![]() ![]() Unfortunately for Sonny, being a disrupter means facing opposition from those content with the status quo – including his boss, the cantankerous CEO Phil Knight (a red-haired Affleck) the by-the-books VP of marketing Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and Jordan's misanthropic, hard-bargaining agent David Falk (Chris Messina), who doesn't even want his client to take a meeting with Nike. Instead of spending its budget on signing multiple new basketball stars, Sonny wants Nike to go all-in on Jordan. After replaying a VHS tape of the athlete's game-winning shot at the 1982 NCAA Championships, he decides the company has to break traditions and make an offer the other brands won't. Sonny is positioned as a "disrupter" who sees "greatness" in Jordan at a time when few others do. (We know this because he says, "I'm willing to bet my career on Michael Jordan.") This is especially true for Sonny, the longtime Nike salesman who's decided to bet his career on trying to secure the Chicago Bulls' NBA draft pick Michael Jordan for an unprecedented sneaker deal. If you work at the giant corporation that is Nike at that time, that's a problem. 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. It's nothing more than a craven exercise in capitalist exaltation. (Interestingly, the faceless actor playing Jordan is only seen from behind and mutters just a handful of words throughout the entire film.)īut for all that Don Draperesque spin, Air really is crass. It's set up as an affirmation of Black Excellence writ large, of a budding superstar demanding, via his sharp-witted mother Deloris (Viola Davis), he is paid his worth in a business known for exploiting its athletes, especially its Black ones. It's imagined as a classic American tale of ambition and a singular vision, in the form of the underestimated salesman Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon). ![]() 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). OK, that's the crass way of describing it the film's creators would undoubtedly characterize their aims as being more "inspiring" than that. 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. 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. Over the years, there have been plenty of examinations of the Air Jordan brand's fraught success and influence, including a 2018 documentary, Unbanned: The Legend of AJ1. It renewed hand-wringing over American consumerism and " Black-on-Black" crime. The Air Jordan line was a culture-shifting juggernaut, impacting not just the business of sports but fashion, celebrity, hip-hop, and street culture for decades to come. In 1984, a young Michael Jordan signed what was then the NBA's most lucrative sneaker deal with Nike.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |