'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 āElvisā, āNopeā, and of course āMinions: The Rise of Gruā flanking him as they target-bombed the Enemy (premature declarations of cinemaās 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 āOppenheimerā and āBarbieā? Whoever winsā¦ we win.
But weāre not here today, six weeks into the ongoing Writerās Strike and one week into Pride Month, to talk about the future. Weāre here to talk about the present, which for the purposes of this Lifting Fog post1 includes two movies that I recently saw ā one of them in theaters, doing my part to keep an art form alive that I kinda sorta believe in!
āYou Hurt My Feelingsā
Last we saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she was making āBlack Panther: Wakanda Foreverā 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 āLady with Purple Hairā would suggest ā 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, āmid.ā 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 itās refreshing to see something like this 1) in a theater2 and 2) targeted to an actual adult audience (AAA, indeed). Iām cheering at the A24 logo like Iām cheering on a sports underdog.
āYou Hurt My Feelingsāā premise is simultaneously universal and niche: what if you, a memoirist-turned-novelist, overheard your otherwise very supportive therapist husband say they didnāt 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 āKendall Royās fan-fic boyfriend Stewy Hosseiniā Moayed) get a lot of real stuff to play. āFeelingsā isnāt a movie of big moves: divorce isnāt threatened, declarations arenāt made in the rain. But you feel like youāre watching something real unfold; just four thoughtful, flawed people contending with the small but stinging moments of their relationships and professional lives.
ā¦okay, maybe itās not mid, that was just me going for some easy literary punch. We are all characters in a Nicole Holofcener movie.
āAirā
Itās maybe not the worst social media development of these past ten years, but itās one of them: brands acting like people. You know exactly what Iām talking about. The Arbyās Facebook account pretending to be horny for Heinz ketchup. āNew Jerseyā getting into a Twitter meme war with āNew York.ā Kitchen-Aid products commenting āyasss, get that bag, girlieā 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! š¤·š¼
All of which is to sayā¦ Iām not surprised there are now multiple āhey, āmember that product you love?ā movies in rotation. I count three right now:
āFlaminā Hotā, which you might have guessed is the movie about the invention of Flaminā Hot Cheetos (and also apparently a huge lie!), directed by Eva Longoria and premiering on Hulu this weekend
āUnfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Storyā, directed by Jerry Seinfeld (?!) and somehow long-since completed, which I guess means theyāre waiting to drop this on Netflix Q4 alongside some fresh new Pop-Tart flavor
āAirā, now on Amazon, detailing the creation of sneakersā Holy Grail, the Nike Air Jordan
Listen: itās not that I think thisā¦ I guess we have to say genre at this point is inherently devoid of artistic merit. āThe Social Networkā, about the invention ā and litigation ā of Facebook, remains a stone-cold masterpiece, each year a more cogent, painful indictment of the House Zuck Built. But itās the āindictmentā part of that sentence that gives that Oscar-losing movie artistic life. Absent that, itās just advertisement. Which, for the most part, is why āAirā never truly soars. (Sorry.)
āAirā 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 āThe Social Networkā, or āMoneyballā, itās 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, isnāt that dramatic an undertaking.
Itās 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 āYou Hurt My Feelingsā, 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 (weāre 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:
āā¦reimagining the relationship between talent, studio, and distributor via an innovative model that prioritizes creators and leverages a proprietary, data-driven approach to distribution.ā
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 āAirā!
And yetā¦ itās still a movie about a fucking shoe.
The āwhere are they now?ā cards at the end are what give it away ā fact after fact about how much money someone made, or how much they sold their business for. The words āpassive incomeā are meant to be some fist-pumping celebratory moment. Iām not not a capitalist; my grievance here is on a storytelling level, where youāre asking us to care less about these individual characters ā who they are, what their hang-ups are, what they care about ā than the literal value they provide a billion dollar company. Compare that to the end of āMoneyballā, perennial baseball loser Billy Beane sticking around Oakland to keep being a loser, and youāll feel exactly whatās missing from āAirā.
I was also planning to write about āGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3ā (just like āYou Hurt My Feelingsā and āAirā, another solid B/B+) but spent too much time generating fake promo material for the Aviation Gin movie, so Iāll save that for another day. More reviews soon.
In the meantime, follow me on Letterboxd! Itās 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), Iām practically Mae West over there (pithy).
CORRECTION: The subhead previously identified it as āBlade Runner 2149ā when the post-apocalyptic world the movie depicts is actually āBlade Runner 2049ā, a mere quarter-century away!
Whatās the ideal Substack nomenclature here? āEmailā feels too formal. āEssayā obviously too fart-sniffy. I like āpostā 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