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      Air Jordans on the Big Screen: When the Sneaker Is the Real Star

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      “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

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      in Television

      LaChanze, at Home in ‘The Color Purple’ House

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      The Westchester house where the Tony-winning actor lives is ideally sized for family reunions — and for spending time alone.“The Color Purple” house — that’s how the actor LaChanze refers to her five-bedroom home in lower Westchester County, N.Y. This has nothing to do with the exterior (it’s gray) or the interior (plum, lavender, lilac, fuchsia, mulberry and violet are underrepresented).But it has everything to do with LaChanze’s Tony-winning performance in the 2005 musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s celebrated novel. “Being in ‘The Color Purple’ was how I was able to buy the house,” said LaChanze, who is currently starring in the limited-run Broadway production — through Jan. 9 — of Alice Childress’s 1955 comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.”Her other Broadway credits include “Once on This Island” (1990),“If/Then” (2014) and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (2018). She won an Emmy in 2010 for the PBS special “Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise.”Sixteen years ago, after considering various housing possibilities, LaChanze settled on the suburbs, because she wanted her children, Celia Rose Gooding, now 21, an actor, and Zaya LaChanze Gooding, 20, a college student, to have firsthand knowledge of lawns and trees. For herself, she wanted relatively new construction.“I knew I’d be living alone,” said LaChanze, 60, whose husband of three years, Calvin Gooding, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. “I knew I didn’t know how do repairs. It narrowed my options, because many of the properties in Westchester are much older.”“My mother always stressed that when you walk in the front door you should leave behind everything from the world outside,” said LaChanze. “I’ve incorporated that feeling into our living space.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLaChanze, 60Occupation: ActorGreat performance: “People love to watch me make fried chicken on Instagram. My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t make a meal in under 30 minutes, then you’re not a good cook.’”“I was lucky,” she continued. “I found a house that was built in 2000. I’m the second owner.”She was, perhaps, even luckier in what surrounded the house: abundant greenery and a yard that was hard by both a park and the Bronx River.“People can’t cross over, so it’s like my own piece of the water,” LaChanze said. “It’s quiet and scenic. That’s pretty much what sold me.”She has since added a firepit and affixed a set of wind chimes to a birch tree near the deck. They ring in the key of A. “I love that,” she said. “A lot of Negro spirituals are written in that key. You hear that chord? It’s just beautiful.”Unlike those chimes, the house needed some fine-tuning. It had style, for sure; it just wasn’t LaChanze’s particular style.LaChanze’s three cats have the run of the house.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“There were gold-plated fixtures and I was, like, ‘Nooooo,’” she said. Out they went, replaced by nickel.Down came the columns between the den and the kitchen to create an expansive space, and bookcases were built on either side of the fireplace. (One of the shelves holds a steel remnant from the twin towers.) Marble countertops, a marble floor, a glass-tile backsplash in shades of brown and copper, and a few coats of butter-yellow paint were part of the kitchen overhaul.“I kind of went to work in here a little bit,” LaChanze said with a laugh. “All my friends and fans who follow me on Instagram know what my kitchen looks like.”You can easily tell that this is the residence of someone who works in the arts. The framed awards and piles of scripts in the office, the area set up for recording sessions, the show posters on the wall in the basement gym, all make the point.“I recently did Spike Lee’s documentary on HBO,” LaChanze said, referring to “NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021 ½”. “He gave me a copy of the poster for the show and signed it for me.”LaChanze, a fan of the game bid whist, estimates that she has some 100 decks of cards.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIt’s equally clear that this is the home of someone who cares about art. “I’m a little bit of a collector,” LaChanze said. “I call my foyer my international space, because I travel quite a bit and I have a bunch of art from a lot of different places” — a door from Nigeria, a drawing etched on the bark of a tree from Tonga, dung art from Rwanda.The foyer also holds a thriving fiddle-leaf fig, one of two that LaChanze, an enthusiastic gardener, bought this summer at Costco — for the bargain price of $69 each, she is proud to tell you — and has been tending ever since, first out on the deck, now by the stairs that lead to the second floor.“I just love it to death. Look how big it is,” she said, sounding like a very proud mother.And there, in a nutshell, you have the primary business that’s conducted at LaChanze’s house: nurturing.Here is where the actor’s large, far-flung family gathers twice a year for reunions, and where falling asleep on the custom-designed, brown crushed-velvet sectional in the den is encouraged. Here, too, is where a group of card-playing cronies comes every month for an evening of bid whist.“It’s something that’s big in my culture,” LaChanze said. “When I was young, my parents were playing with their friends, but then someone had to leave. They came and got me and taught me the game, so they could keep going, because you need four people.”Her affection for the game and its key component has stuck: She has amassed 100 decks of very elegant cards.“OK, so one night I was going down the internet rabbit hole, and I discovered this group of people in a card-collection club,” LaChanze said. “I joined, and every few months I get sent a new deck by a new designer. There are a lot of, I would say, biker dudes and magicians in the club, and it’s really a lot of fun to talk to these guys across the country about what we love about our cards.”“My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t make a meal in under 30 minutes, then you’re not a good cook,’” said LaChanze, who demonstrates how to pull off this culinary trick to her fans on Instagram.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesNear where LaChanze sets up the card table in the basement is a sofa upholstered in green velvet. “This is the first sofa my husband and I bought together,” she said, gently patting a cushion. “We were at Bloomingdale’s, and I was telling him that I’d love a good deep couch that we could spoon on and not feel uncomfortable. We both fit on this.”She added: “I’ve kept it so that my girls can have a little piece of their daddy in here.”When LaChanze comes home from the theater, she greets her three cats and then heads out to the deck, often with a glass of wine in hand, and listens to the wind chimes, or takes a walk down to the water or to the firepit.“I love my home,” she said simply. “My friends are telling me, ‘Well, LaChanze, you’re getting older. Your daughters are gone all the time. Why do you want to live in this big place alone?’”Alone? That’s not how she views it.She has her slice of the river. She has the stars. She has what she calls the heart-of-the-house light, a lamp in the dining room that is never switched off. She falls asleep every night to the lullaby of the Metro-North train whistle.“I love hearing that sound,” LaChanze said. “Because it reminds me I’m not by myself.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      Brooklyn Academy of Music Plans a New York-Focused Season

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      In its first full season since the start of the pandemic, the organization will feature a mix of new and familiar works in dance and theater.There will be dances exploring Black love and relationships, theater works highlighting the impact of technology on daily life and an appearance by the filmmaker Spike Lee.The Brooklyn Academy of Music will focus its coming season on the artists of New York City, the organization announced on Friday, as it seeks to bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.“This is a season to celebrate artists who give New York City a sense of possibility, a sense of wonder, a sense of effervescence, a glow, a bit of magic,” the academy’s artistic director, David Binder, said in an interview. He said the academy wanted to create a season to mark New York’s recovery from the pandemic, which brought many of the city’s cultural institutions to a standstill for more than 18 months.The season, which runs November to March, is the academy’s first since the start of the pandemic. As the organization tries to lure audiences back to its stages and recover millions in ticket revenue lost during the pandemic, it will feature a mix of familiar hits and new works.Dance will be front and center, starting in November with the world premiere of “The Mood Room,” a Big Dance Theater production, conceived, directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. The show, which takes place in Los Angeles in 1980, mixes dance, theater and spoken opera to explore the effects of Reaganism.The dance lineup also includes Reggie Wilson’s “Power” in January, and the New York premiere of Kyle Abraham’s “An Untitled Love,” in February. The work, set to neo-soul music, is described as an “exaltation of Black love and unity.”Also in February comes Pam Tanowitz’s acclaimed “Four Quartets,” a staging of T.S. Eliot’s poems. When it had its premiere at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, in 2018, Alastair Macaulay, writing in The New York Times, called it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”In March, the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Morris’s classic “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (1988), set to Handel’s oratorio.There will be theater and cabaret offerings as well. In March, SITI Company, the noted experimental New York theater company, will stage “The Medium,” a minimalist meditation on the role of technology in society.The cabaret performers Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman will star as their alter egos Kiki and Herb in a new holiday special, titled “SLEIGH,” which will premiere after Thanksgiving.In December, Lee will appear alongside his brother for a conversation about the filmmaker’s new book, “SPIKE,” a visual look at his career.With coronavirus cases still high, it remains to be seen whether audiences will turn out at prepandemic levels, but Binder said he believed many people were clamoring for live performances. The academy’s brief fall season, which opened in September, has attracted several sold-out crowds, he said.“It seems New Yorkers are really hungry to get back into the theater,” Binder said. “I feel very optimistic and excited.” More

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      in Music

      Listen to the Essential Terence Blanchard

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      Spike Lee scores, daring jazz: Here are highlights from the varied career of the composer of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera.Like Wayne Shorter — to whom his newest album, “Absence,” is dedicated — Terence Blanchard is the rare jazz star whose renown as a composer almost overshadows his reputation as a daring and stylish improviser. Almost.Blanchard, whose opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, rose as a jazz phenom in the early 1980s, taking over the trumpet chair in Art Blakey’s fabled Jazz Messengers after Wynton Marsalis left. Barely 20, he was a double threat even then: writing compositions of coiled energy and smartly woven rhythmic interplay, and improvising fiercely, cutting sharp turns and slipping into sly glissandos.He soon became Spike Lee’s musical other half, a relationship that helped to make film scoring into a primary vocation. And in the 21st century, he’s established himself as one of jazz’s most respected educators and spokesmen. Here are a few highlights from his discography.‘Ninth Ward Strut’ (1988)Throughout much of the 1980s, Blanchard led a band along with the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison — a fellow 20-something New Orleans native and Jazz Messenger — that became one of the standard-bearing groups of jazz’s Young Lions movement. In “Ninth Ward Strut,” Blanchard pays tribute to his hometown’s signature sound with a swinging second-line rhythmic underpinning, while pushing his own identity as a composer. The track is rhythmically suspenseful and harmonically jagged in a way that would become characteristic.‘The Nation’ (1992)Spike Lee tapped Blanchard to record the trumpet parts for Denzel Washington’s character in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), including on the film’s title tune, which became a kind of Young Lions-era classic. Lee soon began asking Blanchard to write scores — and he hasn’t stopped. “Malcolm X” (1992) was one of the first films Blanchard did, exploring an expanded palette of choral harmonies, strings and brass. He rearranged the music for jazz sextet soon after, and recorded it as “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite,” a restless and ambitious album for Columbia Records.‘A Child With the Blues’ (1997)Blanchard recorded this track with the neo-soul doyenne Erykah Badu for the soundtrack to “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” librettist Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 film “Eve’s Bayou.” Bantering with Badu, he pulls sassy glissandos from the horn and pushes her into pitter-patter rhythmic exchanges. (It later reappeared on a deluxe edition of the album “Baduizm.”)‘Dear Mom’ (2007)After scoring “When the Levees Broke,” Lee’s 2006 documentary about Hurricane Katrina, Blanchard adapted his compositions into a suite, as he had with the “Malcolm X” music. He released the results as “A Tale of God’s Will” the following year.Katrina was deeply personal for Blanchard, whose mother lost her home in the storm. Adoration and enervation course together on “Dear Mom,” as Blanchard plays a pas de deux with a large string section. The album won Blanchard the second of his five Grammys, for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.‘Can Anyone Hear Me’ (2018)For years, Blanchard has put a premium on working with younger musicians, and in his current quintet, the E-Collective, he’s assembled a wrecking crew of cutting-edge improvisers who regularly reimagine how jazz-rock fusion might work. On “Can Anyone Hear Me,” from a recent live album, Blanchard’s horn is encased in an electric bodysuit of distortion and effects, but the precision and counter-intuition of his soloing shines through. More

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      in Movies

      ‘25th Hour’: The Best 9/11 Movie Was Always About New York

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      While other directors edited out the twin towers from movies at the time, Spike Lee worked the tragedy into a story originally about other things.When Spike Lee came under fire last month for including 9/11 conspiracy theorists in his HBO documentary series “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½,” historians and others expressed disappointment that Lee had seemed to give credibility to long-debunked claims. (He subsequently edited them out.) But for those of us who’ve followed Lee’s career, and its intersection with that seminal New York event of 20 years ago, the initial decision was especially baffling — as Lee also directed what many consider the quintessential film about post-9/11 New York City.“25th Hour” is not a “9/11 movie,” at least not in the way that “United 93” or “World Trade Center” are. In fact, the attacks were not part of the David Benioff screenplay that Lee signed on to direct, nor were they part of Benioff’s original novel (which was published in January 2001). But Lee is an intuitive filmmaker, open to improvisation and adjustments — and, as “NYC Epicenters” reminds us, he is a documentarian who saw his city in a moment of mourning, melancholy and transition, and wanted to capture it.Most of Hollywood did not feel the same. In the weeks following the attacks, feature films with terrorism plotlines, including the Barry Sonnenfeld comedy “Big Trouble” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Collateral Damage,” were delayed and drastically re-edited. Films still in production, like “Men in Black II” and “Lilo & Stitch,” were rewritten to remove echoes of 9/11. Skyline shots with the World Trade Center were edited out of the not-yet-released “Kissing Jessica Stein,” “Igby Goes Down,” “People I Know” and “Spider-Man,” and a sequence of that superhero trapping a helicopter in a web between the twin towers — the centerpiece of a popular teaser trailer — was deleted as well.Most controversially, some filmmakers chose to leave their skyline shots intact, but to erase the Twin Towers with digital effects. And thus the World Trade Center was wiped from “Serendipity,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Mr. Deeds,” and Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander,” which hit screens less than three weeks after the attacks. The director’s publicist explained at the time that he made the last-minute decision to remove the towers because the film was an escapist comedy and seeing the buildings “would defeat that purpose.”Spike Lee disagreed. “You could not even show an image of the World Trade Center. “I said, we’re not doing that.” With filming on “25th Hour” planned for the following winter, Lee set about weaving 9/11 “into the fabric” of the existing story, as his star, Edward Norton, explained on the audio commentary: “It was like looking at it through the angle of another story, but the melancholy that the city was full of in that year afterward. I feel like the impact of 9/11 emotionally is all through this movie.”Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light” installation after reading about it. Touchstone Pictures“25th Hour” is the story of Monty Brogan (Norton), a white-collar drug dealer whom we meet on the last day before he is to report for a seven-year incarceration. That night, he hits the town with his childhood pals (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his live-in girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), ostensibly for one last blowout, but also in an attempt to come to terms with the choices — and thus, mistakes — he’s made in his life.So the explicit references to the tragedy are minimal. There is the opening credit sequence, featuring the “Tribute in Light” art installation, in which 88 searchlights combined to create two beams representing the fallen towers (Lee said he filmed it the very night he read about it in The Times); accompanied by Terence Blanchard’s moving musical score, these images say far more about the tragedy than any news footage or expositional dialogue could. Occasionally, ephemera of that autumn — American flags, makeshift memorials, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden — pop up in the background.One scene, lifted almost verbatim from the novel, finds Monty delivering a lengthy, angry, profanity-laden monologue into a mirror, meticulously insulting New Yorkers of every imaginable race, religion and class (before landing on his family, his friends and finally himself). Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were added to the list of his targets.Most poignantly, Lee relocated a scene between Hoffman and Pepper to an apartment overlooking ground zero, and placed the actors in front of a large window to view workers sifting for human remains. “New York Times says the air’s bad down here,” Hoffman notes; Pepper disparages the paper (“I read The Post”) and insists, “E.P.A. says it’s fine.” (The federal agency was later revealed to have misled the public.)In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground zero.Touchstone PicturesSome of the film’s initial critics found these additions to be an intrusion — A.O. Scott deemed them “obtrusive” and “a little jarring.” But as the years have passed, the value of what Lee was capturing has become clear. On the film’s fifth anniversary, the film critic Mick LaSalle called it “as much an urban historical document as Rossellini’s ‘Open City,’ filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome.”But Lee didn’t just capture the way New York looked in those uncertain, shellshocked months after 9/11. His film captured how the city felt, the strange quiet that fell over the streets, the overwhelming melancholy that embedded itself in our collective DNA. “25th Hour” was not the story of those attacks, but it was a story about one way of life coming to an end, and another, far less certain one looming on the horizon.“We were very careful how we were going to portray Sept. 11 because we know it’s still very painful and that it will always be very painful for those who lost people,” Lee said upon its release in December 2002. “But at the same time, we couldn’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend like it never happened.” And that instinct, that insistence on documenting the city we lived in rather than the city we imagined, is what makes Spike Lee one of New York’s essential filmmakers.Jason Bailey is the author of the forthcoming book “Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It,” a history of the city and movies about it. He is also the host of the “Fun City Cinema” podcast. More

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      in Movies

      Spike Lee Accidentally Reveals Palme d’Or Winner Early: It’s ‘Titane’

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      Julia Ducournau becomes the second woman to win the top prize, after Jane Campion in 1993. The surprise reveal came at the start of a chaotic ceremony.CANNES, France — The 2021 edition of the Cannes Film Festival gave its top prize, the prestigious Palme d’Or, to the French film “Titane.”A wild serial-killer story with some of the most controversial scenes of the festival, “Titane” was directed by Julia Ducournau, who became just the second woman to win the Palme, after Jane Campion took the prize in 1993 for “The Piano.”And though “Titane” had been hotly tipped as a prime contender for the Palme, that reveal came much earlier than intended: At the beginning of the closing ceremony, when the jury president, Spike Lee, was asked to announce the first prize of the night, he misunderstood and read off the first-prize winner instead.“Don’t do it!” shouted the actress-director Mélanie Laurent, a jury member seated next to Lee. But the cat was already out of the bag.(At a news conference after the ceremony, Lee said that he had no excuses and that “I messed up,” adding, “I’m a big sports fan. It’s like the guy at the end of the game in the foul line, he misses the free throw or a guy misses a kick.” He also said he apologized to the Cannes organizers. “They said forget about it.”)The accidental “Titane” reveal was only the first of several chaotic moments at the ceremony, as the spoiled Palme reveal was followed by a best-actor prize for Caleb Landry Jones for the Australian tragedy “Nitram.” When a nervous-looking Jones took the stage, he appeared sick to his stomach, said, “I cannot do this,” and beat a hasty retreat.Still, by the time a teary Ducournau was brought out at the end of the ceremony to finally accept her Palme, she had embraced the chaos. “This evening has been perfect,” she said, “because it’s so not perfect.”Julia Ducournau, left with her star, Agatha Rousselle, became the second woman to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes history.Eric Gaillard/ReutersOther major winners included Leos Carax, who took the best-director prize for his eccentric musical “Annette,” best-actress winner Renate Reinsve for the Norwegian romantic dramedy “The Worst Person in the World,” and a pair of ties: The second-place prize was split between “A Hero,” from the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, and the Finnish drama “Compartment No. 6,” while the third-prize tie went to the Nadav Lapid film “Ahed’s Knee” and “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton.At the last Cannes film festival, held in 2019, the Palme winner was “Parasite,” the first major prize Bong Joon Ho’s film took on its path to the best-picture Oscar. Though “Titane” is far too gory to become a major Oscar contender, its Palme win firmly establishes Ducournau as a major international director only two feature films into her career.Correction: July 17, 2021An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the winner of the best director prize. He is Leos Carax, not Leox Carax. More

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      in Movies

      Malcolm D. Lee on ‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’ and Directing LeBron James

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      The filmmaker recalls the “organized chaos” that went into making the new film and the studio pickup games with Chris Paul and other pros.The making of “Space Jam: A New Legacy” was a head-spinning exercise in the unfamiliar for the director Malcolm D. Lee.For one thing, the film went into production less than a week after he officially signed on to direct the film. Lee was a late addition in summer 2019, taking over directing duties from Terence Nance. The script was still in development. Lee, the veteran director of comedies like “Girls Trip” (2017) and “The Best Man” (1999), had never worked with animation before and had never seen the original “Space Jam,” the 1996 basketball-Looney Tunes crossover starring Michael Jordan.On top of all that, Lee was charged with taking care of a movie built around LeBron James, one of the most popular athletes in the world. James had appeared on the big screen before (most notably in a supporting role in the 2015 romantic comedy “Trainwreck”) but had never anchored a feature.“It was organized chaos,” Lee, 51, said in an interview this week.The director met James a decade earlier when they had discussed making a film together, but it never came to fruition. The new project is a gamble for both Lee and James: It will inevitably be compared to the now-beloved original in the same way that James is continually measured against Jordan. If it flops, a movie literally billed as “A New Legacy” may be damaging to James’s own.The movie is, if nothing else, self-aware. At one point, James, playing himself, notes how poorly athletes fare when they try to act. (Similarly to the original, other pro basketball players — including Damian Lillard, Anthony Davis and Diana Taurasi — have cameos.) The film also features Don Cheadle as the villainous manifestation of an algorithm named, well, Al G. Rhythm, who kidnaps James, his youngest son (Cedric Joe) and the rest of the Warner Bros. universe.James and Bugs share the screen.Warner Bros. In addition to preparing for the film, James, 36, also had to stay in shape for the N.B.A. season. Lee said that on shoot days, James would wake up at 2 a.m. and work out till 6 a.m., then show up for a full day on set.In an interview, Lee, who is the cousin of fellow filmmaker Spike Lee, discussed his own love for basketball and how he directed a star without a traditional acting background. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Did you grow up playing basketball?The third grade really is when I started playing organized basketball. I wasn’t as into it as my brother and my dad were encouraging me to. I started playing in this league in Brooklyn called the Youth Basketball Association. My dad coached a year. In fact, it’s funny, too, because Spike, who was living with us at the time, was the assistant coach. [Lee is 13 years older than his cousin.]No kidding.Swear to God. And Spike will tell you himself. There was one week when my dad went down to Alabama — that’s where he’s from — and Spike had to coach us. We had an undefeated season until that date, so Spike was sweating coaching us. And we actually got the victory. He didn’t want to spoil my father’s streak.What was your first conversation with LeBron like when you took the “Space Jam” gig?I think LeBron had the same agenda as everyone else in that he wanted to make the movie great. He wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing, that my vision was clear and that he’d be taken care of. Not coddled, but that there was a leader aboard who was going to say, “This is what we’re going to do and this is how are we going to do it.” I assured him that there could be delays — I just don’t know — but I’m a professional, I’ve been in this for a long time and I will make sure that you’re taken care of.Lee signed onto the film late in the process. “It was organized chaos,” he said.Justin Lubin/Warner Bros.Did you have any reservations about working with a basketball star who doesn’t have the traditional acting training that someone like Don Cheadle has?Not really. LeBron’s been in front of the camera since he was 18 years old. Now, I mean, “Oh, those are just interviews,” but people get asked the same questions over and over again. So he’s got some rehearsed responses. He also was very funny. He wants to be good. He was good in “Trainwreck.” There’s some actors that get something and say, “OK, that’ll cut together.” And some that are just natural. I think LeBron has a lot of natural ability.Without spoiling it, there is a scene where LeBron has to convey a vulnerable emotion toward his son. Is there anything in particular either you or he did to prepare for that scene? Because that had to be out of his comfort zone.For sure. Look, the first thing that I try to get with any actor is trust, right? I have to trust them. They have to trust me because I’m going to ask them to go to some places that they aren’t necessarily comfortable going. So yes, we did talk about something before he delivered some of those lines. Then we did a couple of takes — just let him get warmed up. If I’m not getting what I’m looking for, then I’ll say, “Why don’t you think about this? And don’t worry about the line so much. Just have this in your brain and then say it.”From left, Nneka Ogwumike, Cedric Joe, Damian Lillard, Anthony Davis, Klay Thompson and Diana Taurasi on the set. Scott Garfield/Warner Bros.Film is a director-driven medium, and basketball is very much player-driven in that players can get coaches fired or disregard them entirely. Did that dynamic ever come into play in the course of filming?No. I don’t think there was ever any “I want to do it this way and I don’t care what you have to say.” I think LeBron likes to be coached. He’s a master of his craft. But at the same time, people are in your corner whose job it is to say: “Make sure you do this. Think about this. I’m seeing this on the court. You’re not seeing blah, blah, blah.” And I think he takes that information. Same thing with acting.During the filming of the original “Space Jam,” Michael Jordan hosted scrimmages with other N.B.A. players. Was there anything like that here?There was a court built for [James] on the Warner Bros. lot. I did go to one pickup game and that was thrilling for me, because I’m a huge basketball fan. Chris Paul was there, Ben Simmons, Anthony Davis, JaVale McGee, Draymond Green.You didn’t ask to play?Hell no.What an opportunity, man!Are you kidding? The opportunity to get embarrassed. A lot of those guys come into the gym, they don’t know I’m the director of the movie. They’re like, “Who’s this dude?” I can’t be like, “Hey, how you doing? I played intramurals at Georgetown.” That’s not going to impress anybody. More

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      On the Scene: Cannes Film Festival 🇫🇷

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      On the Scene: Cannes Film Festival 🇫🇷Kyle BuchananReporting from the French RivieraThe standing ovation for “Annette” — an esoteric musical with songs from the band Sparks — lasted so long (over five minutes!), Adam Driver and Leos Carax, its director, both lit up cigarettes in the theater. More