Air: Welcome back to the director's chair Ben Affleck. Your sturdy craftsmanship was missed. Air is a rousing behind-the-scenes sports drama a la Moneyball that uses slick pacing, sharp dialogue that's peppered with amusing zingers and an ensemble cast of tremendous actors giving magnetic performances to make a fact-based story a whole lot more exciting than it should be. The story here is about Nike's pursuit of Michael Jordan shortly after he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls in 1984 and the groundbreaking Air Jordan deal he signed that has made him and Nike billions of dollars since it was signed. The bulk of the film follows Nike's top basketball talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) as he tries to convince his bosses (Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker) and the CEO (Affleck) at Nike to put their entire basketball budget for that year into signing Jordan and eventually, Jordan's parents (Viola Davis, Julius Tennon) and agent (Chris Messina) to sign an endorsement deal with Nike over Converse and Jordan's expected choice of Addias.
The constant stream of basketball, basketball shoe and Nike revenue stream shop talk is made palatable by how grounded every character feels. Every person's demands and concerns come from a totally reasonable place and their reactions at every step of the process feel true to where their characters are at mentally and emotionally at that moment-including the blatantly dramatized stuff like Vaccaro giving an inspiring, superhumanly eloquent speech that ultimately sways Jordan to sign with Nike at their final pitch meeting at the company's Oregon headquarters. This level of honesty and respect for the players involved makes being in their company very pleasant, which establishes an investment level in them that is very rare achieved by an upbeat biopic.
Asking the viewer to buy that Nike was a scrappy underdog company on the grounds of their basketball shoe business being the 3rd biggest in the world is a preposterous sales pitch that actively threatens to derail this movie. Despite its valiant saboteur efforts, that crash never occurs. Air is so well-executed and entertaining on the whole that its questionable framing of "adversity" for a corporate entity that was already ascending at that time becomes more of an amusing thing to think about or discuss than a legitimate hinderance to its quality. Now let's hope that Air opens the door for another great untold story in the world of basketball shoe endorsements: How New Balance was able to sign Kawhi Leonard at a time where no other NBA star would be caught dead wearing their sneakers.
Grade: B+
Renfield: Universal killing their planed "Dark Universe" after the catastrophic failure of 2017's The Mummy has opened the door for diverse takes on their large roster of monster IP. Dracula is the latest character to get a new spin as Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War) decided to tell this classic story from the perspective of the Count's long-suffering familiar Robert Montague Renfield and make it a comedy action horror movie about Renfield's desire to end his toxic relationship with Dracula after a hundred or so years of service. For the most part, Renfield's twist on the Dracula story works. Framing the dynamic between Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) as manipulative and abusive is an inspired creative touch that the film mines well for both comedy and drama, giving Renfield the abilities of superhuman strength and speed after he eats bugs leads to some wild action scenes loaded with great moments of dark humor and splattertastic kills that make impressive use of practical gore/blood and Cage's awesome take on Dracula is partly hilarious, partly horrifying and always riveting to watch .
The plot's a bit too busy for such a short movie-there's an entire subplot involving a powerful New Orleans crime syndicate (led by Shoreh Aghdashloo as the imposing boss and Ben Schwartz in a completely against-type turn as her idiot cokehead son who claims to be an enforcer, but never pulls the trigger himself) and Awkwafina as the cop investigating them after they killed her father and that leads to some wonky pacing and abrupt tonal shifts that took me out of the film for brief stretches. At the same time, those threads also directly lead to many of the best gags and B-movie moments in the movie-which perfectly highlights the dilemma Renfield creates for itself with its attempts to be a funny, campy, sweet, creepy, gritty, hyperviolent and somewhat emotional version of a story that's been adapted dozens of times on screen alone since Bram Stoker's novel was published in 1897. Some fine-tuning of its surprisingly vast collection ingredients would've definitely helped making its balancing act more cohesive, but it's a fun movie nonetheless that's worth a watch for anybody that's looking for a different take on Dracula or just wants to watch spend 90 minutes watching a funny, gory B-movie.
Grade: B
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: How to Blow Up a Pipeline is so close to being a great movie. The moral implications of its plot are murky and fascinating as the film dares to ask the audience if acts of terrorism against the corporations that are helping expedite climate change are justifiable on the grounds of self-defense on behalf of the human race and telling this story through the eyes of a group of young people (Ariela Barer-who also co-wrote the script with director Daniel Goldhaber and Jordan Sjol, Sasha Lane, Kristine Froseth, Forrest Goodluck, Lukas Gage, Jayme Lawson, Jake Weary, Marcus Scribner) from all over the United States that gather in the shadows to plan and execute the destruction of an oil pipeline construction in rural Texas captures the angry millennial/Gen Z voices that have been calling for radical action on this issue after generations of indifference from politicians and civilians alike. The problem is that despite its heavy, thorny connection to the real world, Goldhaber is still trying to make a fictionalized thriller here and in that area, he comes up short. Most maddening of all, it's a lone creative decision that prevents How to Blow Up a Pipeline from sharing the urgency that its characters act with. By choosing to cut to a flashback right before or after a key/dangerous moment in the present, Goldhaber detonates a string of IED's to the simmering tension that is inherently baked into the plot. While these flashbacks are key for contextualizing what lead each character to potentially risk their lives or face jail time in order to destroy some oil infrastructure, deploying them at the moments they did provides the film with unearned, unjustifiable breathers. A piece of art with a true anarchist spirit like this should be a suffocatingly relentless experience and when it consistently backs away from being that it becomes a much more comfortable watch than it should be.
Grade: B
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