Tag: Matt Damon

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NOW PLAYING: Fantastical Visions

I Saw The TV Glow (Courtesy A24)

The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:

I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land. 

IF

Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.

Back to Black 

Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27. 

The Blue Angels

This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.

Flash Gordon

The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.

The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.

The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.

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Film Features Film/TV

Air

Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro sits across from Viola Davis’ Deloris Jordan.

It’s newsworthy that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are once again making movies together in 2023. The duo first burst onto the scene in 1998, when their script for Good Will Hunting won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and also saw Robin Williams earn a Best Supporting Actor trophy. Fast-forward 25 years, and the duo is back with their new film, Air. Unlike Good Will Hunting’s coming-of-age plot, Air is a true story: the history of Nike footwear.

Air begins in 1984 when shoe companies Adidas, Nike, and Converse are battling for market share. The three firms are fighting, with varying levels of success, to catch famous athletes’ attention — especially in the NBA, where Michael Jordan is a rising star. Jordan has a clear interest in Adidas and a sponsorship from Converse; Nike, with its 17 percent market share, is an afterthought.

Basketball scout Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) sets out to make Nike a force to be reckoned with. Vaccaro goes way beyond his jurisdiction to create the Air Jordan, the now-legendary sneaker that catapulted Nike to the top table. Although Vaccaro’s risks lead to eventual success, many of the hurdles he encounters threaten the company’s stability and reputation. But in the end, Vaccaro created a new paradigm for celebrity endorsement.

Damon is only one of many familiar faces in Air, along with Chris Tucker, Jason Bateman, Marlon Wayans, and Viola Davis. As a director, Affleck uses each actor’s individual styles to evoke the very real people they’re portraying. One example is Viola Davis’ portrayal of Deloris Jordan, Michael Jordan’s mom. Making most of the decisions for him during that time, Michael Jordan’s parents were pivotal figures who negotiated contracts and dealt with the media. Davis’ firm motherly hand and emotional balance makes you believe Michael Jordan is her actual son. Similarly, Chris Tucker’s portrayal of Nike executive Howard White leverages Tucker’s comedic chops during tense scenarios, while also sincerely conveying the loyalty White had for Vaccaro and Nike.

From the start of the film, Affleck takes the viewer back to the ’80s, with clips of Mr. T and popular infomercials; ’80s hits like Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” soundtrack long drives. Even Affleck’s camera shots look like they came from ’80s films, like the repeated extreme close-ups of Sonny’s face. The bright wardrobe colors worn by Damon made this Gen-Zer run to my grandfather’s closet to find his Members Only jacket.

There’s one thing about the cast list that stands out: Michael Jordan, the man himself, is not in the film. Really? You had a $60-$70 million dollar budget, and you don’t even have a cameo of Michael Jordan? But Air is all the better without him. We get to know Vaccaro as a risk-taking go-getter, although he makes everyone around him anxious. Other minor characters like Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) are given opportunities to shine, especially through Strasser’s arc about his daughter and the risks he wasn’t able to take. Add in Michael Jordan and Air becomes all about him. The movie’s message about taking risks and the qualities that made it special would be overshadowed by the presence of the superstar.

The messages of this movie can be encompassed in one quote which keeps getting repeated: “A shoe is just a shoe until someone puts their foot in it.” This story was just an idea until Affleck and Damon got their hands on it — and made it something special.

Air
Now playing
Multiple locations

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Now Playing In Memphis: Video Games and Video Art

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Everybody’s favorite plumber-jumper gets a moment in the spotlight. The previous attempt to make The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the 1990s was an epic train wreck, but this one is animated and getting good buzz from audience, if not from critics. The all-star voice cast includes Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black, Seth Rogan, Fred Armisen, and Keegan-Michael Key, But will it escape the curse of video game adaptation? Spoiler alert: The princess is in another castle. 

In 1984, Nike was a struggling athletic shoe company on the verge of bankruptcy. Then they struck sponsorship deal with a young basketball player named Michael Jordan. Ben Affleck returns to the director’s chair for Air, the origin story of modern sneaker culture, with Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother Deloris and Matt Damon as Nike exec Steve Vaccaro. 

The winner of the 2023 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand And One film is the story of a poor, Black single mother trying to raise her son in New York City. Triple threat Teyana Taylor stars in what is being called the performance of the year. 

Come to John Wick: Chapter 4 for the great Keanu Reeves gun-fu-ing his way through hordes of assassins who disrespected his dog or something. Stay for the scene stealing turn by action movie legend Donnie Yen.  

Nam June Paik was the first, and many say still the greatest, video artist. The Japanese-Korean had a strong connection with Memphis — his last commission, Vide-O-belisk was created for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. On Thursday, April 14, Crosstown Theater will host the Memphis premiere of a new biographical documentary about the trailblazer, Nam Jun Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV.

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Jason Bourne: Matt Damon Cashes Another Check

I like Matt Damon; you like Matt Damon; everybody likes Matt Damon. He’s an everyman for our age. He can be vulnerable and nerdy, like when he’s playing the stranded astronaut in The Martian, or he can be rough and hunky, like when he’s playing Jason Bourne, like he does in Jason Bourne.

Author Robert Ludlum created Bourne in his 1980 novel The Bourne Identity, launching a surefire formula for airport gift-shop, page-turner success. He took a standard Cold War spy story of betrayal and double-cross and, borrowing a page from the Captain America comics, made his protagonist a borderline superhuman product of a covert CIA super soldier program. The now 13 books in the series all carry the same branding strategy: The title starts with “The Bourne…” and ends with a single, gravitas-inducing word like “Imperative,” “Ultimatum,” or “Sanction.”

For the fifth film installment of the Bourne saga, director Paul Greengrass and company have chosen to abandon the classic titular formula in favor of simply using the character’s name, and it’s a crucial tell. Even the modicum of creativity needed to take Bourne’s name and add a single, nondescript word was too much. Damon and Greengrass sat out the last installment, and 2012’s Bourne Legacy suffered greatly for its lack of Bourne, so now they’re back to give us the pure, uncut Bourne.

We first see our hero having an expositional flashback dream while riding in a crappy Land Rover to a godforsaken town on the border of Greece and Albania where he makes his living as a street fighter. Bourne prepares for the punch out with a resigned look, and I imagine Damon, having been sucked back in to play a part he said he was finished with, was drawing from life experience. In 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, Damon’s expression read as the grim determination of a man who must survive long odds. In 2016, it vacillates between mild annoyance and boredom.

Also bored is Tommy Lee Jones as CIA Director Dewey. He’s secretly working to ensure that his spooks have access to all the information in Deep Dream, a poorly described tech product with 1.5 billion users created by Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed). But Operation Iron Hand, Dewey’s plans for ushering in the surveillance state of his dreams, hits a bump when Kalloor gets an attack of conscience and opts out of the secret agreement he had with the government. Assassination plans are hatched.

Meanwhile, Bourne’s drawn out of hiding by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), a former ally from back in the Ultimatum days who is going to leak word of all of the CIA’s nefarious doings to Christian Dassault (Vinzenz Kiefer), the Julian Assange hacker figure added to give outdated spy jinx a little 2016 razzmatazz. Greengrass creates the film’s only good set piece in the midst of a violent street protest in Athens where Bourne and Parsons are trying to meet while pursued by a fellow CIA superassissin known only as the Asset (Vincent Cassel). The dramatic lighting and crude street fighting suggest the 2014 made-for-YouTube protests in Ukraine, and the colorist has a field day.

But Greengrass can’t keep his bad habits at bay for long. The pioneer of handheld shaky cam just can’t sit still long enough to create a decent establishing shot. Either the film steadily loses visual coherence as it progresses, or I was just worn down by the constant useless cutting. Why does it take a team of film professionals five cuts to show Jason Bourne getting out of a car? Do we really need to see three angles of CIA Cyber Ops chief Heather Lee (Alcia Vikander padding her retirement account) doing hacker stuff on a laptop?

By the time Bourne and the Asset are chasing each other through the neon streets of Las Vegas, the crappy editing sinks the entire scene, transforming fantastically expensive car stunts into a dull blur of random images set to the same pounding, drum-heavy score that also accompanies Bourne when he’s heading into a hotel bathroom. Keeping with its generic title, Jason Bourne is the basic bitch of 21st-century action movies.

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Film Review: The Martian

2001: A Space Odyssey regularly jockeys for position with Citizen Kane and Vertigo atop lists of the greatest movies ever made. When Stanley Kubrick set out to create what he called “the proverbial good science-fiction movie”, he tapped Arthur C. Clarke, the super-genius author who came up with the idea for the communications satellite, and the resulting masterpiece explores the space between scientific rigor and religious awe.

But sometimes it seems 2001‘s influence on the genre it sought to perfect has not been universally positive. Consider 1968’s other great sci-fi hit, Planet of the Apes. It, too, concerned itself with humanity’s ultimate fate, but its big ideas are wrapped in a fun package. There should be enough room in sci-fi for both Charlton Heston snarling “You damn dirty apes!” and Keir Dullea staring into psychedelic infinity. But too often, when directors are given free reign, they feel obligated to try to top Kubrick. Consider two recent examples of hundred-million- dollar misfires: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Nolan’s spectacular, 2001-inspired 70-mm photography couldn’t save Interstellar from collapsing into self-important gobbledygook. For Prometheus, Scott disappointed everyone by ditching the pulpy, “haunted-house-in-space” premise that made Alien a classic in favor of wallowing in secondhand Kubrickian mysticism.

Scott learned his lesson with The Martian. The origin and fate of all humanity are not at stake, just the life of one man: NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon). Adapted from a best-selling novel by Andrew Weir, The Martian‘s inspiration comes not from universe-spanning epics, but from the 1954 short story “The Cold Equations,” in which a space pilot and a stowaway must grapple with the fact that they don’t have enough fuel to land safely. Newtonian physics creates the fodder for high drama.

When an unexpected sandstorm forces the crew of the Ares 3 mission to leave the red planet in a hurry, Watney is hit by flying debris and left for dead. But Watney wakes up and drags himself back to the expedition’s abandoned, but still mostly functional, base, where he performs some gruesome self-surgery and tries to come to grips with the fact that he is more alone than anyone has ever been. The opening sequence, where the crew struggles through the storm and mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) must make the gut-wrenching decision to leave, are some of Scott’s best work since Black Hawk Down. The story then splits into three: the castaway’s uphill battle to survive in Mars’ harsh environment; the NASA ground team discovering they’ve still got a live astronaut on the Martian surface; and the expedition crew flying through the solar system with only enough fuel to return to Earth. Everyone must work together to rescue Watney as the world watches.

The Martian often plays out like a fictionalized, future version of Apollo 13. Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard get all the little details right, like how calling a NASA scientist a “steely-eyed missile man” is the highest compliment, and how “lock the doors” is the worst thing you can hear in mission control. But they never get bogged down in minutiae, thanks largely to Damon’s engaging and vulnerable performance. The cast is huge, and features workmanlike performances from Jeff Daniels as the NASA director, Kristen Wiig as the beleaguered PR specialist, Chiwetel Ejiofor as the mission director, and Sean Bean as the head of the astronaut corps. But even though Scott is excellent at ratcheting up the tension back on Earth, I found myself eager to return to Mars to watch Damon living by his wits while pausing occasionally to take in the otherworldly vistas Scott creates from heavily CGI’d footage of the Jordanian desert.

The Martian is a major return to form for Scott, who seems inspired by NASA’s can-do spirit. The film’s optimism is a far cry from the darkness of Blade Runner, but it has proven to be a big hit with audiences, massively outperforming box-office projections by grossing $55 million in its opening weekend. As this film and Gravity prove, science fiction is sometimes better when it concentrates on the small questions, like how to find your way home.

The Martian
Now playing
Multiple locations

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Promised Land

Promised Land, the muckraking new film co-written by and co-starring Matt Damon and John Krasinski, wants you to think about “fracking,” the controversial and environmentally troubling means of natural-gas extraction that’s the subject of the latest energy-industry boom. But I found myself instead mulling why no one’s put Damon in a straight romance.

Directed with anonymous assurance by sometime indie auteur Gus Van Sant, who also helmed Damon’s writer-actor breakout Good Will Hunting, Promised Land is in the mold of environmental exposé films such as The China Syndrome, A Civil Action, or Erin Brockovich. Damon is Steve Butler, who escaped his own dying Iowa farm town and has risen to be VP of land management for a multi-billion-dollar energy company via his astounding success at leasing rural lands for fracking.

Explaining his effectiveness to his bosses, Steve says that he relates to his targets because he comes from the same world of football Fridays, tractor pulls, and the “delusional, self-mythologizing bullshit” of the “farming-town fantasy.” The way Damon sees it, fracking is an easy sell in rural areas losing industry and dependent on government help to make farming profitable. “I’m not selling them natural gas. I’m selling them the only way they have to get back,” he says.

Promised Land suggests complexity in making the film’s protagonist a representative of the ostensible corporate villains, while making Steve’s do-gooder foil, a community organizer played by Krasinski, seem just as conniving and less sincere. But a few weeks after seeing the film, these machinations are less memorable than Damon’s ostensibly inessential bar-room meet-cute with conveniently charming local Rosemarie DeWitt.

It’s reminiscent of Damon’s work with DeWitt’s Your Sister’s Sister co-star Emily Blunt in last year’s The Adjustment Bureau. The metaphysical plot was a dud, but the pair’s dry flirtations were a kick. Damon’s IMDb filmography lists 64 titles, and few, if any, are primarily relationship-driven, much less anything you’d call a romantic comedy. Maybe, given the dire quality the latter subgenre has fallen into, this is smart on his part, but pair Damon with an actress like Blunt or DeWitt, who can match his brainy, naturalistic charm, and there’s a good movie to be made.

Beyond the Damon-DeWitt chemistry, Promised Land has some other nice performances, especially Frances McDormand as Steve’s only-doing-my-job-I’ve-got-a-kid-to-feed corporate sidekick and 2012 breakout Scoot McNairy (Argo, Killing Them Softly) as an ornery farmer who rejects Damon’s pitch.

Beyond performance, Promised Land is interesting for its unresolved attitude about life outside the cities and burbs. The film seems to think it’s correcting Steve’s merciless diagnosis of small-town life, but the corrective feels phony — as does a final-act plot twist. Unless farming towns in Pennsylvania are radically different from those in Arkansas, I feel comfortable saying there’s no single-and-available Rosemarie DeWitt, moved back from the big city to teach grade school and live in a big, beautiful house all by herself, just waiting for the right suitor to make his way into town. And that elderly farmer riding around in his pick-up truck (here, Hal Holbrook) is probably not a courtly Cornell and M.I.T. grad and former Boeing engineer ready to contradict corporate misinformation. But even hard-selling a romantic ideal of small-town life for an urban liberal audience, Promised Land never really answers the challenge Damon’s character makes: Fracking may not be the answer for depressed rural economies, but what is?

Promised Land

Opening Friday, January 4th

Multiple locations