Do Dragons Wear Air Jordans?

Success Has a Lot of Daddies…

Air (2023. Written by Alex Convery. 112 minutes)

Alex Convery’s screenplay was on the Blacklist a few years back. No, that does means he was hauled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. We are so far past the awful days of HUAC of the 1940s that in 2005 the term could be used as the name of a list, put together every year, of the best unproduced screenplays. If you have never heard of it, you can check it out here. Anyway, enough of the people who vote on the issue thought this script was good enough to be on the list.

So you know it is a pretty good script. And it’s written by Alex Convery. That was the name on the script when it went on the list. After the film was completed, the Writers Guild arbitration process gave him sole credit.

When the film began to get noticed in Hollywood, Ben Affleck (who also directed and acts in the film) and Matt Damon (who also acts in the film), who as writing partners won an Academy Award for their screenplay Good Will Hunting (1997), started spreading the word they had rewritten some of the script.

And Chris Tucker, who plays a Nike executive in the film, insisted in an interview in the LA Times that his character was not in the original script, and that he wrote his character’s scenes.

Me, I’ll stick with the Guild’s judgment. And I’ll tell you why.

There is a consistency in the writing that is usually a hallmark of a single writer. While Affleck and Damon may have diddled with the script, they have certainly done so in within the stylistic guidelines that came in Convery’s work and were a large part of the reason his script made the Blacklist. The people who vote on that (agents, development people, etc) know good, distinctive writing when they read it.

As for Tucker’s “contributions,” I am a bit dubious about his claim that the character was not in the original script. His character is such a part of the story that it is unlikely that Convery had not put him in. I can agree with Tucker that he may have written his own dialogue, because it is stylistically different from the rest of Convery’s writing, and notably so. Tucker’s character’s dialogue is a lot more free-form than Convery’s and stands out from the rest of the script. In this case, that is not necessarily a bad thing because the character’s dialogue is funny and makes a nice counterpoint to the rest of the script. There is not too much of it to upset the balance of the film.

This is Convery’s first produced screenplay, and if producers can ignore all the other claims they will be smart enough to look at Convery’s other scripts and hire him.

Ah, yes, one more thing: the movie itself.

I have no idea who came up with the opening 1984 montage, but it is terrific. It will remind you of a lot of things you had hopefully forgotten about the year.

Most of the film takes place inside the Nike shoe company. They have great success with running shoes, but they are way behind Adidas and Converse in basketball shoes. They are reduced to look for second and third-string NBA players. We get a lot of this set up in a scene where Sonny Vaccaro is running a meeting where everybody is trying to come up with ideas for improving Nike’s position. Justin Chang, in his review in the LA Times, calls Convery’s script “heavily Aaron Sorkin-indebted,” and he is right, although the people don’t walk as much or as fast as they do in Sorkin’s work.

Sonny comes up with the idea that instead of spreading the money they are allowed over three different players, they bet it all on newcomer Michael Jordon, who was just starting in the NBA. Look at the scene where Sonny, watching a tape of Jordan, realizes how good he can be. It is done mostly in visuals, but then Convery nails it when Sonny presents his ideas to his bosses.

Sonny is a wonderful character for Matt Damon to play, but Convery has written great, detailed characters for the actors playing the other executives at Nike. Affleck is the CEO of Nike who is not quite convinced of anything Sonny says. Jason Bateman is the head of marketing who is not quite up to the demands Sonny puts on him.

And there are more. Jordan’s agent is played by Chris Messina in a great performance, managing to get his mouth around all the crude things he has to say. Late in the picture, the all-male cast is broken up by the arrival of Viola Davis as Jordan’s quiet, tough, smart mother. Her scenes with Damon are terrific.

One of Convery’s interesting, and smart, choices, is to never show us the young Michael Jordan from the front. We get shots of his back, but compared to the other characters we never see him full-on. You have enough great characters, especially his mother, that you do not need to try to re-create him. Besides, who would you get to play him?

In the end, Mother Jordan makes an unheard-of at the time deal that will give Michael a percentage of the sales of the Air Jordans. Stick with the picture through the end credits to find out how much that was worth for the Jordans, Nike, and the characters we have seen. I generally don’t like end titles that tell you what happened, but here, its impact makes it a great idea.

Stuffed.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023. Screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio, story by Chris McKay & Michael Gilio. 134 minutes)

I have never played Dungeons and Dragons.

I have never read any of the magazines or novels inspired by it.

I have never knowingly purchased any of their merchandise, not even the D&D Wine Bottle Opener.

So how come I went to see the new D&D movie? You’ve guessed I am going to tell you, haven’t you?

I saw the trailer and I was struck by two things. It seemed to be funny as well as everything else. And it starred two actors I like to watch: Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez. There was also a quick glimpse of Hugh Grant in the trailer, but not enough to tell what he was up to.

Then there were a couple of articles in the LA Times (April 3 and 4) about the making of the film. In the April 3^rd story, the Chief Executive of Hasbro Chris Cocks, said, “The biggest lesson probably from something like the 2000 movie [a major bomb at the box office] is: Don’t make it just for the fans. Make sure that you tell a story that, even if you’ve never picked up a dice before or read one of the D&D books, you can relate to.” That is a major lesson for filmmakers thinking about doing a film of a game (or a novel or a play or any other piece of what they now call intellectual property).

So off I went to see it. One advantage of doing a version of the game (I did read up about D&D after I saw the film) is the basic structure of the game lends itself to telling a story: a group of characters get together to go on an adventure. That gives you a plot. In the film, the group is trying to find a relic that will allow Edgin (Pine) to bring his late wife back to life so he can reunite her with him and their daughter. That provides the spine for the film that the group’s adventures can be attached to, and the writers do exactly that. The problem I had is that there are a lot, and I mean A LOT of side adventures that get attached to the spine. I could have done with a few less, particularly as the film goes on. It comes to an ending at one point and then throws in another set-piece battle.

Chris Cocks also said that making it into a heist picture meant that they could also bring the humor I saw in the trailer into it. Cocks noted that the original game had a “none-too-serious ethos.” John Francis Daley (he and Goldstein also co-directed) said in the April 4^th Times story, “The thing that’s so exciting to me about doing a D&D movie is you can add that element of levity and whimsy to the film without at all betraying the lore… That sense of heartfeltness and lack of cynicism was really important to us… And I think that there is a way to be humorous without at all undermining the stakes, of the sincerity.”

Which explains casting Chris Pine as Edgin. Pine is good in films as a straight hero, but he can also bring a sly, comic edge to his work. See my review here of Wonder Woman (2017) for an example. He is on the same page as the writers.

What surprised me in the casting of Rodriguez is that she can match Pine in bringing a light tone. We are so used to her sulking in the Fast films that it is amazing, and delightful, to see her smile and hit the zingers back and forth with Pine. Sandra Bullock, watch out, there is a new America’s Sweetheart in town.

Hugh Grant is the villain of the piece and the writers have given him constant changes of attitude that Grant turns on a dime. Regé-Jean Page, late of the first season of Bridgerton (2020), has a nice supporting role as a conventional, humorless heroic type, and the writers have given him interesting stuff to do, including conversations with Pine that lift the level of the film.

While the writers do well by creating interesting characters for the actors to play, they are not as good at creating characters for the assorted beasties that show up. I assume there will be a sequel, and I would hope the writers of it give some more interesting characterizations of the beasts than we get in this film.

Oh yeah, one other thing. I don’t think there is D&D Wine Bottle Opener. But I would not be surprised if there is.

Low, Low, Low Key.

Moving On (2022. Written by Paul Weitz. 85 minutes)

Here we have only half the star power of 80 for Brady (2023) Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, but the script holds together here better than the one for that film. Which does not make it that much better.

This one is a quiet dark comedy. Fonda plays Claire, who comes to the funeral of her old college friend. Claire tells Howard, the widower, she is going to kill him some time in the next week. Howard has no idea why, and it is well into the picture before we find out. Spoiler alert: he had raped her when she was in college. She did not want to kill him while his wife was alive, but she now considers him fair game.

Claire gets Lily Tomlin’s Evelyn to help out, and we watch as they have trouble setting up the whole thing. The problem with the script is that is rather flat. Fonda and especially Tomlin do what they can with the dialogue Weitz has given them, but the film never takes off as much as it needs to to really work.

If you are thinking about writing a dark comedy of this kind, look at John Michael Hayes’s script for the 1955 The Trouble with Harry or the William Rose-Jimmy O’Conner script for the same year’s The Ladykillers.

Howard does end up dead, by the way, but not the way the women planned.

Another View.

Boston Strangler (2023. Written by Matt Ruskin. 112 minutes)

So here we have two women reporters for a big city newspaper cracking a case that the male reporters don’t want to bother with. Hmm, didn’t we just see this a couple of months ago when it was called She Said. Not exactly. That, as you may remember from my review, was about the Harvey Weinstein case. But after you read this item, you may want to go back and look at that one, since I saw the same problems in this one.

Here we again have two women reporters played by two of our best actresses, Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon. But in Ruskin’s script, they are flat as pancakes. That’s a criminal waste of talent. Again it is the old story: assuming that because you are telling a true story, you don’t have to do more than show the facts.

In an interview in Creative Screenwriting Matt Ruskin, who also directed, went on and on about how he watched All the President’s Men (1976) and was determined to make the city room of the Boston newspaper look as authentic as the newsroom in the earlier film. Thinking like a director. He should have paid more attention to the characters.

The case of the Boston Strangler was famous in the Sixties, and in 1968 there was a film about it called The Boston Strangler. It told the story of the detective who broke the case, but there was no mention of the women reporters whose reporting on how the police were messing up the investigation pushed the cops into action. Well, that was in the Sixties, before the Women’s Movement got up steam. So we could say the current movie is an improvement. I suppose it is, but only in that limited way. 

The earlier film had the star power of Henry Fonda as the detective and Tony Curtis in a spectacular performance as the main suspect. And the filmmakers (the screenplay was by Edward Anhalt from a book by Gerald Frank, the director was Richard Fleischer) knew how to get the most out of their stars. Ruskin should have looked at that film instead of All the President’s Men.