April 2023

 

AIR  (2023)

     Every sport has a cadre of insiders who, though little known to the general public, play an integral role in the game’s development, promotion and recruitment of talent. Last year’s underappreciated “Hustle,” starring Adam Sandler, looked at the scouting world of basketball. Now, a real-life basketball insider, promoter and shoe executive Sonny Vaccaro, takes center stage in “Air,” which tells the well-known (at least to sports fans) story of Nike’s wooing of Michael Jordan and the creation of the most popular athletic shoe.

     Matt Damon plays Vaccaro, whose job is to save the struggling basketball division of Nike, which in the early 1980s, was still seen as only a running shoe company. While others in the firm are focusing on lesser lights among the 1984 NBA draft picks, Vaccaro, a gambler at heart, puts his job on the line to convince Jordan and his business-minded mother (a scene-stealing Viola Davis) to pass on the bigger companies, Adidas and Converse, and commit to a Nike shoe deal.

     The highly entertaining film, directed by Ben Affleck (who also plays Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight) never takes itself too seriously—it is after all just a shoe—lacing the drama with humorously profane, snappy dialogue filled with inside basketball references and the cut-throat world of athlete endorsements.

      The script, by first-timer Alex Convery, who worked on the ESPN documentary on Vaccaro, is essentially a series of conversations Sonny has with the zen-like Phil; his worn-down boss (Jason Bateman); Jordan’s despicable agent (Chris Messina); his supportive co-worker (the always hilarious Chris Tucker) and Davis’ steely Mrs. Jordan.

    The film momentarily soars when shoe engineer Peter Moore (a memorable Matthew Maher) explains his passion for creating shoes as he starts working on the Air Jordan model and again when Vaccaro offers an eloquent prediction of Jordan’s future. But Affleck and his buddy Damon aren’t reaching for great art here; instead, they’ve memorialized on film one of the most important business deals in recent history along with a heartfelt tribute to an amazing athlete.

  

STORM WARNING (1951)

    This isn’t the usual 1950s crime picture—especially when one considers the cast, headlined by Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan and Doris Day. Typically, with these three on screen, the “storm warning” would be romantic entanglements, but this movie deals with much stronger stuff.

     Rogers plays Marsha Mitchell, a feisty model who, while traveling on a bus to Los Angeles with her manager, ditches him during a stop at Rock Point (a stand-in for Corona, Calif., where it was shot), a small town where her sister (Day) lives.

     Instead of a touching reunion, Rogers witnesses the killing of an out-of-town reporter after he’s taken from the local jail by men wearing white robes and hoods.

    Based on the power the Ku Klux Klan had in Corona in the 1920s, the film, written by Daniel Fuchs (Oscar winner for “Love Me or Leave Me”) and Richard Brooks (just starting a directing career that would include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Elmer Gantry”), pulls few punches in its evisceration of the Klan and how it drew in ordinary, seemingly respectable citizens. Though, pointedly, the film avoids mentioning the KKK’s role in the lynching of and discrimination against African Americans. In those days, Hollywood always hedged its bets.

    Reagan plays the town’s prosecutor, seemingly the only man in town bothered by the KKK’s dominance, who is determined to find someone to flip on these hate-mongers who have bullied everyone in town. The outsider Marsha is his best chance, but she’s conflicted by the fact that her sister’s new husband (Steve Cochran) has joined the Klan.

      All three stars bring an intense sincerity to the picture; at one point, when Reagan abruptly shows up at a rally, he casually tells a man holding a child, “she oughta be home in bed.” And Rogers gives one of her most down-to-earth performances even as she’s playing a fashion model.

    Hollywood veteran Stuart Heisler, who started with Mack Sennett in 1913, tells this frightening story without the hysteria and over-reach that anti-Communist pictures of the era reek of. Though he mostly worked in B-pictures, Heisler directed some fine films in the 1940s and 50s, including “The Glass Key” (1942), “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (1947) with Susan Hayward and “The Star” (1952) with Bette Davis.

     The same year as “Storm Warning,” Heisler directed an equally unlikely picture, “Journey into Light,” in which a minister (Sterling Hayden) gives up his calling in a crisis of faith. Heisler seemed to have been Warners’ go-to filmmaker for controversial subjects.

     The studio had previously, though tentatively, taken on the KKK in a 1937 Humphrey Bogart film, “Black Legion,” but didn’t name the group. “Storm Warning” is the closest Hollywood came to repudiating the propaganda of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” a cinematic masterpiece and an abomination.

     It’s unfortunate that “Storm Warning,” recently restored by the Film Foundation, has rarely been screened over the past half century.

  

SHOWING UP (2023)

    I’m not sure what to make of the fourth collaboration between writer-director Kelly Reichardt and actress Michelle Williams, which trails an insecure sculptor trying to make her mark in a community of artists.

    Like a short story in a literary magazine, “Showing Up” has little plot or exposition and the main character, Lizzy (Williams), despite her dedication to her art, possesses almost no control over her own life, while competing with dismissive and pretentious strivers. She’s such an empty vessel that an injured pigeon nearly takes over her life,

    In her day job, Lizzy works at an art school, serving as the secretary-assistant to her mother (Maryann Plunkett), who seems to be an administrator. (Nothing much in the film is explained.) While her mother treats her like just another employee, her father (Judd Hirsch) barely listens to what she says. And fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau, Oscar nominated for “The Whale”), who is Lizzy’s irresponsible landlord and off-and-on friend, only notices Lizzy when she needs something.

    Reichardt and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (“Emma.”) give considerable screen time to the small clay figures of women in various poses that Lizzy is working on for an upcoming gallery show. These creations clearly have importance to the director, but I wanted more from Lizzy: a decision, a change, a reckoning. That isn’t this movie’s mission.

    I also couldn’t get over that Williams, though her hair is cut to make her seem younger, is 43 years old; I would have appreciated the character much more if it had been played by someone in their twenties, an age when most are struggling to find themselves. 

      Reichardt has been a critics’ darling since she and Williams teamed up to make the touching indie, “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), but, as glad as I am that she’s able to get her films released, I wish she’d stop offering appetizers and dig into the main course.

  

BEST SELLERS (2021)

    Traditionally, British actors never retire. Yet few have sustained a run like Michael Caine. The 90-year-old started as a film actor 67 years ago and has been a star for 57 of those years.

    After playing one of the leaders of a British troop fighting off local Africans in “Zulu” (1964) and an amorous spy in “The Ipcress File” (1965), Caine became an international star in the title role of “Alfie,” playing an unapologetic (and incredibly sexist) playboy who enjoys the “swingin’ 60s” life in London. The title song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David was huge hit and Caine’s performance earned the actor the first of six Oscar nominations.

    Highlighting his astonishingly resilient career are performances as a brutal vigilante in “Get Carter” (1971); a cynical journalist in “Pulp” (1972); opposite Laurence Olivier in the two-man play “Sleuth” (1972)—he took the Olivier role in the 2007 remake; as Peachy alongside Sean Connery in “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975); a rather kinky doctor in “Dressed to Kill” (1980); a drunken professor in “Educating Rita” (1984); a man who falls for his wife’s sister in “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986); an abortion doctor in “The Cider House Rules” (1999), a disillusioned journalist in Vietnam in “The Quiet American” (2002); Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s protective butler in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy and the rebellious Jasper in “Children of Men” (2006). That’s just the “best of” from this unassuming, understated performer. He won supporting acting Oscars for “Hannah” and “Cider House.”

     “Best Sellers” offers a perfect old man role: Caine plays Harris Shaw, a misanthropic writer who, after one best-selling novel, drops out of sight until the daughter of his original publisher drags him out of his house and publishes his most recent work of fiction. The film centers on the relationship between stressed-out Lucy (Aubrey Plaza), who needs a best-seller to save her publishing house, and the alcoholic Shaw, who is nothing short of a jerk. After they drop the usual college-community writers’ circuit for a tour of pubs, Shaw becomes a star on social media for simply shouting “It’s all Bullshite!” to cheering young people.

    The movie doesn’t move beyond its one-note plot but I was entertained by watching Caine’s Shaw act like a jackass and Plaza’s Lucy (an indie film star after “Ingrid Goes West” and “Emily the Criminal”) learn to loosen up. 

     In just the last few years, Caine has starred as the brains behind a collection of elderly bank robbers in “King of Thieves” (2018), a modern-day Fagin in “Twist” (2021) and, again for Nolan, in a small role in “Tenet” (2020).  

    These may be the great actor’s final roles as he had back surgery last year and now struggles to walk. But after nearly seven decades of screen performances, longer than almost every star in film history, I wouldn’t count Caine out yet.

  

THE LOST KING (2023)

      Among the most maligned figures in history, Richard III, according to many recent investigations, may have not been the ogre painted by William Shakespeare in his 1594 play. More than 100 years after he died in battle on Bosworth Field, possibly offering his “kingdom for a horse,” the 32-year-old king was portrayed by the great playwright as a murderous megalomaniac who brought dishonor to the crown.

     The most recent film by Stephen Frears, one of Britain most accomplished directors, follows the real-life journey of Philippa Langley as she becomes obsessed with finding the final resting spot of Richard and restore his reputation.

     Unhappy in her sales job, Philippa (played with quiet resolve by Sally Hawkins), after seeing a local production of the Bard’s play, starts reading up on Richard, joins a group of quirky true believers obsessed with the king and imagines seeing the “son of York” outside her home, eventually speaking with him (Harry Lloyd plays both the “vision” and the actor in the play).   

     While the film tends to meander and the device of her speaking with “Richard” grows tiresome, Frears and his screenwriters (Langley herself, Michael James and actor Steve Coogan, who also plays Philippa’s ex-husband) never lose sight that the film is about Philippa, not the 15^th Century monarch.

      One of the key themes of the film is how women continue to be marginalized by men in power.  Philippa is someone who has been underappreciated all her life, even in her great triumph. Hawkins, who was nominated for an Oscar for playing a similarly unassuming character in “The Shape of Water” (2017), has rarely failed to deliver a believable performance since her breakthrough in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008). She was also memorable in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” (2013), scoring a supporting actress Oscar nomination.

    The 81-year-old Frears was a British television director until the 1980s when “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), with a young Daniel Day-Lewis, and “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) put him on the list of top filmmakers. Among his best works are “High Fidelity” (2000), “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002), “The Grifters” (1990) and “The Queen” (2006), the last two earning him best director Oscar nominations.

  

HOLLYWOOD STORY (1951)

     I recently started exploring the surprisingly rich treasure trove of movies to be found on YouTube. I never imagined how many full-length features (occasionally first-rate prints) could be found hidden amongst the music videos and sports highlights.

    Along with watching “Mickey,” a Mabel Normand vehicle from 1918 whose popularity was second only to “The Birth of a Nation” for many years; the directing debut of Josef von Sternberg, “The Salvation Hunters;” and a handful of Clara Bow silents directed by Victor Fleming and Frank Lloyd, I stumbled on a film I’d never heard of about the movie business.

       While it doesn’t stand with classic industry pictures such as “A Star Is Born” (1935), “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1949), “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) or modern takes “The Player” (1992) and “Mank” (2021), “Hollywood Story” is thoroughly entertaining even when its coincidences grow more ludicrous.

     Richard Conte, one of the eras most underrated actors, plays Larry O’Brien, a successful New York filmmaker who is looking for a Los Angeles movie studio to take over. His publicist friend (Jim Backus, who also provides the unnecessary narration) takes him to an abandoned studio lot where the long-time caretaker gives them a tour.

     O’Brien’s interest is peaked when he’s shown the long-deserted office of silent director Franklin Ferrara, who was murdered in that very room in 1929. He immediately decides to not only make a movie about Ferrara’s unsolved murder, but to solve the crime, a decision that makes everyone around him unhappy.

     First, O’Brien’s producing partner (Fred Clark) forcefully demands he drop the film project and then a young woman (Julie Adams) begs him to give it up. She’s the daughter of the woman who was both the star of Ferrara’s silents and his paramour. Also, the detective who originally worked the case (Richard Egan) warns O’Brien to back off.

   But the director laughs off the doubters—he displays an arrogant confidence not unlike when Conte plays tough-guy assassins. In fact, he pulls Ferrara’s one-time writing partner (a very quirky Henry Hull) out of his hermit-like existence and convinces him to write the script for the new picture.

    Like “Sunset Blvd.,” made the year before, a few silent stars play themselves, including Francis X. Bushman (“Ben-Hur”), Helen Gibson (star of many Westerns and Hoot Gibson’s wife) and Betty Blythe (a 1920s sex symbol who starred in “She” and “The Queen of Sheba”). Ramping up the verisimilitude are many scenes shot around L.A. and Hollywood, including a scene where the characters visit the set of a Joel McCrea film.

    Surprisingly, the director is William Castle, who later became famous for his horror thrillers, including “The Tingler,” “House on Haunted Hill” and “Mr. Sardonicus.” But before he became famous for his creepy horror, he made about 30 low-budget crime pictures and Westerns for Columbia, including the Robert Mitchum film “When Strangers Marry” (1944).

  

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 (2023)

    Since the mid-1980s, Keanu Reeves has been part of the Hollywood landscape: He was in his early 20s when made his mark as part of the morally challenged teen gang in “River’s Edge” and then, three years later, became a full-fledged star with the slacker comedy “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

     In the 1990s, “Speed” and “The Matrix” raised Reeves’ profile, but he never seemed interested in becoming more than a stoic, deep-voiced action star (though “The Lake House” should have opened the door to more opportunities).

    In 2014, at age 50, he found another hit franchise, playing the taciturn hit man, John Wick, the invention of screenwriter Derek Kolstad, whose complicated relationship with his former employer leaves a boatload of dead bodies around the world.

    I skipped parts two and three, but the final chapter, confirms that I missed nothing. Surrounding by opulent settings and sarcastic enemies and facing impossible odds, Wick outkills every world-class assassin recruited by the bad guys.

    Among the ridiculous set pieces in this new film is a long shootout as Wick and his opponents drive around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And through it all, not a single policeman shows up. Same goes for an extensive gunbattle in a hip, crowded dance club, where the partiers keep dancing despite a hail of bullets.

     Making sure there’s no connection to reality, Wick’s most accomplished rival is Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind assassin.

    Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick repeat their roles as Wick allies from the previous chapters as does Laurence Fishburne, who also supported Reeves in the “Matrix” pictures. They bring some levity to the story, but, overall, this foolishness Is played with the seriousness of a Eugene O’Neill tragedy.

   

 

PHOTOS:

Matt Damon and Viola Davis in “Air.” (Amazon Studios)

Ginger Rogers under assault by the KKK in “Storm Warning.”  (Warner Bros.)

Michael Caine as a writer in “Best Sellers.”  (Screen Media Films)

Richard Conte plays a director in “Hollywood Story.”  (Universal International Pictures)