I was going to avoid the nausea and the spiritual depletion of sitting through the nearly three-hour John Wick: Chapter 4. I can sense what’s waiting for me, and I hate the mere idea of submitting to this shite. I “know” (i.e., am strongly suspecting) that my reaction will more or less align with David Poland’s 3.24 review.

But too many fools and knaves are kowtowing, and so I’ve accepted the unfortunate burden of having to sit through the damn thing (allegedly a Gray Man-ish pummeling) sometime this afternoon. Talk about a ghastly prospect…

Poland excerpt:

Nobody remembers that one version of the Tootsie ad copy (seen with my very own eyes a week or two before the 12.17.82 opening) described Dustin Hoffman’s “Michael Dorsey” as a “desperate, out-of-work, hopelessly straight actor.” Columbia marketers didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.

Imagine if someone was dumb and impolitic enough to launch a site that highlights and occasionally even celebrates the writing (books and short stories but especially screenplays) by members of a certain ethnic group that is arguably (a) the most actively despised online and (b) in some instances and sectors is constantly discriminated against across the board — straight white older males. Imagine if someone was stupid enough to do this.

If you calculate that the glory days of the ‘70s actually began with Bonnie and Clyde (fall of ‘67) and ended with Star Wars (May ‘77), it followed that the fallow, high-concept period of the early to mid ‘80s which included the tits & zits films (and which produced one unchallengeable classic — Risky Business) and the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula films (Flashdance, Top Gun), you can understand and sympathize with the July ‘86 cover-story freak-out by New York critic David Denby.

The indie-driven ‘90s provided what felt like an exciting reprieve, and there were certainly many distinguished films that came out in the early aughts before the superhero death virus that began to permeate in the early 2010s. This led to Denby’s “Do Movies Have A Future?”, which was published in 2012. But it wasn’t quite as bad as all that…okay, maybe it was.

The later Obama years nonetheless allowed for cinematic highlights (The Wolf of Wall Street, A Separation, 12 Years A Slave, Zero Dark Thirty, The Social Network, Call Me By Your Name, Moneyball, Son of Saul), but then the scolding, pearl-clutching wokesters muscled their way into the remaining nooks and crannies of Hollywood consciousness in 2017-18, and a huge wave of fear, intimidation and conservatism flooded in, and right now many of us are still gasping for breath.

Hollywood Elsewhere hasn’t seen Celine Song’s Past Lives, but many who caught it at Sundance ‘23 are claiming it will be a formidable contender in the forthcoming 2023 Best Picture slug-out. That may be the case (I might love it!) but they’re forgetting one tiny thing. They’re forgetting that A24 has to pay the price for EEAAO — it has to pay for sweeping the table and permanently lowering Oscar property values. It may not be fair or compassionate, but given what’s happened there’s no way Past Lives will take the cake. The name of the game is revenge.

…like the plague.

Ben Affleck’s Air is a solid 8.5 or even a 9 —- just don’t go expecting the world. It’s a modest, well-crafted film about vision and risk and soul and salesmanship, and the best aspect, I feel, is that it doesn’t swing for the fences.

It’s an unpretentious, steady-as-she-goes sports saga that frets about stress and failure and at the same time insists over and over that “if you don’t take a risk you can’t make a gain,” which is precisely what Walter Huston’s chuckling, goat-like prospector said in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

In a way Air is just as much of a pikers-strike-it-rich story as John Huston’s 1948 classic was and is, and the stakes are just as life-and-death when you consider what might’ve happened if Nike hadn’t signed Michael Jordan and if Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro and Affleck’s Phil Knight had taken a gut punch instead.

Their down-to-business story is about marketing and branding that wound up on a super-scale, but told with a modest brush. Nothing goofy or slick or wild-ass. It starts out ordinarily or even ho-hummishly, but then it picks up a little steam and then a little more, and then little dabs of feeling are sprinkled into the second act and then spoonfuls of the stuff into the third as it gets better and better and better.

And then the big payoff moment comes, which isn’t as emotional as Jerry Maguire but then how could it be? Air isn’t about wives or girlfriends or kids or dogs…it’s strictly about business and that’s a good enough thing, trust me.

Here’s the thing: Damon’s Vaccaro is a beefalo bordering on a lardbucket, and I was bothered by this at first. But guess what? I stopped thinking about the paunch around the 30-minute mark. By the one-hour mark I’d forgotten about it entirely. This in itself says a lot.

7:55 am update: It’s being said that Viola Davis’s grounded performance as Michael Jordan’s tough negotiating mom, Deloris, is the keeper. She’ll probably be Oscar-nominated, but Damon’s Vaccaro shoulders the weight. He’s playing the poet and the singer and the believer of the piece, and it’s his best performance since…what, the second Bourne film? Or The Informant? And I love how he’s never cowed by Affleck’s Knight, calmly standing his ground, and in fact plays him at the very end. It’s brilliant. And I love Chris Messina’s tough-shithead agent who reps the Jordans and is content to eat alone.