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How Chris Messina Forced Matt Damon to Up His Game in ‘Air’
The “actor’s actor” ad-libbed so many funny threats that the movie star couldn’t keep a straight face and resorted to improvisation to keep up.Chris Messina has a hard time admitting that he’s funny.Even after his hilarious turn as a silver-tongued sports agent in “Air” and six seasons as a drolly charming doctor on the sitcom “The Mindy Project,” he is surprisingly self-critical when it comes to his comic abilities.“Comedy is so hard,” he said in a recent video call from his home in Los Angeles, adding an expletive for emphasis. “It’s hard to land a joke. So I still struggle with that. I’m best when I either don’t know it’s a comedy or don’t play it as a comedy — then you might find me funny.”This is difficult to believe if you’ve seen “Air.” As Michael Jordan’s outrageous, surly representative David Falk in the story of the creation of the Air Jordan sneaker, Messina is uproarious, screaming and swearing his way through fever-pitch negotiations with voluble panache. In the most memorable exchange, Messina calls the Nike scout and marketer Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to lambaste him for secretly visiting the Jordan family. Messina goes utterly ballistic, hurtling around his office as he barks threats and insults involving various bits of bodily anatomy. The Ringer described him as the film’s “foul-mouthed” M.V.P.“Phone calls are usually just a bore,” Messina said thoughtfully, displaying an open and eager friendliness, pleased to be discussing the details of a craft he clearly loves. “There’s no one on the other line — sometimes there’s a script supervisor reading the lines off-camera.”Messina in “Air.” His scene partner, Matt Damon, was laughing so much that there were no usable takes of the character straight-faced in that sequence.Ana Carballosa/Amazon StudiosBut for “Air,” the director Ben Affleck had the idea to shoot both sides of the conversation simultaneously. He set up Damon and Messina in offices down the hall from each other, and had two sets of cameras rolling at the same time. “It felt more alive,” Messina said. “Matt and I could talk over each other, then we could improvise, then we could come together and say, ‘How about we change this to this?’ And then go back to our offices and keep going.”As Affleck told me in a recent phone interview, “All of the great lines in that scene are Chris’s improvisation.” And those improvisations, he said, had a particularly strong impact on Damon. “Matt could not keep a straight face. I had to use Matt laughing because there wasn’t a take of him playing it straight. He tried to play it straight, and he just couldn’t.”Damon explained that “it was already really funny on the page.” But when Messina came up with threats, “it dictated how I had to play the scene,” Damon said. “I had to start ad-libbing. I started talking to the background artists next to me, going, ‘It’s David Falk on the phone, sorry,’ and I just started laughing.”“Air” is Messina’s third appearance in an Affleck-directed film, after the Oscar-winning drama “Argo” and the period crime tale “Live by Night.” Affleck said, “I always look for work for Chris because he’s always so good. Every time he’s had the opportunity, he’s always done more than I envisioned or imagined.”Though “Live by Night” was not a commercial success, Affleck said he was “particularly proud” of Messina’s performance, for which he gained 40 pounds. “I said he could wear a body suit. He said no, it wouldn’t be the same,” Affleck said. “I can’t say enough good things about him.”Damon echoed the sentiment, describing his co-star as an actor’s actor, the kind “all the other actors always talk about. Did you see him in this? Or, he’s in that, that’ll be good.”Messina’s career started on the stage. A “tried and true New York theater actor” from Long Island, as he put it, he plied his trade “mostly Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway, and sometimes Off Off Off Broadway, in the Bronx and in Queens and on the Lower East Side.” He speaks of those scrappy early days with a nostalgic air, reminiscing about plays “where the actors outnumbered the audience, or where, when it rained, it would leak on the stage,” he said. In short, he loved it.For a long time, Messina yearned to find glory the romantic way. “I really thought, stupidly, that Mike Nichols would discover me in a play and put me in ‘The Graduate 2,’ you know? I had read about Dustin Hoffman. But that never happened.”Instead, Messina transitioned to the screen. After a couple of small, forgettable parts in films like “Rounders” (with Damon) and “The Siege,” he landed his breakout role, on the final season of the funeral-home drama “Six Feet Under,” playing the amiable, strait-laced lawyer Ted Fairwell, the love interest of Lauren Ambrose’s Claire. On the strength of his work on that HBO drama, he began landing high-profile films, including Sam Mendes’s “Away We Go” and Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” as well as recurring parts on the cable dramas “Damages” and “The Newsroom.”Matt Damon said Messina was the kind of actor “all the other actors always talk about. Did you see him in this? Or, he’s in that, that’ll be good.”Amanda Hakan for The New York TimesMost viewers, though, probably know Messina best for his work on “The Mindy Project,” starring as the sometimes ill-tempered, sometimes charismatic Danny Castellano opposite the series creator, Mindy Kaling. When casting began in 2011, Kaling was specifically seeking actors she “hadn’t seen do a lot of comedy” or, if they were experienced, “weren’t the usual suspects they always send you,” she said in a recent interview.She knew he was perfect straight away. Describing him as one of the most comical actors she’s worked with, she said Messina was “so rooted in the truth of his character that he can’t help but be funny.”She attributes that expressly to the fact that he is not a traditional comedian. “Your average sitcom actor wants to hit their moments, make the day, and go home. Chris isn’t like that,” she said. “It’s almost exhausting, the level of honesty and truth he brings to every scene. He was really listening to my character and reacting if the character did something funny or absurd. He made me a better actor. I was listening better when I was with Chris, because he set the bar so high.”Although Messina proved well suited for the role, he originally didn’t even want to do it, turning down the part multiple times before relenting. (“Mindy wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he explained.) He was, he said, “very worried about every aspect of it,” including the commitment to a network comedy with 20-plus episodes per season, potentially for many years — perhaps making it more difficult for him to do the kind of serious work he dreamed of as a performer.“I wanted to do ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ I wanted to do ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” he said. Though he liked the role and Kaling, “I was afraid of it running forever.” And, of course, he was afraid of something else: the genre. “I was afraid of not being able to keep up with them comedically,” he said. “I am afraid of jokes.”On the other hand, being afraid is what Messina wants. “Being scared of a role, of an opportunity, being challenged, that’s what I’m looking for. Maybe it’s corny or too actorly, but I do like finding closed doors inside of me.” More
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Hollywoods Newest Stars? Nike, BlackBerry and Cheetos.
A new spate of films stars not people but consumer products.Your standard-issue Hollywood biopics foreground people caught in the wheels of history. We meet titans of industry, genius mathematicians, brave astronauts and dogged journalists. We hear stories of fearless, unyielding figures whose visions changed the world. Some, like presidents and generals, already know their own importance; others still think they’re ordinary. But the stories generally revolve around people and events, showing us how laws were changed, wars won, villains defeated.Lately Hollywood has landed on an effective variant: Hey, remember this old thing?This type of film is not new, precisely, but this spring is staggeringly replete with examples. “AIR,” directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of Nike’s game-changing sponsorship deal with a rookie Michael Jordan and the world-conquering shoes that emerged from it. “Tetris” does the same for the titular video game, which farsighted 1980s capitalists managed to license from the Soviet state. “BlackBerry” offers a raucous, satirical history of the Canadian tech company whose cellphone went extinct. And then there’s “Flamin’ Hot,” a drama about the former Frito-Lay employee who claims — highly dubiously, according to Los Angeles Times reporting — to be the creator of the addictively spicy red-dusted Cheetos.These movies are not about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality; they are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality. The protagonists here are white-collar functionaries who carry leather briefcases to work. They are corporate middle managers and marketers and brand gurus. They scream into phones, scrutinize contracts and sift through webs of licenses and sublicenses. Their world isn’t always depicted as glamorous; “AIR” has Matt Damon don a fat suit to play a schlubby, basketball-obsessed divorcé. But these are stories in which businessmen are the heroes. They are the people who got the job done, if the job was selling millions upon millions of units to grow a major corporation’s market share.Yet it’s not even right to say these brand-o-pics focus on the men. They are, above all, centered on the objects. Movies have told the stories of market-movers before, but Hollywood’s most recent biopics of Steve Jobs were not called “iPhone 1” and “iPhone 2.” Ray Kroc’s franchising of McDonald’s is dramatized in a movie called “The Founder,” not “Big Mac.” It’s in these new movies that the consumer product itself truly becomes the star around which human stories revolve. Their cumulative mood is resolutely frothy: poppy 1980s bops, eight-bit graphics, white-collar sharks gnawing on the geeks. For any child of the era, this is yet another casual stroll down memory lane — one in which, yet again, memory lane is flanked by endless billboards of retro brands. The objects in these films, after all, are not just products; they signify a specific slice of a time, perhaps a specific type of childhood. Like all brands these days, they are signposts we use to navigate the world, orienting ourselves socially, signaling our identities. They are interested in people who make the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more.This experience of consumption is precisely what the films promise audiences. In both “BlackBerry” and “AIR,” the executives are consciously trying to tap into questions of consumer desire and identity. “AIR” could even be seen as an origin story for the very concept of brand-as-identity, an innovation it seems to admire. “BlackBerry,” shot in vérité style, is more sour on the idea. Glenn Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, depicted here as the raging id of the company, barking orders at his sales force: “You’re not salesmen anymore,” he says. “You’re male models. I want you at every country club, yacht club, tennis club. Wherever the elite go, you go!” The phone’s function is no longer the point. “When they ask you, don’t say, ‘It’s a phone that does email,’” he says. “It’s not a cellphone — it’s a status symbol.”Writing in Playboy in early 2014, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek mused on our experience of brands and “the mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes Nike sneakers (or Starbucks coffee).” I don’t know whether Ben Affleck ever read that article, but there’s a strange level on which his film repeats, again and again, something Zizek imagined about Nike. If such a company were to outsource production to overseas contractors, design to design firms, advertising to ad agencies and distribution to retailers, what would be left? “Nike would be nothing ‘in itself,’” Zizek wrote. “Nothing other than the pure brand mark ‘Nike,’ an empty sign.” In “AIR,” it is Damon’s character — Sonny Vaccaro, a marketing executive — who finds a new answer. His radical idea is to commit the entire basketball budget to Jordan. Nike, he says, must tap into something deeper, to turn a shoe into a man and a man into a shoe. The vice president of marketing is puzzled: “You want to anthropomorphize a shoe?” The film leaves it to Jordan’s mother, played by Viola Davis, to underline how that’s done: “A shoe is just a shoe,” she says, “until my son steps into it.” “BlackBerry” is caustic, while “AIR” is, ultimately, a feel-good celebration of the brand-identity revolution that changed sports forever. “Tetris” feels more confused. (We watch Henk Rogers become a millionaire by getting the Soviets to license some handheld-gaming rights, but whether Nintendo or someone else gets them feels more meaningful to Rogers than to consumers.) While watching each of the three films, though, I found myself thinking about the words etched on the backs of so many devices: “Designed by Apple in California/Assembled in China.” Each of these stories is interested in the inventors and innovators who create the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more. In “AIR,” the only real acknowledgment of this comes from that vice president of marketing, who expresses mild ambivalence about Nike’s factories in Taiwan and South Korea — a confusing gesture in a movie about a company that, in 1998, had its real-life chief executive lament that it had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” This year, in Michigan, Times reporting found underage factory workers who said inhaling the dust from producing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos left their lungs stinging. Feelings about this spring’s eruption of brand flicks have been mixed. In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan called this spate of product bios “great news,” expressing hope that “AIR” might open the door for more footwear-origin stories. (Why not Uggs or Birkenstocks?) In the opposite ideological corner, you’ll find Boots Riley, the leftist musician and filmmaker (“Sorry to Bother You”), arguing on Twitter that commodity flicks are Hollywood’s effort to “push back on radicalization of the working class.” It’s certainly possible that these movies expose something vapid about our consumer society — say, our readiness to attach our humanity to empty slogans or to praise “visionaries” whose vision isn’t about fighting injustice or reaching the stars but merely selling us tons of plastic.Still: All these brand films, and all the reviews of them, seem to acknowledge the same point. The day-to-day texture of our lives, they suggest, may be dictated less by brave explorers or crusading lawyers and more by people with office jobs who make products and then make us want to buy them — people whose decisions shape our habits, our choices, our sense of ourselves. The part these films do not yet fully agree on is whether this fact is worth celebrating or deeply depressing.Source photographs: Apple TV+; Amazon Studios; William West/AFP, via Getty Images. More
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Hoping to Draw Moviegoers and Filmmakers, Amazon Heads to Theaters
The streaming company released Ben Affleck’s “Air” on 3,500 movie screens this week, and it plans to open 10 to 12 films theatrically every year.It was a full house at the AMC Town Center in Las Vegas in September when Ben Affleck slipped into the darkened theater. He wanted to see how his new film, “Air,” would play with a test audience, some members of which might have shown up just to escape the scorching heat outside.To his amazement, the crowd went nuts for the movie, about Nike’s efforts in the 1980s to lure a young Michael Jordan to its struggling basketball brand. The viewers clapped when Chris Tucker appeared onscreen, and they hooted for Viola Davis.“People were cheering before they said a line,” Mr. Affleck said in an interview.And that left him feeling rather deflated. He exited the theater and called Matt Damon, his longtime collaborator and new business partner.“God, man, this is tragic,” Mr. Affleck recalled telling Mr. Damon. “I haven’t had a movie play in a theater like this in years. And it’s going on a streamer.”He added, “I felt like Charlie Brown with the football.”But a funny thing happened on the way to Amazon’s Prime Video service, which bankrolled the $130 million film. After similar raucous screenings in Los Angeles, Amazon decided the film would go to theaters first — opening on 3,500 screens in the United States this week, and more than 70 other markets worldwide. It will play for at least a month and is the company’s largest theatrical release since it began making movies in 2015.“Originally we thought, well, our customers are on Prime, so that’s where we need to deliver our movies, but we’re now thinking of the bigger audience and assuming that most of the United States are Prime members anyway,” Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon and MGM Studios, said in an interview. “So why wouldn’t you offer these movies theatrically and allow people to come back to that experience and then move directly to Prime afterwards?”She added, “It’s only the beginning for us.”Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, is a veteran TV executive and was initially wary of releasing films theatrically.Danny Moloshok/ReutersAmazon now says its ultimate goal is to release 10 to 12 movies a year in theaters. Not all will be on as many screens as “Air” or play as long. Rather, each theatrical strategy will be based on the perceived box office potential. And other films will still debut on Prime Video.The news is a huge victory for the beleaguered theatrical exhibition business, with year-to-date ticket sales down 25 percent from before the pandemic.“It’s not really about just playing ‘Air,’” said Greg Marcus, chief executive of the Marcus Corporation, a movie entertainment and lodging business in Milwaukee. “The bigger, more important story is its commitment to doing a theatrical slate so that some of it’s going to work and some of it won’t. Success should be judged over an entire slate and include all revenue generated throughout the life of the slate.”Between the advent of streaming and consumer habit changes brought on by the pandemic, Hollywood has been constantly re-evaluating how it thinks about movie theaters. The common wisdom over the past year is that superhero movies still draw crowds (even if the numbers are waning), as do films with wild spectacle (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) or established characters (“Creed III”).Less certain are the films that Mr. Affleck prefers to traffic in, especially when he’s behind the camera: adult dramas with touches of comedy and an earnest feel-good bent, like his Oscar-winning “Argo.” Recent Oscar contenders, like Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” disappointed at the box office.But a strong performance for “Air” could indicate to the industry that movies for adults are still viable in theaters. Apple, which previously eschewed theaters, already has plans to release both Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” theatrically this year.That could encourage other distributors to release more films in theaters, and filmmakers eager for streaming money but still yearning for their work to be seen on the big screen may look to Amazon. (“Air” brought in $3.2 million at the box office on Wednesday, and Amazon is expecting it to gross a modest $16 million through the weekend.)“I think there is a legitimate case to be made that some movies are better experienced in the theater with a group of people,” Mr. Affleck said. “If they can provide robust theatrical releases where the movies are well supported, then it will move Amazon to the front of the pack.”When Ms. Salke, a veteran television executive, took over Amazon’s studio in 2018, her knowledge of the movie business was cursory at best. She had spent years overseeing television at NBC, shepherding hits like “This Is Us.” At the beginning of her tenure, she plunked down close to $50 million for five movies at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The films, including “Late Night,” and “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” underperformed.Suddenly, Amazon, which had been a friend to the theater business with its films “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Big Sick,” was no longer interested in the cutthroat world of box office receipts, where the entire industry knows if a movie is a success or a failure by Saturday morning of opening weekend.“It was like, why would we put ourselves through that step if it’s going to tear down the film and require us to double our investment in marketing to get to Prime to kind of turn that story around?” she said.When Amazon bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2021, there was trepidation that the historic label would be reduced to a tile on the Prime website. MGM had recently been resurrected by Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdy and had made theatrical commitments to filmmakers like Mr. Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson and Sarah Polley.Instead, Ms. Salke seems to have been influenced by the executives at MGM. She also saw how films Amazon acquired during the pandemic — like “Coming 2 America” and “The Tomorrow War” — did as streaming-first movies.“The performance of those films on the service already made us feel like we want to go bigger on the movie side,” she said. “Then we’re buying MGM and closing that deal. We have more movies.”While Mr. DeLuca and Ms. Abdy decamped for a job running Warner Bros., the MGM executives who remained had shown Amazon what a successful theatrical strategy could look like. It culminated in the early-March release of “Creed III,” which has grossed close to $150 million in North America, outperforming its predecessors.In the meantime, Ms. Salke has consolidated her power. The company’s new head of film, Courtenay Valenti, who will oversee both Amazon and MGM after a long career at Warner Bros., will report to her instead of to Mike Hopkins, Ms. Salke’s boss and the senior vice president of Prime Video, Amazon Studios and MGM. And Ms. Salke said she would not waver from her theatrical strategy no matter how “Air” performed.“We are committed,” she said.Matt Damon and Viola Davis star in “Air,” which tells the story of Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan.Amazon StudiosThere is no guarantee that Amazon’s strategy for “Air” will succeed. With many moviegoers requiring a spectacle before buying a ticket, a film that is shot primarily in office buildings and never actually shows the face of the actor playing Michael Jordan could be a difficult sell.Sue Kroll, the studio’s new head of marketing, argues that despite the setting and the talky nature of the film, “Air” has the makings of a crowd pleaser.“It really does take you to another place,” she said of the movie, which stars Mr. Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, a sad-sack basketball scout asked to find up-and-coming basketball stars to endorse Nike shoes.“It’s emotional. It’s funny. And it has a lot of heart,” Ms. Kroll added. “I think it can pave the way for a lot of other great movies out there that should be seen theatrically.”The company hopes so. At the end of April, it will release Guy Ritchie’s “The Covenant,” an MGM film that stars Jake Gyllenhaal as an Army sergeant ambushed in Afghanistan. On Sept. 15, it will release “Challengers,” an MGM movie that stars Zendaya as a tennis player turned coach. “Saltburn,” a film from the “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell, which Amazon acquired out of Cannes last year, will open sometime in the fall.Ms. Valenti, who started last month, is still putting her full schedule together. “There is fantastic development here, but movies don’t grow on trees,” she said, before adding that she thinks her job will be made easier because of Amazon’s commitment to marketing its films, wherever they land.“The only way you attract the best talent, the best filmmakers, the best storytellers to make their larger-than-life films here,” Ms. Valenti continued, “is because they have to know that their movies aren’t going to die in the quicksands of the service.” More
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Air Jordans on the Big Screen: When the Sneaker Is the Real Star
“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
