Year Released: 2023
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Starring: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina
(R, 112 min.)
Genre: Drama/Comedy, Inspired by True Events

“I don’t like to take no for an answer, and I think your son should be endorsed by someone with the same mindset.” Sonny Vaccaro to Delores Jordan

This seems a compelling and sweet film about risking everything for someone you believe in. It even has streaks of genius, most of which is due to Matt Damon’s brilliant performance.

Sonny Vaccaro and Nike pursue basketball rookie Michael Jordan, creating a partnership that revolutionizes the world of sports and contemporary culture.

The plaudits are coming in, each critic trying to undo the others with a clever basketball analogy:

It’s “ nothing but net,” or

… a slam dunk to rival other sports-business gems from Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire” (1996) to Brad Pitt in Moneyball (2011). Jason Fraley

The film reunites those bad-part-of-town Boston buds, Damon and Affleck, who awed everyone in their film debut Good Will Hunting over a quarter of a century ago.

It’s the first time Affleck is directing his best bud, and most agree that he does a good job. Neither actor is afraid of self-deprecation, either.

Damon, whom we remember for his buff body and superb fighting skills in his Bourne days, puts on the pounds and even wears a fat suit to look like the sweaty and overweight schlub Sonny Vaccaro. We even have a funny scene with him in a track suit getting ready to make it round the track. I will not spoil it for you, though.

Affleck plays Nike CEO and founder Phil Knight, a Rolex buddhist (like Richard Gere and even the current Dalia Lama himself ), and he has no compunctions about how his materialist proclivities might conflict with his mystic teachings, which he drops whenever he doesn’t know what to say to Damon, especially when he pleads for more money for his basketball division.

When you find a wise man who will point out your faults, follow him like a map to a hidden treasure.

This is no self, there is just the non-self.

Damon’s response in right on:

“Is this gonna lead to some Buddhist aphorism I don't wanna hear?”

He also comments about the contrast between those comments and Knight’s purple Porsche.

***

Much has been said about Michael Jordan’s insistence that he would not approve the film unless Viola Davis played his mother, Delores. She does, and they actually wrote extra scenes to give her more screen time, but she is sadly underused here, and we see little of that great talent she wowed us with in Fences.

Different Drummer is not the only critic who felt the absence of the real Michael Jordan in the film is at best awkward. He only appears in cuts of his real life career and later life tragedies, i.e. his father being killed for the expensive car Michael gave him. These real screenshots appear while Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro gives a moving pep talk in his desperate play to get Jordan for Nike instead of Adidas, which the young rookie prefers. The extemporaneous speech is inspiring – at least I thought so at the time – but it also seems to elevate a talented athlete to mythic if not God-like proportions, something that has tainted the sports world for several decades. Here it is. You decide:

Forget about the shoes, forget about the money. You're going to make enough money, it's not going to matter. Money can buy you almost anything, it can't buy you immortality. That, you have to earn.

I’m going to look you in the eyes and I'm gonna tell you the future. You were cut from your high school basketball team. You willed your way to the NBA. You're gonna win championships. It's an American story, and that's why Americans are gonna love it. People are going to build you up, and God are they going to, because when you're great and new, we love you. Man, we'll build you up into something that doesn't even exist. You're going to change the fucking world. But you know what? Once they've built you as high as they possibly can, they're gonna tear you back down - it's the most predictable pattern.

We build you into something that doesn't exist, and that means you have to try to be that thing all day, every day. That's how it works. And we do it again, and again, and again. And I'm going to tell you the truth. You're going to be attacked, betrayed, exposed and humiliated. And you'd survive that. A lot of people can climb that mountain. It's the way down that breaks them, 'cause that's the moment when you are truly alone. And what would you do then?

Can you summon the will to fight on, through all the pain, and rise again? Who are you Michael? That will be the defining question of your life. And I think you already know the answer, and that's why we're all here.

A shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it. Then it has meaning. The rest of us just want a chance to touch that greatness. We need you in these shoes not so you have meaning in your life, but so that we have meaning in ours. Everyone at this table will be forgotten as soon as our time here is up - except for you. You're gonna be remembered forever, because some things are eternal. You're Michael Jordan, and your story is gonna make us want to fly.

This is where Different Drummer has some qualms and begins to agree with those who see the film as one giant infomercial. I still remember when sports shoes were called sneakers or tennis shoes. They were about $2 and made of canvas. We didn’t beat people up to steal them. And we looked up to scientists who saved lives like Jonas Salk who invented the polio vaccine, or Louis Pasteur, who heated milk so it would not kill babies. Not celebrities, rock stars, and overpaid athletes. Perhaps these two writers say it best, although neither one mentions that Nike’s sweatshops use Chinese slave labor:

We learn Michael earns around $400 million annually in "passive" income from the sale of his branded shoe line, but the rest of Air makes a big deal out of Nike, again, being a multi-billion-dollar corporation that is now generating several times that amount by putting this guy's name on its sweat-shopped, mass-produced, faux-limited widgets. Air doesn't, in other words, know what it's about. If it did, surely no one involved would make a movie valorizing a roomful of white CEOs making an impossible fortune off some Black kid. –Walter Chaw

But this film winds up looking like the most expensive in-house corporate promo in history: shallow, parochial and obtuse. By the time the credits roll, we’re apparently supposed to be euphoric – not so much at individual sporting achievement, but at all the billions of dollars that Nike has been making. –Betsy Reed (The Guardian)

Sometimes it takes a while for a film to gel. Or maybe I should say congeal. That is exactly what happened for me. Not to mention my repulsion by the repeated F bombs, which I regard as just verbal sloth as well as vulgar, and the offensively crude talk from Chris Messina as Jordan’s agent David Falk.

Watch it to see Hollywood’s expert manipulation of our emotions. However, it seems some of us are not so naïve anymore. Let me know what you think a week after you see it. When the helium balloons sag to the floor.

–Kathy Borich
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Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

Sonny Vaccarro (Matt Damon) breaks all the rules to sign the relatively unknown rookie, Michael Jordan, onto the struggling Nike basketball division. The first is arriving unannounced at his parents’ house in Wilmington, North Carolina.

He is not looking to talk to 21-year old Michael himself, but to his mama, because, as his buddy at Nike Howard White (Christ Tucker) has told him. in the Black communities, “The mamas run stuff.”

Refusing to take no for an answer, Delores Jordan finally invites him into her house and backyard. Words are exchanged, certainly not food, for this is a reluctantly accepted usurper, not an invited guest, and Michael is going with Adidas, anyway.

What she might have offered him, later, when they finally settle things, is this North Carolina and all-around Southern staple: Banana Pudding.

Few North Carolinians can agree who makes the best barbecue, but we all agree that it should be chased with a dish of banana pudding. A Southern interpretation of an English trifle, banana pudding knows no season, only devotion.

Some people like their banana pudding topped with toasted meringue. Others vote for billows of whipped cream. Some want it warm. Others want it deeply chilled. It goes without saying that banana pudding is layered, not stirred.

Barbecue is contentious. Banana pudding is a peacemaker. –Sherri Castle

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Banana pudding is a signature Southern soul food dessert served on a bed of Nilla Wafers cookies and layered with round slices of bananas in between yummy whipped topping, pudding, and cream cheese.

It’s pure bliss – also known as soul food!

Banana pudding has a Southern identity that stretches back more than half a century. This dish became quintessentially Southern, probably due to the source of where it was primarily being prepared, providing the South with a more extraordinary claim to the dish!

Black Southern banana pudding is an elevated version of the Americanized English trifle. This layered homemade custard dish was reimagined to perfection by African-American cooks in the South. –Shaunda Necole

Enjoy!