Product placement is over. It’s so lame. Why smuggle an merchandise of merchandise right into a film, like contraband, and have individuals snicker on the subterfuge, when you possibly can declare your product overtly and lay it on the desk? Why not make a movie about the merch? That was the case with “Steve Jobs” (2015), which unfolded the creation fable of Apple; with “The Founder” (2016), which did the identical for McDonald’s; with “Tetris,” now on Apple TV+; with the upcoming “BlackBerry,” which isn’t, alas, concerning the harvesting of soppy fruits; and with “Pleasure” (2015), which gave us our first probability—pray God it not be our final—to observe Jennifer Lawrence attempting her hardest to promote mops.

The most recent instance of a ready-branded movie is “Air,” the product on this event being the Air Jordan. The film is written by Alex Convery and directed by Ben Affleck, who additionally seems onscreen as Phil Knight, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Nike. The corporate, in fact, was named for a Greek goddess, which can clarify why Affleck is decked out with a beard and a hair model that fell out of vogue in 438 B.C. He additionally will get to drive a purple Porsche and to put on pink working pants, perilously free across the crotch. Any looser and he’d danger an NC-17 ranking. Whether or not or not Affleck is atoning for the disgrace of taking part in Batman, within the DC franchise, it’s fairly sporting of him, in his personal movie, to set himself up as a complete jerk.

Not that this can be a sports activities film. It’s not even a shoe film. It’s a heroic saga of the advertising and marketing of a shoe. The motion begins in 1984, heralded on the soundtrack by Dire Straits’s “Cash for Nothing” (which really got here out the next yr). Gloom prevails at Nike headquarters, in Beaverton, Oregon; basketball-shoe gross sales have been cornered by Converse and Adidas, leaving Nike with a meagre seventeen per cent. The duty going through Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who has been charged with turning issues round, is to search out three gamers who might entrance a brand new marketing campaign. However Vaccaro doesn’t need three gamers. He needs one participant, and that’s Michael Jordan.

The joke is that, by each measure of human grace, the hunter and the hunted are at reverse ends of the spectrum. Jordan is Jordan, whereas Vaccaro, as incarnated by Damon, is puffing, paunchy, and clad in such nameless tones of beige and grey that he might die at his desk, on a cloudy afternoon, and no person would discover. But he does have the knack of perseverance. Thus it’s that, to the Krakatoan fury of Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), Vaccaro reveals up uninvited on the residence of Jordan’s dad and mom, James (Julius Tennon) and Deloris (Viola Davis), in North Carolina, and pleads with them to contemplate Nike for his or her son. They graciously oblige; the events convene in Beaverton; the deal is finished.

Give Affleck a transparent story and, as he demonstrated in “The City” (2010) and “Argo” (2012), he’ll stick with the beat. (An excessive amount of ambiguity unnerves him; witness the sullen bafflement of “Gone Woman,” in 2014.) “Air” is pacy, adept, and entertainingly nicely drilled, and his forged, which incorporates Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, and Marlon Wayans, has a clubbable heat. The scenes between Affleck and Damon, longtime associates offscreen, have a barbed geniality that finds its personal rhythm; they’re most likable once they needle one another. At one take away from the membership is Matthew Maher, as Peter Moore—Nike’s in-house genius, who designs the Air Jordan over a weekend. Unrushed and diffident, Moore thinks solely of the shoe, despite the fact that, as he realizes, it’s a pawn within the advertising and marketing recreation.

Step again from “Air,” nevertheless, and you start to understand how profoundly bizarre it’s; weirder, I believe, than Affleck is aware of. Observe Damon, Bateman, and Maher as they gaze upon the completed footwear, bathed in its mystical glow. They’re like shepherds in a Rembrandt Nativity, lit by the pure radiance of the Christ little one. They usually’re a shoe. As but, we’re forbidden to see it for ourselves; the holy of holies should be guarded from our eyes. Likewise, though Michael Jordan is performed by Damian Younger, we by no means glimpse his face. He retains his again to the digicam always, the implication being that no mortal actor might hope to enshrine such a being. (For sure, there isn’t a try and reconstruct Jordan’s strikes on courtroom; as a substitute, we get classic clips of the true factor, on TV.) It’s possible you’ll or could not have believed in Will Smith, when he took the title position in “Ali” (2001), however not less than you didn’t should spend two and a half hours watching him from behind.

What’s it with “Air,” then? “Just like the previous spiritual fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its personal moments of fervent arousal.” So says the French thinker Man Debord in “The Society of the Spectacle,” his jeremiad of 1967. It’s, I admit, unlikely that each viewer of Affleck’s film will race residence and dive into neo-Marxist analyses of cultural homogenization; some of us will exit for a plate of ribs and a beer. However they could, as they digest, mirror with a frown on the dramatic centerpiece of the movie—a speech delivered within the pursuits of justice by Deloris Jordan, over the cellphone, to Vaccaro. As a result of she is performed by Viola Davis, a matchless purveyor of ethical willpower, you possibly can’t assist recalling the sequence, in “Doubt” (2008), when Davis went face to face with Meryl Streep over the long run prospects of one other younger man. If something, the sequence in “Air” is but extra intense, as a result of Davis is filmed within the tightest of closeups. And what’s Deloris demanding? That her son be given a share of the proceeds from each Air Jordan that’s bought. Consider in him, and there will likely be little question.

This film, briefly, kneels on the altar of excessive capitalism. It even comes with a prophecy. In Beaverton, Vaccaro tells Michael Jordan, in individual, that he will likely be introduced low, assailed, after which raised up once more, as a result of, not like everyone else within the room, he’s immortal. (A few of these tribulations are displayed in a speedy montage of flash-forwards.) The executives and brokers who encompass Jordan are like monks, with no seen household or residence life; Vaccaro and Falk are each seen eating alone. Solely as soon as can we catch a whiff of one thing troubling in “Air,” when a personality mentions that a lot of Nike’s footwear are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea. So, does Affleck conclude his movie with a large shot of a manufacturing unit flooring, and of those that toil, on paltry pay, to make basketball footwear? Like hell. Relatively, he ends with the revelation that Nike bought 100 and sixty-two million {dollars}’ price of Air Jordans within the first yr. Hallelujah.

The brand new Owen Wilson movie, “Paint,” is ready within the current day, however solely simply. Written and directed by Brit McAdams, the film takes place in and round Burlington, Vermont, and tells the story of Carl Nargle, who’s performed by Wilson with a curved pipe, an explosion of frizzy blond curls, and an aura of invincible gentleness. When a good friend says that her Uber has arrived, Nargle replies, “I don’t know what that’s.” He hosts a present titled “Paint” on a neighborhood public-television station; daubing away, and addressing the digicam, he deftly completes his footage stay on air. Most of them—and ultimately all of them—depict Mt. Mansfield, the loftiest peak within the state. There’s nothing mistaken with returning obsessively to at least one theme; might or not it’s that Nargle is drawn towards his mountain as Bonnard was to his spouse, luminously untouched by time, within the tub?

No. Nargle just isn’t a fraud, however his artistic powers are of the tiniest. And he’s a idiot. Additionally, because it seems, he’s a predator. Over time, a lot of the girls who work on the station, resembling Katherine (Michaela Watkins), Wendy (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Beverly (Lusia Strus), have slipped into his clutches—particularly, into his van, higher often known as the Vantastic. All of this lends a contemporary and menacing overtone to the mantra with which he indicators off on the finish of his present: “Thanks for going to a particular place with me.” What’s peculiar about McAdams’s movie is the mildness of Nargle’s comeuppance. Certain, he loses his job, his spot being taken by a youthful painter named Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), nevertheless it’s not too lengthy earlier than he rediscovers love. So dreamily forgiving is the ambiance of the plot, in truth, that I discovered it downright creepy. Perhaps all of the characters are stoned. That may clarify lots.

“Paint” will win few associates within the enviornment of public broadcasting—which, the movie suggests, is staffed by the semi-competent and loved primarily by smiling seniors in retirement properties and boozers slumped in bars. But McAdams does have an eye fixed, and an ear, for the trivialities of melancholy and provincial politesse. Hear to 2 lovers breaking apart on CB radio (“It’s over. Over”), or Katherine wistfully pondering a change of profession: “Albany has a ton to supply,” she says. “I-90 and I-87 go proper via the center of it.” As for Nargle, he looks as if a refugee from a Christopher Visitor movie, and I can think about him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the many folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether or not he deserves a film to himself is one other matter. ♦