'You Hurt My Feelings' and 'Air': Return of the mid-budget adult drama
Wildfire smoke has turned New York City skies into 'Blade Runner 2049'; striking WGA members are screaming at every Tesla driving onto the Netflix lot. That's right, folks - *movies are in the air*
Last summer saw Tom Cruise almost single-handedly save the American theater-going experience, with wingmen like ‘Elvis’, ‘Nope’, and of course ‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’ flanking him as they target-bombed the Enemy (premature declarations of cinema’s death). THIS summer has something like 97 new releases between now and Labor Day, titans clashing every weekend. Where will you be on July 23rd, when centuries of gender division climax with the twin premieres of ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’? Whoever wins… we win.
But we’re not here today, six weeks into the ongoing Writer’s Strike and one week into Pride Month, to talk about the future. We’re here to talk about the present, which for the purposes of this Lifting Fog post1 includes two movies that I recently saw — one of them in theaters, doing my part to keep an art form alive that I kinda sorta believe in!
‘You Hurt My Feelings’
Last we saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she was making ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ twenty minutes longer than it needed to be with a go-nowhere subplot designed to kick off some Disney+ show in Q1 2024 or whatever. But she is, of course, a far more dynamic screen presence than her character “Lady with Purple Hair” would suggest — one of the most rightly celebrated comic actresses of her time and, as her second outing with Nicole Holofcener proves, just as adept at human-scale drama, too.
The movie itself is, and I mean this less as a diss than a category designation, “mid.” Mid-budget. Mid-stakes. Mid-lives. In the early aughts, independent theaters were bursting with this brand of low-key, coulda-been-a-stage-play adult relationship dramedies. Eventually they made their way to Netflix, where all their edges were sanded off to appeal to either South Korea or adult YA enthusiasts, so in that sense it’s refreshing to see something like this 1) in a theater2 and 2) targeted to an actual adult audience (AAA, indeed). I’m cheering at the A24 logo like I’m cheering on a sports underdog.
‘You Hurt My Feelings’’ premise is simultaneously universal and niche: what if you, a memoirist-turned-novelist, overheard your otherwise very supportive therapist husband say they didn’t love your writing? This may in fact be the most Upper West Side of New York premise of all time. But within this hyper-regional specificity, Louis-Dreyfus and the rest of the main quartet (Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, and Arian “Kendall Roy’s fan-fic boyfriend Stewy Hosseini” Moayed) get a lot of real stuff to play. ‘Feelings’ isn’t a movie of big moves: divorce isn’t threatened, declarations aren’t made in the rain. But you feel like you’re watching something real unfold; just four thoughtful, flawed people contending with the small but stinging moments of their relationships and professional lives.
…okay, maybe it’s not mid, that was just me going for some easy literary punch. We are all characters in a Nicole Holofcener movie.
‘Air’
It’s maybe not the worst social media development of these past ten years, but it’s one of them: brands acting like people. You know exactly what I’m talking about. The Arby’s Facebook account pretending to be horny for Heinz ketchup. “New Jersey” getting into a Twitter meme war with “New York.” Kitchen-Aid products commenting “yasss, get that bag, girlie” on an Instagram post from Jenna Ortega. It almost makes you want to kill yourself before our planet is wiped away by some combination of AI and ultra-flooding! 🤷🏼
All of which is to say… I’m not surprised there are now multiple “hey, ‘member that product you love?” movies in rotation. I count three right now:
‘Flamin’ Hot’, which you might have guessed is the movie about the invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (and also apparently a huge lie!), directed by Eva Longoria and premiering on Hulu this weekend
‘Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story’, directed by Jerry Seinfeld (?!) and somehow long-since completed, which I guess means they’re waiting to drop this on Netflix Q4 alongside some fresh new Pop-Tart flavor
‘Air’, now on Amazon, detailing the creation of sneakers’ Holy Grail, the Nike Air Jordan
Listen: it’s not that I think this… I guess we have to say genre at this point is inherently devoid of artistic merit. ‘The Social Network’, about the invention — and litigation — of Facebook, remains a stone-cold masterpiece, each year a more cogent, painful indictment of the House Zuck Built. But it’s the “indictment” part of that sentence that gives that Oscar-losing movie artistic life. Absent that, it’s just advertisement. Which, for the most part, is why ‘Air’ never truly soars. (Sorry.)
‘Air’ chronicles the mid-80s moment when Nike, long second-fiddle to both Adidas and Converse in the athlete footwear game, successfully partnered with NBA rookie Michael Jordan and birthed arguably the most popular shoe of all time. Like ‘The Social Network’, or ‘Moneyball’, it’s a process movie: guys in rooms debating the ins and outs of some thing, making outlandish bets and testing their resolve. Lots of talking. Dramatic score for what, on the surface, isn’t that dramatic an undertaking.
It’s super-watchable! You could imagine catching snippets of it on TNT over the course of months, years, eventually piecing individual scenes into a coherent movie. Like ‘You Hurt My Feelings’, the performances are fun and lived-in. Matt Damon is SCHLUBBY. Chris Messina is MAD. Chris Tucker is CHATTY. Jason Bateman is DIVORCED.
I suspect that Matt and Ben (we’re friends) figured this story, nominally about athlete equity, would make for the best first movie out of their new production company, Artists Equity. This is from their website:
“…reimagining the relationship between talent, studio, and distributor via an innovative model that prioritizes creators and leverages a proprietary, data-driven approach to distribution.”
The story of Air Jordan provides a great ideological mirror. Before, athletes helped sell brands, with little financial return past the initial sale; now, athletes were brands, making real money for these companies, finally forced to concede what was really driving sales. I am currently on strike with 10,000 other TV and movie writers over a not dissimilar argument! I agree with the core sentiments of both Artists Equity and ‘Air’!
And yet… it’s still a movie about a fucking shoe.
The “where are they now?” cards at the end are what give it away — fact after fact about how much money someone made, or how much they sold their business for. The words “passive income” are meant to be some fist-pumping celebratory moment. I’m not not a capitalist; my grievance here is on a storytelling level, where you’re asking us to care less about these individual characters — who they are, what their hang-ups are, what they care about — than the literal value they provide a billion dollar company. Compare that to the end of ‘Moneyball’, perennial baseball loser Billy Beane sticking around Oakland to keep being a loser, and you’ll feel exactly what’s missing from ‘Air’.
I was also planning to write about ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ (just like ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ and ‘Air’, another solid B/B+) but spent too much time generating fake promo material for the Aviation Gin movie, so I’ll save that for another day. More reviews soon.
In the meantime, follow me on Letterboxd! It’s basically Pokemon Go for cinephiles, an endless dopamine drip of movie musings. Which is to say: the same thing I do on Lifting Fog. But if I write like Robert Caro here (overlong), I’m practically Mae West over there (pithy).
CORRECTION: The subhead previously identified it as ‘Blade Runner 2149’ when the post-apocalyptic world the movie depicts is actually ‘Blade Runner 2049’, a mere quarter-century away!
What’s the ideal Substack nomenclature here? “Email” feels too formal. “Essay” obviously too fart-sniffy. I like “post” but, you know, sound off in the comments
The Los Feliz 3, in a theater whose cramped size calls to mind one of those Japanese businessman pod hotels