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‘l.a. times’: film review | sundance 2017.

Michelle Morgan's feature debut 'L.A. Times' is a look at misguided thirtysomething Angelenos and their professional and personal pursuits.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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LA Times - Still 1 - H 2017

If you’re going to attempt a quasi-farcical look at the behavior of thirtysomething strivers in Hollywood, you need to cut more sharply and dig more deeply than does L.A. Times. This mild confection focused on confused and misguided pretty young things is reasonably well constructed as far as it goes, but there’s nothing new here and the conceit of Hollywood scenesters as being uniformly vapid and creatively void is frankly rather tired at this point. Michelle Morgan’s debut feature is confidently made but doesn’t offer enough urgency or distinction to lift it above the mass of so many other indie titles.

The only person here who speaks with a singular voice and developed opinions is wannabe writer Annette, who just happens to be played by writer-director Morgan herself. Inflexible and extremely judgmental, she’s engagingly different from the others for a while until you remember that similarly smart-mouthed aspiring young characters in 1930s Hollywood movies were about 10 times snappier and more energetic. All the same, it’s fun to hear a character in this reflexively tolerant environment insist, “Of course you should judge someone. You absolutely should!”

The Bottom Line It's no 'La La Land.'

The roundelay begins with Annette impulsively breaking off her live-in relationship with the ineffectual Eliot ( Jorma Taccone ), the creator of a schlocky sword-and-sorcery TV series. He blandly agrees to the separation, only to drift until meeting Ingrid (Margarita Levieva ), an alluring if impatient young lady who turns out to be a $500-per-night hooker. He doesn’t mind.

The most actively agitated of the women is Baker ( Dree Hemingway), a beautiful guy magnet who’s suddenly come to think that her unhappiness and lack of a lasting relationship stem from her admitted tendency to sleep with men too soon. This intriguing drifter could have been explored more deeply, but searching into the characters’ deeper realms is not on the film’s agenda.

Other, less interesting figures pass through the Hollywood days and nights without having much of interest to say about anything. Everyone’s hopelessly self-involved, of course (what else is new in Hollywood?), and who doesn’t want to make money, but no one speaks with any excitement about what they’re doing, their goals or creative ideas. Vapidity rules the day, and Morgan doesn’t make it interesting by applying the requisite ruthless edge.

Morgan invents little melodramas to fill out the time: An intemperate client who leaves the choice of a new expensive sofa to his interior designer makes her pay for it when he doesn’t like it, and a funny/creepy incest interlude worthy of a French farce crops up when an obsessed guy reveals to his inamorata, rather too late in the game, that they are actually cousins.

The locations, especially in Hollywood’s Whitley Heights and Nichols Canyon, are well chosen, and the hipster nightspots favored by the denizens are on the money.

Production companies: Stern Talking To, Hyperion Point Cast: Michelle Morgan, Jorma Taccone , Dree Hemingway, Kentucker Audley , Margarita Levieva , Adam Shapiro, Angela Trimbur , Robert Schwartzman , Nora Zehetner , Tate Donovan Director-screenwriter: Michelle Morgan Producers: Ryland Aldrich , Alix Madigan-Yorkin , Jared Stern Executive producers: Ricky Blumenstein , Tom Dolby, Susanne Filkins , Paul Finkel , Michael J. Mailis , Abdi Nazemian , Jason Potash, Jorma Taccone , Susan Wrubel Director of photography: Nicholas Wiesnet Production designer: Hillary Gurtler Costume designer: Heather Allison Editor: John-Michael Powell Music: Anthony Willis Casting: Amey Rene Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Next) 97 minutes

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L.A. Times Calendar section: bring back movie reviews!

June 15, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

From Greg Laemmle:

The movies are back! Or at least, Hollywood blockbusters are back. But if you pay attention to the pundits (always with a grain of salt), you’ll see story after story about how the arthouse audience still hasn’t returned. And to a large degree, this is true. But why? Is the older audience still staying away because of Covid fears? Did they discover streaming during the 13-month shutdown of moviegoing, and they are slow (or never) to come back. Or is there something else contributing to the situation?

Our theatres have been open for over a year since the 13-month shutdown, and every week we present an array of smaller foreign-language films, documentaries, and indie features. Distributors aren’t advertising in print like they did pre-pandemic. But if you look in the LA Times every day, you’ll see our Laemmle Theatres directory ad listing all these titles. But beyond the ads, there is something missing in the paper. Something of vital importance to creating awareness of smaller films. That thing …REVIEWS.

I’m prompted to write this because last week, on Friday, June 10, there was not a single film review in the print edition of the L.A. Times Calendar section. Among other films, the paper completely ignored the French literary adaptation LOST ILLUSIONS, a huge, award-winning hit in France and a critical success here. (The New York Times, which did review it, called the film “ sensational .”). Some weeks, the Times has run reviews, but published them days after a film’s opening. And for films that might only end up playing for a week in LA, running a review after the weekend is not particularly helpful, either for the film or for an interested viewer.

Compare this to the pre-pandemic period when a reader could expect to find multiple reviews in the Friday paper, and then plan their weekend (or weekly) moviegoing accordingly.

We know that the newspaper industry has its challenges. We at Laemmle Theatres are pushing our partners in distribution to return as advertisers because we understand that we work in an ecosystem made up of press, advertising, and programming. But having the programming without the press badly depresses turnout. And without ticket sales, distributors are loath to advertise.

It is a sad state of affairs when the paper of record in the movie capital of the world has a film section that is a shadow of its former self, reviewing one or two films per week. The L.A. Times once employed two lead film critics at a time, notably such heavyweights as Charles Champlin, Sheila Benson, Kevin Thomas, Kenneth Turan , and Manohla Dargis . Those writers were backed up by a stable of talented freelancers to cover the plethora of cinema Angelenos are fortunate enough to have access to. Current lead film critic Justin Chang is just as gifted a writer but he’s only one person and can’t cover all the big studio releases in addition to foreign and American indie films too.

We’re going to continue doing what we do, working with filmmakers and distributors to bring the world of cinema to Los Angeles.

What can you do? If you aren’t already a subscriber, subscribe to the Times. Supporting local journalism, even a big city paper like the Times, is important. But as a subscriber, contact the paper and ask for the return of Friday reviews, ideally in the print edition.

They can also look to other local outlets for film coverage. KPCC’s FilmWeek is one excellent resource, with a panel of critics reviewing many of the week’s new attractions. But there are others.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but you can pay more attention to our eNewsletter, website, and social channels , where we keep you informed of the hundreds of different films we screen annually, for long and short engagements. And when you see something you like, don’t keep it to yourself. Please share your enthusiasm so that others will be encouraged to find the film in question.

But ultimately, these alternatives cannot fill the void left by a newspaper that has abandoned its leading role. To the publisher and editors of the L.A. Times: to be the paper of record for a megalopolis like Los Angeles means covering the arts, especially film. And we hope that you will return to your pre-pandemic policy of reviewing films that are opening theatrically in Los Angeles on (or before) the date of their theatrical opening. Together, we can rebuild the audience for the world of film in the movie capital of the world.

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Asked and answered!

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-01/calendar-feedback-sunday-july-3

Fantastic letter, thank you!

Good to know about this – thanks for posting! Hope it encourages them to bring back reviews. Glad you guys are still around – we come to your theater often!

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Justin Chang

Film Critic, Fresh Air

Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker and NPR's Fresh Air . He previously served as film critic at the Los Angeles Times and chief film critic at Variety .

Chang is the author of FilmCraft: Editing , a book of interviews with seventeen top film editors. He serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and is a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee. He teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

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Review: Ben Affleck’s entertaining Michael Jordan-Nike drama is more than hot ‘Air’

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One of the pleasures of the movies is the way they can complicate and undermine the idea of history as destiny, taking unbeatable sure things and reminding us that they were once untested, unknown quantities. It’s not, admittedly, the easiest thing for a filmmaker to pull off. Too often the clarity of hindsight can become the enemy of real drama; the more phenomenal the legend, the more inevitable and even circumscribed their success can seem. There’s a moment near the end of “Air,” Ben Affleck’s shrewd, hugely enjoyable and fitfully ruminative new movie, that deftly gets at this point, when a basketball fan opines that “everybody knew” from the beginning that Michael Jordan would be an all-timer — never mind that, sometime earlier, said fan could be heard declaring precisely the opposite.

Not that “Air” treats Jordan as some kind of underdog, or even as its central subject. An NBA rookie when the movie opens, he’s already marked for greatness — a greatness of such untouchable, godlike proportions that, beyond some TV footage of the real Jordan on the court, the movie dares not even show his face. (Damian Delano Young, the actor who plays him, appears only briefly and is almost always filmed from behind.) No, the truer underdog here — and the other legend in the making — is Nike, the upstart Oregon-based footwear company with the swoosh logo, the “just do it” slogan and an initially lackluster profile in the basketball sneaker market. That last part will change forever, of course, once Nike manages, through a campaign of extraordinary savvy and daring, to outbid and outmaneuver its deeper-pocketed rivals, Adidas and Converse, and hitch its own fortunes to Jordan’s meteoric rise.

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April 3, 2023

Boasting a punchy, phone-slamming, expletive-hurling, heavily Aaron Sorkin-indebted script by Alex Convery, “Air” is an ode to the art of the landmark celebrity-endorsement deal . It’s also something of a feature-length Nike commercial, albeit a deft and entertaining one. Mostly, it’s a tribute to classically American values like branding and publicity, ambition and swagger, wealth and more wealth (the Air Jordan line has earned billions and counting) and good, old-fashioned competitive cunning. Like “Argo” (2012), Affleck’s Oscar-winning hit about how Hollywood helped rescue six Americans amid the turmoil of the Iran hostage crisis, the movie dusts off decades-old headlines and invests them with the breezy urgency of a comic heist thriller, one with far lower human stakes but an incalculably higher payout. The year may be 1984, but any hint of Orwellian gloom here is dissolved in a wave of merry capitalist brinkmanship.

The mastermind is Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon, paunchy and polo-shirted), the sharpest, most stubborn mind in Nike’s flailing basketball division. Possessed of a keen understanding of the game and its players, he also has a gambler’s streak that loses him more than it earns. (His talent-scouting trips tend to detour through Las Vegas, where the script establishes his risky impulses and drops a sly beaut of a Kurt Rambis joke.) It’s Sonny who grasps and articulates the singularity of Jordan’s brilliance a few crucial beats before everyone else does. And it’s Sonny who argues that Nike, rather than dividing its annual $250,000 basketball budget among three or four lower-ranked players, should offer the whole pot to Jordan and tailor an entire shoe line to the athlete, rather than the other way around. (Matthew Maher, so good in last year’s “Funny Pages,” steals a few scenes as Nike shoe wizard Peter Moore, who designs the Air Jordan in all its prototypical Chicago Bulls red-and-black glory.)

It’s a potentially game-changing proposition — and a potentially business-killing gamble. Sonny has a lot of skeptics to convince, including Jordan, a die-hard Adidas fan, and (more importantly) Jordan’s mother, Deloris, the solid rock and gently guiding hand behind his every career move. Deloris is played, superbly, by Viola Davis, whose soft-toned, gravel-edged voice is authority itself. (In a nice touch, Davis’ husband, Julius Tennon , plays Michael’s father, James Jordan.) Two of the movie’s most beautifully written and played scenes find Sonny approaching and later negotiating with a thoughtful, quietly unyielding Deloris, setting the pattern for a story in which nearly every turning point is structured as a two-way conversation — a one-on-one master class in the art of persuasion.

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Sonny’s many sparring partners include Jordan’s potty-mouthed agent, David Falk (Chris Messina, a scream), and Nike’s good-natured but beaten-down marketing director, Rob Strasser (an effective Jason Bateman). Strasser gets a poignant if overly calculated heart-tugger of a speech that kicks “Air’s” already solid dad-movie cred up several notches; he also gets one of the script’s few moments — an oblique reference to Nike’s use of Asian sweatshop labor — that puncture the feel-good corporate vibes.

Most of those vibes emanate from the company’s affable, Zen-minded CEO, Phil Knight, a wearer of track suits and spouter of Buddhist koans played by Affleck himself as the risk-averse yin to Sonny’s reckless yang. Unsurprisingly, the well-worn Matt-and-Ben screen rapport gives Sonny and Phil an instantly readable, affectionately combative dynamic, as well as an understated emotional core.

It’s not the only time Affleck uses casting to suggestive, even subversive ends. On the surface, “Air” may look like an unrepentant valentine to the ’80s, from the amusing overkill of its extended opening montage (President Reagan and Princess Diana , Ghostbusters and Cabbage Patch Kids) to its steady stream of Violent Femmes/Cyndi Lauper/Bruce Springsteen needle drops to the simultaneously spot-on and comically exaggerated ugliness of its offices, all dim greenish lighting and chunky computer hardware. (The grubbily ancient production design is by François Audouy, the cubicle-panning cinematography by Robert Richardson.) But in some ways, the movie is also carrying on a subliminal, more subtly nostalgic conversation with the ’90s , the decade that transformed Affleck and Damon into household names and saw some of their key supporting players here first rise to prominence.

The latter include Marlon Wayans, delivering a charming cameo as George Raveling, the Olympic basketball coach who would prove instrumental in persuading Jordan to sign with Nike; and Chris Tucker , funneling his motormouthed comic gusto into the smart suit and warm, welcoming vibes of Howard White, the future vice president of the entire Jordan brand. In ways that sometimes register more potently than the action or dialogue, “Air” is haunted by the specters of these actors’ career highs and lows; this is Tucker’s first movie in seven years. It’s also haunted by the sight of Affleck and Damon, two aging Hollywood golden boys who at times seem to be confronting their own mortality alongside their characters. They’ve made a movie about the ravages of time, the fleeting, sometimes arbitrary nature of fame and the general rule of failure to which success proves an all-too-rare exception.

This meta-melancholy subtext rises to the surface late in the movie, when Sonny delivers a deal-clinching, throat-tightening boardroom speech about how few legacies endure and how few legends are remembered. It’s a message that consoles and stings, not least for the way it seems to knock even movie royalty down a few pegs. Success and fame on the level of a Michael Jordan, Sonny reminds us, has a way of throwing even great accomplishments into perspective.

“Air” comes by these ideas honestly and thoughtfully, and they’re rich enough that you sometimes wish Affleck and Convery had given them freer, unrulier reign, rather than shoehorning them (so to speak) into all the story’s busily, efficiently moving parts, its blue Slurpee sight gags and Adidas-skewering Hitler jokes. Crucially, it’s in the scenes with Wayans, Tucker and Davis that the movie engages meaningfully, if too briefly, with the role of race in the overlapping arenas of sports, celebrity and social progress, and especially the question of what Black athletes are owed by an industry that uses their names, likenesses and talent to invest a product with meaning.

Unsurprisingly, it’s Deloris who brings these issues to the fore — and also cuts through them with clean, unerring logic — when she argues for a fundamental shift in the balance of power between her son and Nike, and by extension between all athletes and the companies seeking to trade on their fame. The movie is on her side — or rather, it pivots to her side at just the right moment, pulling the rug out from under Sonny and his colleagues and also, perhaps, from under itself. In these earnest, cheer-worthy moments, “Air” almost convinces you that it’s more than just a feel-good celebration of capitalism and corporate power, that it has its eye not just on the prize but on the entire game — and that it’s looking out for all the underdogs as fervently as it wants you to believe.

'Air'

Rating: R, for language throughout Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes Playing: Starts Wednesday in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘The Killer’ Review: John Woo With a French Twist

Woo’s new version of his Hong Kong action movie “The Killer,” starring Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy, may be a remake, but it’s not a retread.

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By Glenn Kenny

When he started a run of contemporary action movies in the early 1980s, the Hong Kong director John Woo forged a personal mode influenced by the stylized violence of American directors like Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel (see the shootouts in “The Getaway” and “Dirty Harry”), and the mentholated cool of the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (à la the existential assassin of “Le Samouraï”). Before taking up in Hong Kong again in 2008, Woo created some galvanizing work in the United States: “Face/Off” (1997) and “Mission: Impossible 2” (2000).

It is exhilarating, then, to see him set his sights on Paris with a remake of his 1989 Hong Kong classic, “The Killer.” He depicts the City of Lights with a loving, romantic eye.

Woo’s original starred the incredibly charismatic Chow Yun-fat as the title assassin, a hired killer with an ethos who makes some sacrifices on behalf of a young woman he accidentally blinded during a shootout. (Woo has more than a touch of Chaplin’s “City Lights” in him, too.) One challenge for a remake would be finding a younger lead actor to match Chow’s magnetism. There is none, and Woo knows it as well as we do; hence, the film’s rather delightful surprise of gender-switching the title character.

The British actress Nathalie Emmanuel plays the soulful marauder Zee, and man, does she cause a ruckus. The film’s first big blowout, in a cabaret-bar, features quarts of spilled blood, a skyscraper’s worth of shattered glass and mirrors, slow-motion flying bullets and, yes, a mishap in which a cabaret singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers) is blinded. Zee is a little more coldblooded than Jeffrey was in 1989; at first she tries to get rid of the singer rather than help her.

Zee’s contractor, Finn, played by Sam Worthington, isn’t pleased that the singer was allowed to live. Zee is confused — she always asks before taking a job whether her future victims deserve to die. Finn tells her that this one had it coming. But Zee insists on keeping Jenn alive, despite the shadowy forces trying to wipe her out.

Omar Sy plays Sey, a French cop who will, of course, form an uneasy alliance with Zee. (Woo’s world is like the one Mick Jagger’s devil envisions: Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints. Sort of.) Sy projects assuredness and vulnerability in almost equal measure.

Emmanuel, best known as Missandei, the trusted adviser to Daenerys in “Game of Thrones,” conveys a smooth, chameleonic expertise. As in the first film, the killer spends a lot of time in a moody, deconsecrated church, which is, of course, kitted out with a complement of doves — Woo’s favorite symbolic animals.

The direction is energetic, incorporating frantic flashbacks and resourceful split-screen perspectives, and the plot adds several new twists not found in the first movie. Rest assured, this may be a remake, but it’s not a retread.

The Killer Rated R for — guess — violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. Watch on Peacock .