AIR QUALITY

Opening today:

Air--Sneakers are no minor matter. The comfy footwear of choice for many of us--even those of us whose idea of exercise is a good brisk walk to the refrigerator--they seem like they should be apolitical. But almost nothing in the modern, mass-produced world is apolitical. The subject of sneakers is, alas, fraught with difficult social and economic and ethical issues, ranging from the circumstances of their production, to their pricing and the crimes to which it can give rise, to the environmental impact of their disposal.

So it was probably inevitable that sooner or later a movie would be devoted to the origin story of a famous brand of sneaker. It was less clear what director Ben Affleck and the other makers of Air, a chronicle of the beginnings of Nike's Air Jordan line, would want us to take away from their account.

The focus is on Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who scouts endorsement talent for Nike's basketball division. This being the early '80s, Adidas is king in the basketball shoe world, and Nike is a distant, unhip third to Converse, so Sonny struggles to attract big name players, especially with the anemic budget that Nike founder Phil Knight (Affleck) has allotted him.

Thus Air becomes a sort of corporate-level Horatio Alger story. Sonny's battle is on two fronts: first to convince Knight and his colleagues to let him put all of his money on the 17-year-old Michael Jordan, who hasn't even played his first NBA game, and second to convince Jordan's magisterial mother Deloris (Viola Davis) that Nike is the best place for her Adidas-loving son.

Affleck has demonstrated several times over now that he is a director of skill and panache, but also of emotional maturity. I've always suspected that if it wasn't for the elaborate fashionable contempt in which Affleck is held by many for his celebrity, his films would be hailed as the work of an important, probably Oscar-winning, American director. The fact that Nike allowed the use of their logos and products onscreen, and that Michael Jordan himself reportedly approved of the project, suggested that Air was unlikely to be deeply critical, but I went in hoping that Affleck and screenwriter Alex Convery would bring some complexity and uncertainty to the subject.

Well, at one point a character observes that most of Nike's shoes are made in Asian factories; he admits that he should feel ambivalent about this, but doesn't. It may be that Convery and Affleck are using the candor in this line to speak for the movie. Air prefers to allude to the long-term benefits to young athletes to which Jordan's deal led. Similarly, while Affleck largely plays Knight for laughs as a frustrated gnomic buffoon, a would-be sage hilariously beset with anxieties, the movie is nonetheless at pains to point out Knight's massive philanthropy. Any human toll that put him in a position to be so generous is carefully steered around.

And by that point, as an audience member I had pretty much set aside my ambivalence too, because Air is irresistible, the most entertaining movie I've seen this year. Like Moneyball, it's a sports story about the triumphs of middle-aged guys working in offices--the only kind of sports success to which most of us can remotely relate. And while it isn't as good as Moneyball, it's still gripping, funny and unaccountably compelling.

As with Elizabeth Banks in the recent Cocaine Bear, Affleck leans hard into the '80s period, both in the gleefully deployed fashions and music and cultural references and in the style of the filmmaking itself. The cinematography of the great Robert Richardson captures something of the dirty-newsprint look of an '80s flick. But the real key to the film is Convery's juicy dialogue, and the lustiness with which these actors attack it.

Having revived Ford's image in Ford v Ferrari and blown the whistle on ADM in The Informant!, Damon gets to redeem yet another corporation here as the pudgy, surly, keen-minded Sonny Vaccaro; it's his best role in a long time. Chris Tucker brings an extra sweetness to his usual fast-talking routine as Sonny's glad-handing ally Howard White, Chris Messina amusingly spews his Mamet-esque invective as Jordan's agent David Falk, and Matthew Maher has a quiet eccentric charm as shoe designer Peter Moore. As Nike Marketing Director Rob Strasser, Jason Bateman hits his laugh lines well but also brings the role an unexpected melancholy.

Except in some video footage, Michael Jordan himself is a barely-glimpsed extra here; his presence is treated rather like that of Jesus in Ben-Hur. But his camp is represented by Viola Davis, whose commanding presence settles a hush over the movie's antic tone every time she speaks. She's magnificent.

Marlon Wayans also turns up as Glenn Levering, long enough to tell Sonny the story of his attendance at a particular historical event. It seems to have been included here mainly because it's such a great story, but when it renews Sonny's resolve in his campaign, the movie is in danger of reminding us that all this is about the freaking marketing of an expensive sneaker. Several times the movie notes that a shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it. But in some contexts, a shoe is just a shoe no matter who is wearing it.

OFFICER JUDY

Opening this week:

Zootopia—The title refers to a city that looks like a theme park, with frozen tundra, desert, rainforest and other ecosystems all conveniently connected by highway exits. The inhabitants, you see, are animals—anthropomorphic, bipedal, civilized mammals of every sort, from pachyderms to rodents, living side by side.

It’s not Utopia, however. Inter-species tensions continue, especially between predator and prey species, and there are glass ceilings in certain professions. Our heroine Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), for instance, is a bunny who has internalized the high-minded idea that “Anyone can be anything,” and she wants to grow up to be a police officer, normally a job for the likes of tigers and rhinos and cape buffalo.

Through determination and resourcefulness, Judy realizes her dream, but as with many pioneers, she gets stuck with traffic duty. Before long, however, she’s caught up in a mystery involving missing predators, and develops a tense alliance with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a wily vulpine con artist.

The buddy-picture plot that ensues is surprisingly dark and noir-ish at times, and in some ways Zootopia is one of the least sentimental Disney movies I can remember. It’s fraught with unmistakable racial and class subtext, and although it has the struggling underdog protagonist standard to animated features, it honestly grapples with the complex and painful realities behind the believe-in-yourself platitudes of the genre. Thus, the movie’s ultimately positive conclusions feel hard-won, and all the more uplifting.

Zootopia is delightful, but I did have a complaint: the freakin’ 3-D. At least at the screening I saw, it dimmed and washed out the images, and added not one effect that I thought was worth the eyestrain. See it in old-fashioned 2-D.

In case anybody still cares, a few notes on the Oscars:

It was gratifying for me to see the number one movie on my Top Ten list, Tom McCarthy’s low-key powerhouse Spotlight, win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. It was even more gratifying to see the great, 87-year-old Ennio Morricone, who had never won an Oscar for Best Original Score (he won an honorary Oscar in 2007), take the statue for his superb music for The Hateful Eight. It makes up, sort of, for Morricone not even being nominated for his greatest score, for 1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sara.

But most of the satisfactions of this year’s surprisingly enjoyable Oscar show had little to do with the nominees, and more to do with the host. Interest in the Oscars was high this year, less because of any particular suspense as to who would win, and more because of what the great Chris Rock would say and do. While the telecast was glacially paced and overlong as usual, Rock, who had not too memorably hosted the show in 2005, brilliantly managed his tricky duties this year.

What made it a tricky gig was, of course, the controversy over the lack of racial diversity among this year’s nominees. Some African-American industry notables had boycotted the show, and Rock himself had been urged to decline the job.

His approach was marvelously disarming. From the very first line of his monologue, he attacked the subject straightforwardly, good-naturedly and in all directions—his jokes were at the expense of the Academy, the boycotters, and himself, and they ranged from daringly tasteless to thoughtful. A high percentage of them were genuinely funny, and all of them put the controversy into perspective, without disrespect to the validity of the boycott’s grievance.

Perhaps most amusingly, however, was that Rock wouldn’t let it go. I expected he’d try to dispense with the subject with a few jokes at the beginning of his monologue and then move on to a business-as-usual Oscars, but bit after bit kept coming back to it. The show was so single-mindedly devoted to the controversy that, ironically, it probably brought attention to racial inequities in Hollywood in a way that no number of minority nominations could have, deserved though they might be. And it seems pretty unlikely that this would have been the case if Rock hadn’t hosted.

A couple of disappointments: Names eyebrow-raising-ly omitted from the “In Memoriam” segment included Abe Vigoda, Geoffrey Lewis, George Gaynes, Tony Burton and Pat Harrington, Jr. Also, while the brilliant Mark Rylance entirely deserved to win Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies, I still found it slightly disappointing—I wanted to see Stallone win for Creed. But I suppose it’s in the spirit of the original Rocky, where even though he didn’t win, Rocky triumphed just because he got to the Main Event.

LEGO BIG OR GO HOME

Opening today at Harkins Shea:

A Lego Brickumentary—Beyond question, this documentary makes a convincing case that Legos, the little interlocking plastic bricks and the infinite variety of playsets they’ve inspired, are among the most culturally influential toys in the world. But as far as I can recall, I never had Legos as a kid. I can’t even remember ever playing with them at another kid’s house.

So, as with last year’s The Lego Movie, I didn’t have the same direct emotional, nostalgic connection to the subject matter as many people of the last few generations. I watched this Brickumentary as an outsider.

Even from outside, however, it’s an interesting story. Narrated by a Lego “minifig” voiced by Jason Bateman, the movie sketches the history of the line, which originated in Denmark in the late ‘40s—the corporate headquarters is still in Billund—then goes on to wander the world, showing the various subcultures and sub-subcultures that have sprung up around “BrickCons”: The AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego), KFOLs (Kid Fans), and their terminology, like BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece). My favorite bit of this slang was a “1x5,” here explained as a hot chick; as much a rarity at Lego gatherings as a brick of those dimensions.

We’re also shown the uses to which the bricks have been put in science, art, architecture, filmmaking and therapy. And we get interviews with celebrity AFOLs like Ed Sheeran, Trey Parker and Dwight Howard.

Slickly directed by Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge, A Lego Brickumentary is watchable and pleasant, driven along by colorful Lego animations and a fine, sprightly score by John Jennings Boyd. Parts of it are intriguing, parts are funny, here and there—as when we see an autistic kid’s enthusiasm for Lego—it’s even a little bit touching.

Overall, though, the film has a somehow impersonal feel, almost like a string of human-interest stories from a TV newscast, edited together. Lego is not, perhaps, a trivial subject, but this movie feels like the corporate official story, and as a result, I regret to say, all in all it’s just another brick in the wall.

ON THE TASTELESS AND THE FLIGHTLESS

Opening today, for your post-turkey-dinner diversion:

Horrible Bosses 2—Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day return as the three numbskulls who, back in the 2011 hit, plotted to murder their vile bosses, with wacky results. This time they’ve gone into business together, only to have an odious corporate bigshot (Christoph Waltz) bamboozle them into fresh ruin. So they switch from murder to kidnapping, this time targeting the bigshot’s equally odious but much stupider son (a pretty funny Chris Pine).

Bateman is the relatively sensible kvetcher of the group. Sudeikis is a buoyantly optimistic, easily distracted lecher, and Day is a well-meaning simpleton. The principal dynamic of the comedy is that they all jabber away at the same time, getting carried away with whatever imbecilic notion occurs to them, heedlessly blurting out inappropriateness ranging from white-boy racial anxiety to each other’s names over their walkie-talkies while they’re in the midst of a felony.

The absurdly twisting plot pulls in characters from the original—Jennifer Aniston as a sex-addicted dentist, Jamie Foxx as a “crime consultant” and Kevin Spacey as a venomous former boss—but the director, Sean Anders, and the gaggle of writers are not carry-overs from HB the First. I confess I missed that film, but on its own terms I can tell you that HB2 is raunchy, coarse, laborious and heavy-handed. Allowing for the context of the different styles of humor and filmmaking in their respective periods, it isn’t a bit less moronic than a Three Stooges short. But I can laugh at the Stooges, and I’d be lying if I tried to claim I didn’t laugh a fair amount at these three latter-day stooges as well.

Penguins of Madagascar—This spin-off from the Madgascar movies also made me laugh—quite a bit more, really. But unlike Horrible Bosses 2, this one earns its laughs from visual precision and imaginative verbal wit.

The stars are a quartet of zoo penguins who regard themselves as an elite covert team. They run afoul of a mad octopus (well voiced by John Malkovich) who, resentful of the popularity of penguins in menageries worldwide, has a nefarious scheme to abduct them all. The tale is organized like a Bond film, with an action-packed prologue and hilarious and exciting episodes in exotic locales ranging from Fort Knox to Venice to Rio to Shanghai. I was sort of disappointed that it didn’t have an expressionistic title sequence, set to a pop song.

It’s also possible that the finale, set in New York, is a penguin-feather-width longer and more involved than necessary. But this is quibbling—Penguins of Madagascar is one of the funnier films I’ve seen this year.