Nike exec Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) meets with Michael Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis).
If you love basketball and you want to see an in depth movie about Michael Jordan, watch Netflix’s The Last Dance. But if you love stories about high-stakes gambling, go see Ben Affleck’s Air. What Affleck gives us here isn’t a sports story. It’s a tale about business, and a wonderfully juicy one at that. Air tells the story of how Jordan’s contract with Nike nearly single-handedly transformed the middling Oregon-based company into the world’s greatest apparel empire, thanks to the story’s main characters placing big bets: on Jordan by Sonny Vaccaro, a then little-known Nike marketing executive; on Vacarro by his boss, Nike founder Phil Knight, and on Nike by Jordan’s family, particularly his mother Deloris.
As gangster Joe Coughlin, Ben Affleck perfects the art of stoicism.
The best thing that can be said about Live by Night, Ben Affleck’s third writing/directing attempt (after the infinitely better Gone Baby Gone and The Town) is that Affleck definitely looks great in an overcoat and a fedora. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, Affleck’s newest picture is a run-of-the-mill 1920s gangster piece that offers nothing new to the genre, and nothing worth watching on screen, save, of course, for that fedora, which sure suits Affleck’s square-jawed face well. Continue reading “Film Review: Live by Night“
Spinning Platters brings you two final spotlights from the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), which closed on Thursday with Chris Messina’s film Alex of Venice at the Castro, with many of the cast there for a fun Q&A. You can check out the Festival award winners here, and be sure to keep your eye out for many of these films as they are released throughout the year.
Alex of Venice (USA 2014, 87 min)
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Chris Messina in Alex of Venice.
The Mindy Project’s Chris Messina makes his directorial debut with this emotionally rich drama about the dissolution of a marriage. In the Q&A following the film, Messina cited Kramer vs. Kramer, Hannah and Her Sisters, and All the Real Girls as influencing his picture, and, indeed, all the best tonal elements of those films can be felt here. Strong performances from Mary Elizabeth Winstead as workaholic environmental attorney Alex, Katie Nehra as her more free-spirited sister, and Don Johnson as their actor father on the verge of a health crisis solidly anchor the film. Messina, as Alex’s unhappy husband George, and young Skylar Gaertner as Alex and George’s son Dakota round out the cast nicely, with Gaertner’s portrayal just as nuanced and sensitive as Justin Henry’s in Kramer vs. Kramer. A side story about Alex’s father appearing in The Cherry Orchard is a bit of a heavy-handed metaphor, but that’s just one small quibble with an otherwise excellent first feature. Continue reading “Final SFIFF Spotlights: Alex of Venice/Begin Again”
