Aurelia Butler

“Air” tells the origin story of the iconic brand, but it’s long had a hold on Hollywood, from “Do the Right Thing” to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”In “Air,” the new biographical sports drama about Nike’s 1984 effort to land an endorsement deal with then-N.B.A. rookie Michael Jordan, the Air Jordan is the sneaker holy grail. Designed by the eccentric genius Peter Moore, the sleek, stylish basketball shoe seems not so much created as discovered — as if, Moore says in the film, “it’s always been here,” much the way Michelangelo found his sculptures “already complete within the marble block.”The film, directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of how the Air Jordan came to be. If anything, the movie undersells the Air Jordan’s pop cultural significance: Almost as soon as the sneaker was released, it become a phenomenon, not only raising the ceiling for shoe sales but also redefining the very limits of footwear success. In the four decades since its debut, the Air Jordan has continued to thrive: Jordan Brand, now a subsidiary of Nike, earned more than $5 billion in sales in 2022. Retro Air Jordan releases often sell out in minutes, with aftermarket demand routinely driving resale prices into four figures and beyond.Before its reverent screen treatment in “Air,” the Air Jordan already had an important place in movie history, as the unheralded star — sometimes central, sometimes lurking in the background — of countless motion pictures. To better understand how the shoe’s role in pop culture has evolved over the years, we looked back at some of its most notable big-screen appearances.1989‘Do the Right Thing’In a famous scene in Spike Lee’s Brooklyn-set “Do the Right Thing,” the chippy Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) is looking fresh in a clean pair of Air Jordan 4s — until a run-in with a boorish local gentrifier (John Savage) leaves them lamentably scuffed. “You stepped on my brand-new white Air Jordans I just bought!” Buggin Out howls in outrage.It’s an unforgivable affront, and one any sneakerhead knows all too well: Like a dent in a new car, a scuff is hard to come back from. And as the scene makes amusingly clear, a brand-new pair of Jordans isn’t cheap — even in 1989. “How much did you pay for those, man?” a friend asks, indignant on Buggin’s behalf. Other pals chime in: “A hundred bucks! American dollars! A hundred and eight with tax!”This scene quickly achieved a kind of immortality among sneaker collectors, and in 2017, Jordan Brand paid tribute to the film with a special-edition release. The exclusive Jordan 4s were designed to look exactly like the ones Buggin Out wore — complete with replica scuff.1996‘Space Jam’For Jordan’s much-anticipated screen debut, it was only reasonable that His Airness should don an exclusive set of kicks. “Space Jam” — in which Jordan, playing himself, helps Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes defeat the evil alien Nerdlucks on the court — saw the unveiling of the Air Jordan 11 in an exclusive white, black and purple colorway, featured prominently throughout the film’s climactic game.Although the movie came out in 1996, at what was arguably the height of Jordan’s N.B.A. career, the shoe was not made available until 2000, when it instantly became a collector’s item. (It was rereleased in 2009 and again in 2016.) To this day, the Space Jam Jordan remains one of the most beloved editions of the popular silhouette — and the film remains one of the most enduring love letters to the beauty of the shoe.1998‘He Got Game’Spike Lee had deep ties with Nike going back to 1986 when he played Mars Blackmon in his debut feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” later reprising the role in a series of TV commercials for the Air Jordan. When he set out to make “He Got Game,” he leveraged that connection, managing to secure a pair of then-unreleased Jordan 13s months before they were available to the public or even worn by Jordan himself on the court.Denzel Washington stars as Jake Shuttlesworth, a convict offered a chance for a commuted life sentence if he can persuade his estranged son, Jesus (Ray Allen), one of the country’s top high school basketball prospects, to enroll at the governor’s alma mater. Shortly after being let out on work release, Jake heads to a sneaker store, where the clerk (Avery Glymph) immediately shows off the latest Jordan model. “I was all about Jordans, and to have those shoes in my hands, knowing I was like the first person to hold them, was kind of cool,” Glymph told Andscape magazine in 2019.2013‘White House Down’The Air Jordan’s appeal is so democratic that in the action blockbuster “White House Down,” even the leader of the free world wears them. Jamie Foxx, as President James Sawyer, dons a pair of Air Jordan 4s in the fan-favorite Fire Red colorway, using them to sneak past armed terrorists during an attempted kidnapping and violent White House takeover. (“Get your hands off my Jordans!” Sawyer bellows, as one tenacious bad guy wrestles with him on the floor.) It’s a small appearance, but one that makes clear the Jordan’s ascendancy from basketball shoe to streetwear staple to common accessory with formal tailoring.2016‘Kicks’When Brandon (Jahking Guillory), a 15-year-old sneakerhead of limited means, lucks into a coveted pair of Air Jordan 1s for pennies on the dollar, they become his most prized possession, lifting his spirits and imbuing him with newfound confidence. He’s so in love with the shoes that he’s reluctant to do anything in them, sitting out a pickup game for fear they’ll get mussed. “They’re called Jordans,” his friend teases him. “He played basketball!”“Kicks,” an indie drama from the director Justin Tipping, follows Brandon as he tries to track down his Air Jordans after they’re stolen by gangsters, an adventure that puts him in danger. The film shows how desperately a kid like Brandon can pine after Jordans, and how Jordans can come to mean much more than footwear. “They’re not just shoes,” Brandon asserts at one point, and the film compellingly demonstrates that truth.2018‘Uncle Drew’The goofy sports satire “Uncle Drew” stars Dallas Mavericks point guard Kyrie Irving as the eponymous elderly basketball legend, a character he played in several popular Pepsi Max commercials in the early 2010s. But the movie is really about Dax (Lil Rel Howery), an amateur basketball coach with lofty aspirations who is struggling to make his sports dreams come true.Dax works a day job at Foot Locker, where he’s prevailed upon by his team’s vain and entitled star player, Casper (Aaron Gordon), to use his insider connections to buy every player a matching set of Jordan 11s. It’s a staggering expense he can barely afford, and it fails to prevent Casper from ditching his team for a rival’s soon afterward. Interestingly, the sneaker itself is the rereleased Space Jam Jordan 11 from 2016, drawing a connection between Irving’s Uncle Drew and the classic Michael Jordan film.2018‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’The single most iconic screen Jordan since “Space Jam” arrived in the animated superhero flick “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” The new Spider-Man Miles Morales (the voice of Shameik Moore) wears a pair of Air Jordan 1s in the original Chicago colorway, playfully loose, laces untied. (That is remarked upon so often that it becomes a running joke.) The sneakers are variously lingered over, zoomed in on and even featured prominently on the movie’s poster. The focus brought new attention to the classic sneaker, and introduced a generation of viewers to a shoe whose original heyday came before many of them were born. To commemorate the film, Jordan Brand released a special edition Jordan 1 with a distinctive webbed pattern, known as the Spider-Man Origin Story. More

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a thriller rooted in a timely fear: We do not know how the future will see us.A group of young people sit around a dilapidated living room. They’re on couches, on chairs, on the floor. The lovers among them are nestled close. People are drinking from red Solo cups. Someone has a flask. A joint is circulating. There’s laughter and passionate debate and easy alternation between the two. With the sound turned off, the scene would be so familiar — just young adults, relaxing — that you would never guess the question they’re working through together: Are we terrorists? Do we feel like terrorists?“Of course I feel like a [expletive] terrorist!” one young man says, laughing. “We’re blowing up a goddamn pipeline!”No viewer will be surprised to hear this. It’s right there in the movie’s title: “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” But the man himself seems shocked, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. He and the film’s other main characters are hiding in an abandoned house in West Texas. They plan to strap homemade explosives to an oil pipeline the next day, hoping to reveal the industry’s fragility, encourage more ecosabotage and ultimately make fossil-fuel extraction untenable. “They’re going to call us revolutionaries,” one young woman suggests, waving the joint for effect. “Game changers.” Not so, another counters. “They’re going to call us terrorists. Because we’re doing terrorism.”The talk turns to history and the way tactics considered beyond the pale are often played down in retrospect. The Boston Tea Party — weren’t they terrorists, intentionally destroying key economic materials for political purposes? Martin Luther King Jr. was on an F.B.I. watch list; today he’s an American hero. Someone suggests that having the government call you a terrorist might mean you’re doing something right. Someone else suggests that when terrorism “works,” the forces of authority just lie and say change came entirely via “passive, nonviolent, kumbaya” actions. Someone argues that, hey, they’re not going to hurt anyone, to which someone else objects — sure they are; the plan is to create a spike in oil prices, which will have an immediate effect on the lives of poor people. “Revolution has collateral damage,” a handsome young man says with the timeless confidence of a handsome and slightly drunk young man with an audience.The scene is saturated with uncertainty, and nothing anyone says can make that uncertainty go away. The would-be saboteurs don’t even know for sure that their bombs will go off, let alone what effect they will have if they do. They don’t know if they will be caught. Above all, they cannot know how others, now or in the future, will view their actions. Will they be remembered — if they’re remembered at all — as brave warriors justified by the righteousness of their aims? As ordinary villains, sowing destruction and chaos to flatter their own radical impulses? Or as well-intentioned fools whose actions only made it harder, not easier, to achieve the changes they desired?The question is cranked up to 11 by the mass of explosives just yards away.The question of what the future will make of us — what distant generations, looking back, will think of our choices — has probably been invoked for as long as humans have debated what to do next. But the climate issue has made this question inescapable. Decisions we are making right now are determining not just how much hotter and more polluted the world gets, but also how prepared future generations will be to live in the hotter, more polluted world we leave them. This line of thinking feels, at first, galvanizing: What will our descendants, our literal and metaphorical children, wish we had done to make their lives better?The film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” directed by Daniel Goldhaber, was loosely adapted from a 2021 manifesto of the same name by the Swedish political theorist Andreas Malm. The book’s argument is simple: If the climate movement is serious about reducing fossil-fuel emissions at the necessary speed and scale, Malm contends, it will have to make room for strategies long dismissed as too extreme, including the illegal destruction of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Just a few years ago, this argument would only have appeared in organs of mainstream opinion so it could be condemned. Instead, the book received respectful coverage from outlets around the world. Now, surprisingly, it is a movie, one with prominent distribution and a cast featuring familiar faces from prestige TV.Two of its young protagonists, we learn, met when one saw the other browsing through Malm’s book in a store. Their group sees itself as converting Malm’s argument into action, and the fact that the film treats this perspective with sympathy — respect, even — makes it a strange kind of cultural landmark. Until now, ecologically minded saboteurs have generally been presented onscreen either as villains or, at best, as lost souls, unserious radicals who, in their impatience and naïveté, go too far. Goldhaber’s film does contain several critiques of its young protagonists’ scheme, but it remains open to — and, in some moments, palpably excited by — the possibility that they are right and that their plan will work exactly as they hope.But this is only a possibility. Thrillers work by planting questions and making us itch for answers. What makes “Pipeline” so interesting is the way it intertwines plot questions (will the explosives work?) with the uncertainty inherent in judging your actions by the standards of the future. Try as we might, we cannot always know the effects of our individual choices; we cannot know how they will relate to the actions of others or the currents of history; we cannot know how future generations will understand their world or through what lenses they will look back on ours. This uncertainty is the always-present shadow of every decision we make. It would be one thing to see a group of young adults drinking and debating Malm’s arguments in a dormitory; it is another to see them do it with bombs in a van outside. Like all of us, they are wondering what history will make of them, but the question is cranked up to 11 by the mass of explosives just yards away.The movie itself tries something similar; it seems to be going out of its way to feel as though it is already about a historical event. Structurally, it uses flashbacks to give each character a back story that sketches his or her motivations. Stylistically, Goldhaber makes frequent nods to the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. The effect is both electrifying and disorienting: This insistently contemporary story ends up feeling like something from the past, seen from the future, underlining the way the uncertainties faced by the saboteurs are the same ones faced by the film itself. What are the chances that, years from now, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” might be seen as something like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a catalyst for historical change? What are the chances that its legacy might be widespread condemnation and draconian crackdowns on “terrorist” climate protests? What are the chances that it receives little notice at all and looks like just another example of our era talking about climate change but not halting it?“Pipeline” does not have those answers. By the final frame, we do know what has become of the saboteurs’ plan. In a traditional thriller, the resolution of the plot would be a cathartic release from uncertainty, but here we’re plunged back into all the questions the movie knows can’t be resolved. We cannot see the future until it arrives; it can go too many ways. This fact of life can be frightening. It’s nice to be reminded that it can also underline the moral stakes of our decisions in a way that gives them heft and energy.Source photographs: Neon; iStock/Getty Images More

A new documentary chronicles the strange, intrigue-filled saga of Blood, Sweat & Tears and its disastrous Eastern Bloc tour in 1970.Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”Now the band members are telling their side of this bizarre story in the new documentary “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” While everyone involved agrees with Rolling Stone’s conclusion — that the band’s career never recovered from that 1970 tour — the saga turns out to be more complicated than was previously known.“This isn’t a music doc, it’s a political thriller,” the director John Scheinfeld said in a telephone interview. “It’s about a group of guys who unknowingly walked into this rat’s nest, and how political forces impacted a group of individuals.”It is largely forgotten just how big Blood, Sweat & Tears was in its day. “Child Is Father to the Man,” the band’s 1968 debut, drew critical notice for its blend of big-band horns with rock and soul structure and style, but struggled commercially. After the group recruited the stentorian Toronto vocalist David Clayton-Thomas, its self-titled second album exploded, generating three Top 5 singles: “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.”The band performed at Woodstock (though, like many of the bigger groups on the bill, its management refused participation in the movie that made the festival a legend), and “Blood, Sweat & Tears” won the album of the year Grammy over the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Johnny Cash at San Quentin.”But in 1969, Blood, Sweat & Tears had to cancel a concert in Maryland when Clayton-Thomas was detained by Canadian immigration authorities; the United States had blocked his re-entry. No explanation was given, but the band assumed it was politically motivated.“I thought that because he’s Canadian, and we were — not collectively, but individually — speaking against the war,” the drummer Bobby Colomby said by phone, “some ultra-white congressmen probably said, ‘Who the hell does this Canadian guy think he is?’”The band’s manager, Larry Goldblatt, met with officials to resolve his singer’s visa status, and what happened next remains unclear — whether he or the State Department came up with the idea of having Blood, Sweat & Tears tour Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia as a way to promote democracy in Soviet-aligned countries that were potentially exploring closer ties to the West.“To use the language we use today, a quid pro quo was agreed upon,” Scheinfeld said. “If the band does this tour, the State Department will make David’s immigration problems go away. The band gets to keep their lead singer, and the State Department has the hottest band going working to advance their interests in Eastern Europe, so it’s kind of a win-win.”A planned movie of the tour fell apart as did a proposed TV special. The footage, smuggled out of the Eastern Bloc, was found in a vault.AbramoramaClayton-Thomas noted that such cultural exchange tours had been happening for decades, so the band didn’t think it was a big deal. “Most of the guys were jazz musicians, and they were used to the idea that Louis Armstrong would go to Moscow, and they’d send the Bolshoi Ballet to Lincoln Center,” he said by phone. Only the guitarist Steve Katz voted against the trip.It was agreed that the tour would be filmed for a possible documentary, organized by the executive producer Mal Klein. Blood, Sweat & Tears played seven concerts between June 17 and July 7, 1970, and when they first arrived in Yugoslavia, they were surprised by what they saw.“The kids were wearing ripped jeans and they had cafes and rock ’n’ roll and street fairs,” Clayton-Thomas said. “We thought, ‘Wow, they’ve been lying to us — this ain’t so bad.’ Then we went to Romania, and you could hear the Iron Curtain slam shut behind you.”Dan Klein, Mal Klein’s then 14-year-old son, tagged along and described the whole thing as feeling “like a James Bond movie.” He said the officials in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania made no effort to disguise the bugs they placed in hotel rooms, and he recounted being observed during meals.“There was a man sitting at the table reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee,” Klein said by phone, “and after a while, he got up and left, and another person sat down at the same table and picked up the same newspaper and continued drinking the same cup of coffee.”But things turned from comedy to tragedy at the Bucharest concerts, where audience members got too rowdy and were beaten by security guards. The second night, the band members were instructed to dial things down, and when they didn’t, the guards set dogs loose on the crowd.“My father, in his naïveté, thought that if he got the camera people to film the policemen and the dogs attacking the spectators that it would make them stop,” Klein said. “But that was just stupid; that just made them angrier.” The crew had to smuggle its footage out of Romania, using blank reels of film as a decoy for officials to confiscate.Back in the United States, the musicians came under fire for aiding the government, accused of being a “fascist rock band” by both the underground press and mainstream journalists. The trouble immediately became evident at a hastily arranged, hostile Los Angeles news conference.“We came back saying, ‘Yeah, Nixon is awful, Vietnam is the worst thing in the world, but communism? You don’t want that here,’” Colomby said. “But back then, for the extreme left, that wasn’t acceptable to say.”Henry Kissinger even sent Richard M. Nixon a memo about the tour, and the president scrawled a note at the bottom inquiring how “youth leaders might get the message.” On July 25, the band played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies staged a protest, throwing horse manure onstage.The damage was simply too great. “Blood, Sweat & Tears 3,” which was actually released during the Eastern European tour, went to No. 1, but the group never had another hit single, and album sales plummeted. The strains of the tour and the backlash exacerbated tensions between band members, and by the end of 1971, four of the nine musicians — including Clayton-Thomas — had left the group.In its heyday, the band was among the biggest in the country, beating out the Beatles and Johnny Cash for the Grammy for album of the year.AbramoramaAs for the planned documentary, there was no formal directive, but Scheinfeld suspects that the footage, especially of the Romanian riots, was deemed too negative to help American efforts to thaw the Cold War. The feature film morphed into a proposed TV special, but that also seemed to go nowhere. What started as a win-win wound up being a disaster for all sides.And that was the end of the story, until Scheinfeld — whose film subjects have included John Lennon and Harry Nilsson — was introduced to Colomby, who had seen “Chasing Trane,” the director’s 2017 John Coltrane documentary. They got to talking, Scheinfeld learned about the 1970 tour debacle, and he set out on a coast-to-coast mission, combing through storage vaults and government facilities to locate the lost material.Scheinfeld determined that while 65 hours of film had been shot, both the production company and the postproduction house had gone out of business in 1971. After months of fruitless searching, an email showed up from a vault that Scheinfeld had already checked: Someone had found a reference to Blood, Sweat & Tears in a file, which turned out to be a pristine, 53-minute print of the abandoned television edit. That footage became the spine of “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”For Colomby, revisiting this pivotal chapter revealed much that he didn’t know, but he offered no apologies and no regrets for making the deal and taking the trip.“We were the most innocent musicians you ever met in your life,” he said. “We just wanted to play well and do something that would affect music in a positive way. So if you ask, ‘Would you do this again?’ In a heartbeat. It was fascinating. It was eye-opening in every sense of the word.” More

The filmmaker Mickey Reece drags a certain Oklahoma-born singer named Troyal — but answers to “Garth” — into this oddball comedy.The filmmaker and actor Mickey Reece is an uncommonly prolific microbudget filmmaker, having cranked out over two dozen features since the early 2000s. “Country Gold,” his latest picture, is a not fully baked — or, in a certain sense, an over-baked — shaggy dog tale. Despite its homegrown surrealist touches, it’s ultimately a wheel-spinning exercise, though perhaps with its own odd integrity.Reece plays a slack-jawed country singer, Troyal Brux, pronounced Brooks: a fictional megastar based on a genuine one. Why a filmmaker would go to the trouble of slagging Garth Brooks (born Troyal Garth Brooks), whose days of stampeding the zeitgeist are long past, in the year 2023 is beyond me.Reece, like Brooks, is from Oklahoma, which may explain a longstanding grudge of sorts. In any event, in this story, Troyal gets a letter from the older country-western singing maestro George Jones (played by Ben Hall, who has practically no resemblance to Jones), inviting Troyal to Nashville for a meeting of the minds and night on the town.This movie’s George Jones is a labored contrivance. The real Jones has been described by the podcaster Tyler Mahan Coe as “a haunted house of a human being.” Here, Jones is an unusually voluble, quasi-avuncular figure who takes Troyal on a medium-wild night featuring booze, cocaine and massage.Shot mostly in black-and-white, with amusing bits of animation included (the scene in which Troyal is upbraided for ordering a steak well-done is a quirky comedic highlight), this movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.Country GoldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Fandor. More

This documentary takes a personal look at the legacy of one of horror’s most lasting and loved villains.In 1988, the horror film “Child’s Play” introduced a red haired, sailor-mouthed, killer-possessed doll named Chucky. The film was a box office hit, spawning six sequels and a Syfy series, positioning Chucky — the monster-child of the writer-director Don Mancini — alongside Jason and Freddy as one of horror’s most enduring one-name antiheroes. There were killer doll movies before, but “Child’s Play” is the ne plus ultra that “M3gan” bows before.With an influential history to mine, it’s a shame the franchise-spanning documentary “Living With Chucky,” written and directed by Kyra Elise Gardner, feels like hagiographic DVD featurettes meanderingly stitched together. There are flashes of insight, from the actress Jennifer Tilly, who in several films voiced Chucky’s girlfriend, Tiffany; the director John Waters, who praises the films’ queerness; and the actor Alex Vincent, whose performance as Andy, Chucky’s young owner, made the original as heartbreaking as it was heart-pounding. But in the final stretch, Gardner, the daughter of the “Child’s Play” special effects artist Tony Gardner, goes in front of the camera, pausing from documenting the franchise and its impact to placing herself in it, a head-scratching pivot. The film could have used more outsider voices, including fans, to position the character’s legacy.Chucky aficionados who know this stuff already might still stick around until the end, and the Chucky-curious with 105 minutes to kill might get a kick out of the film’s crash course in Chuckydom. (There are spoilers galore.) But horror agnostics likely won’t last through a dive this deep.Living with ChuckyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More