Maguire: Like Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Rod Tidwell, Michael Jordan's strategic aims to secure the best deal possible are steered by the most important Black woman in his life – in both cases, there's a nod to subversiveness that doesn't quite hold water if you think about it too hard. In my screening of Air, there were whoops and cheers when Nike finally accepted the terms of Deloris' negotiations. The dramatic "stakes," if one wants to call them that – and if one does, they're being overly generous – are as follows: It's 1984, and Nike trails behind Adidas and Converse in sales. (He only gets to see her once a week following his divorce and always brings her a new pair of complimentary Nikes. If you work at the giant corporation that is Nike at that time, that's a problem. Directed by Ben Affleck with a screenplay by Alex Convery, Air is a soulless dramatization of how a giant corporation convinced a promising NBA rookie to make its already wealthy and well-off board members, CEOs, and salespeople even wealthier and set for life. It's presented as a classic sports movie about an underdog team (in this case, Nike) achieving greatness with a game-winning score (a rousing boardroom sales pitch). But we're living in the era of the nostalgic headline-to-Hollywood pipeline and in an age where entrepreneurs are obsessed with being credited as artistic visionaries, so perhaps it was inevitable something like the movie Air would come to exist.

The robustly entertaining, real life drama "Air," out April 6 and starring Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman and Ben Affleck, is far and away the most ...

“Air” belongs to Damon in terms of minutes. But giving a movie that’s basically about a gym shoe actual emotional heft, as Affleck and Convery have managed to do, is worth the weighty monologues. “He is the shoe. The shoe is him.” The eventual Chicago Bulls shooting guard utters only a single word over the film’s nearly two hours: “Hello.” “He doesn’t wear the shoe,” says Vaccaro, channeling Mr.

This is a zippy, quippy movie that will have people cheering for visionary white male capitalists.

Of course, what it means practically is that it paved the way for the rich to get richer—in a on-screen postscript before the credits, we read that Jordan makes some $400 million annually in passive income as a result of his Air Jordans deal. This is the ultimate display of morality in a movie brought to you by Amazon Studios. [explained](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZM6j8bKnks) this decision: “This is a movie about an icon, about somebody who’s so meaningful that the minute I show you somebody and tell you, ‘Hey, that’s Michael Jordan,’ you’re just going to know it isn’t.” That’s probably true, though he risked the conscious obscuring being just as distracting. The soundtrack is full of obvious ‘80s selections (Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message,” Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”) and some less obvious ones (Chaka Khan and Rufus’ “Ain’t Nobody”). Ben Affleck’s Air is not a biopic, or at least, it’s not the kind of biopic that we’re accustomed to seeing. Jordan wanted nothing to do with Nike, and then there was the extra layer of resistance that was his business-handling mother, Deloris Jordan (played here by Viola Davis, my woman king).

Damon plays the Nike exec who fought to sign Michael Jordan in this engaging story directed by co-star Affleck.

A soundtrack full of nostalgic 80s hits (by Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, REO Speedwagon, and many more) adds to the appeal. This one’s a real crowd-pleaser and a refreshingly understated experience at the cinema amidst a seas of special effects blockbusters. It’s also an odd decision to never feature Michael Jordan in this movie about the genesis of the sneaker that bears his name. But it’s 1984, and Nike is only a small player in the basketball sneaker game, with a market share dwarfed by competitors Adidas and Converse. The company plans to divest among at least three picks, but signing Jordan would eat their entire budget — something that Zen-spouting Nike CEO Phil Knight (played by director Affleck) hasn’t approved. The genesis of the Air Jordan sneaker may not seem like a must-see cinematic event, but this one comes close to soaring.

Ben Affleck's first directorial effort since 'Live by Night' stars Matt Damon as the Nike basketball guru who spearheaded a landmark celebrity endorsement ...

Unsurprisingly, it’s Deloris who brings these issues to the fore — and also cuts through them with clean, unerring logic — when she argues for a fundamental shift in the balance of power between her son and Nike, and by extension between all athletes and the companies seeking to trade on their fame. (The grubbily ancient production design is by François Audouy, the cubicle-panning cinematography by Robert Richardson.) But in some ways, the movie is also carrying on a subliminal, more subtly [nostalgic conversation with the ’90s](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-04-14/espn-netflix-michael-jordan-documentary-the-last-dance-chicago-bulls), the decade that transformed Affleck and Damon into household names and saw some of their key supporting players here first rise to prominence. Success and fame on the level of a Michael Jordan, Sonny reminds us, has a way of throwing even great accomplishments into perspective. “Air” comes by these ideas honestly and thoughtfully, and they’re rich enough that you sometimes wish Affleck and Convery had given them freer, unrulier reign, rather than shoehorning them (so to speak) into all the story’s busily, efficiently moving parts, its blue Slurpee sight gags and Adidas-skewering Hitler jokes. In ways that sometimes register more potently than the action or dialogue, “Air” is haunted by the specters of these actors’ career highs and lows; this is Tucker’s first movie in seven years. They’ve made a movie about the ravages of time, the fleeting, sometimes arbitrary nature of fame and the general rule of failure to which success proves an all-too-rare exception. Most of those vibes emanate from the company’s affable, Zen-minded CEO, Phil Knight, a wearer of track suits and spouter of Buddhist koans played by Affleck himself as the risk-averse yin to Sonny’s reckless yang. And it’s Sonny who argues that Nike, rather than dividing its annual $250,000 basketball budget among three or four lower-ranked players, should offer the whole pot to Jordan and tailor an entire shoe line to the athlete, rather than the other way around. It’s a potentially game-changing proposition — and a potentially business-killing gamble. Possessed of a keen understanding of the game and its players, he also has a gambler’s streak that loses him more than it earns. One of the pleasures of the movies is the way they can complicate and undermine the idea of history as destiny, taking unbeatable sure things and reminding us that they were once untested, unknown quantities. It’s also something of a feature-length Nike commercial, albeit a deft and entertaining one.

Is Air streaming on Amazon Prime? Here's how to watch the Ben Affleck Nike movie, and when to expect it on streaming.

This is not a hard and fast rule, but our best guess is that Air will release on Amazon Prime around mid-May 2023, possibly May 13, which will be 45 days after the movie opens in theaters. That said, Air is an Amazon Studios original movie, and we do expect that the movie will be Right now, Air is playing only in theaters, which means the only way to watch the movie is to purchase a ticket at your local movie theater. For now, the movie is only in theaters. Here’s where to watch Air and when to expect Air to stream on Amazon Prime. Affleck stars as the billionaire and former Nike CEO Phil Knight, while Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro, a Nike marketing executive in charge of expanding Nike’s presence in basketball.

Movie Review: Air, directed by Ben Affleck, follows the efforts of Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to sign Michael Jordan to the shoe contract ...

Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), who designs the Air Jordan shoe with the wild-eyed fervor of a religious zealot, is in the midst of a midlife crisis; when we first see him, he’s awkwardly skateboarding in the parking lot. He also bathes his film in pop music of the era, often with on-the-nose cues (“All I Need Is a Miracle,” “Money for Nothing,” “Time After Time,” and, of course, “Born in the USA” all make pointed appearances), while using the dreamy, New Age strains of Tangerine Dream (lifted from movies such as Risky Business, Firestarter, and Three O’Clock High) at other moments like an original score. Future transactions would no longer be just about someone’s talent but also about the intangible grace of their identity. The film thus situates the Air Jordan as a product of the runaway consumerism of the 1980s, but it also hints at a boundless, complex new world coming into view. “People like your son, people who work for a living, they don’t let us own anything,” Sonny tells Deloris when the idea is first presented, framing it as a labor-rights issue. The movie may be about timelessness, but it feels very much of its time. “It won’t be the NBA marketing my son,” Deloris predicts. “I assure you it will be the other way around.” At several dramatic points, the film uses video footage of Jordan — the real Jordan — on the basketball court and off, and re-creating those iconic moments with an actor (or, even worse, digitally adding an actor’s face to the archival Jordan’s body) would surely ring false to generations of viewers who grew up watching the superstar and who consider him (correctly) to be the greatest player ever to walk the earth. “Everyone at this table will be forgotten,” he says, noting all the executives gathered around them. But there’s a spiritual reason for it, too, and Air, Ben Affleck’s enormously entertaining corporate drama about Nike’s efforts to sign Jordan, who at the time was just a promising rookie and had not yet played a single NBA game, playfully taps into this idea. We never see the face of the actor playing Michael Jordan in Air.

Here's how to know what's fact and fiction in the new movie about the creation of Michael Jordan's iconic Nike sneakers, 'Air.'

[USA Today](https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2015/09/30/error-jordan-key-figures-still-argue-over-who-responsible-nike-deal/72884830/). Portrayed by actor Damian Young, Jordan doesn’t make an appearance until the final scenes of the film—and even then, his face isn’t shown, with almost exclusively shots of his back. By all accounts, the initial Jordan and Nike deal was unprecedented. He had his idea of what he wanted to do and he didn’t want to go with Nike, that’s for sure. “Sonny (Vaccaro) likes to take the credit. In the film, Vaccaro, a former high school basketball tournament organizer, is in charge of helping to develop the fledgling basketball division at Nike by identifying and recruiting top talent in the league for shoe deals and endorsements. In the film, Nike is portrayed as a novice company of sorts, suffering from some serious growing pains after going public, which Knight believes can be solved if they can tap into the basketball market. “He wasn’t the CEO of Nike,” Convery says, noting that he spoke with Vaccaro himself while polishing the screenplay. [NBA legend, Michael Jordan](https://time.com/5869094/michael-jordan-rap-the-last-dance/). At the time, Jordan was a soon-to-be NBA rookie ranked third in the draft, while Nike was a veritable underdog in the world of sports shoes, known more for its running sneakers than flashy basketball kicks. Neither Jordan nor Nike were the household names they are now at the time of the signing in 1984. We all know how it ended, but to be able to look at how we got there was very compelling.”

Sandy Kenyon says the new movie 'Air', starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, about how Nike recruited Michael Jordan is one of the year's best.

A great script is directed by Ben Affleck, who has a supporting role as Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. The story of how Air Jordan sneakers came into being is made remarkably compelling given that it's a story set mainly in corporate offices. The movie, about how Nike and Michael Jordan together changed the world of sports, has a score of 97% on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

New “Air” movie directed by Ben Affleck details the 1984 Nike shoe deal with Michael Jordan. It includes references to his time spent in NC.

During that scene, flashes of Jordan’s real-life career and later life flash onto the screen, including images that allude to the 1993 murder of James Jordan in Lumberton. They moved away from the state for a period while James Jordan was in the military and Deloris attended trade school, then moved back to North Carolina before leaving again for Brooklyn, New York, where Michael was born. They moved back to North Carolina, to Wilmington, in 1968. ▪ James Worthy, who played at UNC from 1979 to 1982, then went on to become the first overall pick in the 1982 NBA draft and was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers. Vaccaro replays Jordan’s shot several times in quick succession, realizing that the play was not a fluke, but rather designed for Jordan. (Fun fact: Tennon and Davis are married in real life.) ▪ Sam Perkins, who played at UNC from 1980 to 1984. During the meeting, Nike marketing executive Rob Strasser (played by Jason Bateman), suggests several possible names and projects photos of the players, including: ▪ Bob McAdoo, who played at UNC for one season, from 1971 to 1972. Jordan’s deal with Nike came after his three-year college career playing basketball at UNC-Chapel Hill, from 1981 to 1984. As Vaccaro continues to pursue the deal with Jordan, he decides — against the advice and urging of Falk — to visit Jordan’s parents, James (played by Julius Tennon) and Deloris (played by Viola Davis), at their home in Wilmington. McAdoo, who is originally from Greensboro, went on to play in the NBA, and in 1984 was playing for the Lakers.

"Air," Ben Affleck's funny, moving and surprisingly meaningful tale of how Nike came to create Air Jordan basketball shoes, might have been a real snore.

“Air” is that rare sports movie that is virtually guaranteed to appeal to both hardcore NBA fans and people who don’t know a 3-point line from a field goal (thanks, Wikipedia!). The modest but gratifying gifts of “Air” lie in its seeming effortlessness, reassuring viewers that a good movie can still be a good story, well told. Spouting his own aphorism, at one point Sonny reminds his colleagues that “you’re remembered for the rules you break.” Affleck doesn’t break rules with “Air” as much as restore them, obeying principles that have seemed mortally endangered in recent years – about sound structure, recognizably human characters, satisfying catharsis, authentic but not overreaching depth. Affleck has said in interviews that Michael Jordan had only one stipulation in the making of “Air”: that Viola Davis would play Deloris. “Air” begins in the 1980s, shortly after the company has gone public; although co-founder Phil Knight had attained a 50% market share in the athletic shoe market, in basketball he was trailing behind Converse and Adidas. “Air,” Ben Affleck’s funny, moving and surprisingly meaningful tale of how Nike came to create Air Jordan basketball shoes, might have been a real snore.