"Double feature."
Now, I'm too sleepy these days to pull off a classic double feature, where you watch the movies more or less consecutively, with 20 minutes or less between them. I usually fall asleep at some point during even one movie that I watch after dinner. (Thursday night was the extreme example: I fell asleep in the middle of Ridley Scott's 94-minute Legend (1985) for such a long time that I actually had to finish it on Friday night. That was no commentary on the movie, which I found even more enthralling on my second viewing than my first.)
It being a Saturday, though, I could watch one movie during "quiet time" (the pre-dinner screen time for my kids) and one in the post-dinner time slot. And because my younger son has unofficial domain over the living room during quiet time, the garage on the projector was my chosen viewing location.
Movies about sports are better than sports movies
It may not surprise you to learn that Ben Affleck's Air feels reminiscent of Bennett Miller's Moneyball, considering that both are more about the business of sports than a sport itself. Both feature off-field dealings between eccentric characters who are happy enough to berate each other with foul language if it will help sell their point.
And both, it turns out, are really terrific.
Air doesn't rise to the level of Moneyball, to be sure, and it's also considerably less of a sports movie, seeing as how its only game images are real archival footage of Michael Jordan. But boy was it a joy to watch. It's got a great cast, exceptional dialogue and enviable economy of storytelling. And it's just plain fun.
Unlike most sports movies.
That's right, I said it: Movies about sports are better than sports movies.
I love being in the world of sports, but I really don't care that much for a sporting event, or a series of sporting events, to be carried out on screen in front of me. Oh, there are certainly the exceptions -- Major League, for example, is one of the movies it would offend me least to watch once a week for the rest of my life. Generally speaking, though, give me a movie in the world of sports rather than a sports movie any day of the week.
The reasons are pretty clear, and I've gone through them before. For movies that are fiction, I simply don't believe that the crazy comeback that screenwriter concocted would actually happen. Real sports comebacks are amazing precisely because they did happen. For non-fiction films, sometimes that recreation can be cool to watch, but I'd usually just rather watch a tape of the actual game.
But I can rub elbows with sports in a movie like Air or Moneyball without having to suspend disbelief and judge a screenwriter's success at writing some buzzer beater that I don't believe really happened.
And what a bunch of fun sports adjacent characters to rub elbows with. Affleck as Phil Knight, Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, Jason Bateman as the lesser known marketing guy, Chris Tucker as another guy at the company -- no I really don't think it's relevant for me to look up their names or titles right now -- they were just a great bunch to spend two hours with. To say nothing of Viola Davis as Jordan's mother Deloris.
What I thought was really impressive is that they got such good dialogue and such a good script without having to have an Aaron Sorkin in their corner. Air was written by a guy named Alex Convery, and this is his very first credit.
I was all ready to throw Plane on the pile of terrible Gerard Butler misfires, of which there are so many that it becomes impossible even to count them. I mean, the title alone suggests some sort of surrender by the studio and/or screenwriters.
But then I kind of enjoyed the hell out of it.
Things I really liked:
1) The plane losing altitude (not a spoiler, because come on) and trying to land was harrowing. I'm sure I've seen 200 plane crashes in movies, but this one put me into the moment better than most. Kudos, Jean-Francois Richet -- an actual good director, I am reminded as I now see that he directed Blood Father, which I really liked.
2) Butler behaves like a pilot, not an action hero. If you've seen the trailer you know Butler et al mix it up with some bad men in this movie, and yes, Butler carries multiple guns at different points. But the movie remembers that this is an airline pilot, not a commando. He does have an intense physical struggle, but I'm willing to believe a fit 50-year-old man could indeed prevail in such a situation. I don't believe he could pick up a gun for the first time and start picking off foes with it, and to its credit, this movie avoids him having to do that -- almost entirely I think.
3) I actually believed from moment to moment where the story went. It's a wild story to be sure, but I never doubted that the latest twist would/could happen.
Given that Butler is coming off truly terrible movies like Geostorm and Last Seen Alive, and I was not the fan of Greenland that some people were, this has to be seen as a real mini-comeback for him.
Air was an easy four-star rating for me on Letterboxd, as it has again jumped to the front of the line of the films I've seen in the weak-so-far year of 2023. My initial instinct was to give Plane the same -- I know, I know. But in fact, the "I know, I know" is my guilt talking, my idea that Butler is irredeemably terrible and if I really liked one of his films, it must be a mistake on my part.
Who wants guilt to be a factor in the experience you had watching a movie? So instead of 3.5 stars, I gave this one four stars as well.
And that's a pretty damn good double feature.
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