It's imagined as a classic American tale of ambition and a singular vision, in the form of the underestimated salesman Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon). It's presented as a classic sports movie about an underdog team (in this case, Nike) achieving greatness with a game-winning score (a rousing boardroom sales pitch). OK, that's the crass way of describing it the film's creators would undoubtedly characterize their aims as being more "inspiring" than that. Directed by Ben Affleck with a screenplay by Alex Convery, Air is a soulless dramatization of how a giant corporation convinced a promising NBA rookie to make its already wealthy and well-off board members, CEOs, and salespeople even wealthier and set for life. But we're living in the era of the nostalgic headline-to-Hollywood pipeline and in an age where entrepreneurs are obsessed with being credited as artistic visionaries, so perhaps it was inevitable something like the movie Air would come to exist. Over the years, there have been plenty of examinations of the Air Jordan brand's fraught success and influence, including a 2018 documentary, Unbanned: The Legend of AJ1. It renewed hand-wringing over American consumerism and " Black-on-Black" crime. The Air Jordan line was a culture-shifting juggernaut, impacting not just the business of sports but fashion, celebrity, hip-hop, and street culture for decades to come. “That is part of the story.In 1984, a young Michael Jordan signed what was then the NBA's most lucrative sneaker deal with Nike. “I just wanted to tell the story of the sneaker but be honest about it,” Bamiro said. They have chosen to ignore it.īamiro, in telling the Air Jordan story, does not. But by the end viewers likely will be left wondering why they would not say anything, why Jordan would not say anything, to address the violence that has too often surrounded the shoes over the years. For most of the movie, it’s easy to root for Nike, the underdog company that changed sports marketing forever. That is something of a deflating coda for the story, for all the Jordan nostalgia we’ve seen over the past month. Woods’ mother, Dazie Williams, says in the movie that she does not blame Nike for her son’s death but that, “Nike could say something.” The film profiles one 22-year-old, Joshua Woods, who was killed in Texas in 2012. While the perception remains that violence around Air Jordans was a story for 25 years ago, Bamiro points out that it is ongoing. It is a jarring reminder of the reality of the shoe obsession, something that has been glossed over in the re-examination and celebration of Jordan’s career, brought on by the attention, “The Last Dance” was given. There is criticism of Nike, which only put out a limited number of shoes and, thus, creates a superheated demand. He explores, too, the dark side of the Air Jordan obsession, looking at the lives of young men who were killed or subjected to violence while having their sneakers stolen. But as he proceeded, he said, he was continually drawn to the mid-1980s and how seminal the deal Nike gave to Jordan proved to be.īut Bamiro’s movie does not stop there. When Bamiro set out to make the movie, though, the story was not supposed to be about the origins of the Air Jordan-he wanted, at first, to profile the obsessive collectors of the shoes and tell their stories.
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