Available in the original Japanese version (with English subtitles) or in a dubbed English-language version.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Japan, the animated film “The First Slam Dunk” (based on the “Slam Dunk” manga series) features a cast of Japanese characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A 17-year-old basketball fanatic, who is the point guard on his high school team, wants to win the inter-high basketball championships while he is coping with the death of his older brother, who was also a basketball star.
Culture Audience: “The First Slam Dunk” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the manga series and anime films with memorable characters, great action scenes, and emotional resonance.
Takenori Akagi in “The First Slam Dunk” (Image courtesy of GKIDS)
“The First Slam Dunk” is one of the best basketball movies you could ever see. It’s a suspenseful and emotionally gripping film that balances a story of achieving sports greatness and coping with grief. Simply put: “The First Slam Dunk” is an artful cinematic adaptation of the “Slam Dunk” manga series on which it is based. There have also been a “Slam Dunk” TV series (which was on the air from 1993 to 1996), video games and other movies based on the “Slam Dunk” manga series.
“Slam Dunk” manga creator Takehiko Inoue wrote and directed “The First Slam Dunk” (his very impressive feature-film debut), based on his 1990 to 1996 manga series of the same name. “The First Slam Dunk” is an example of how the creator of a manga series can be the best person to also a direct a movie based on the series. Fans of “The First Slam Dunk” manga series will be immensely pleased with this movie version, which should also win over new fans.
“The First Slam Dunk” (which takes place in Japan) is centered on the story of a basketball team’s quest to win a high-school championship and a star player on the team who is dealing wt the death of his beloved older brother. The movie’s main protagonist is Ryota “Ryo” Miyagi, the point guard (#7) of Shohoku High School’s basketball team. Ryota, who is 17 years old, is still grieving over the death of his older brother So-Chan “Soto” Miyagi, who died when Soto was 12 and Ryota was 9. Soto is the one who influenced Ryota to become a basketball player.
Ryota lives at home with his widowed mother Kaoru and his younger sister Anna. A flashback shows that after the death of the children’s father, when Soto was still alive, Soto told his mother Kaoru: “I’ll be the family captain, Ma. Soto tells Ryota that Ryota can be the assistant captain. Coincidentally, Soto and Ryota were born on the same month and date, just three years apart.
Ryota is haunted by the memories of Soto. Winning a championship means more to him than just getting a title. For Ryota, it means making his family proud and honoring Soto’s legacy. Much of “The First Slam Dunk” consists of games that Shohoku High School’s basketball teams on their quest for the championship. They want to unseat the reigning championship team from Sannoh Kogyo High School, which has a star player named Kazunari Fukatsu.
The other members of the Shohoku High School basketball team are team captain Takenori Akagi (#4), three-point shooter Hisashi Mitsui (#14), a former MVP of his junior high school; small forward Kaede Rukawa (#11); and power forward Hanamichi Sakuragi (#10), who is the team’s biggest rebel. In the “Slam Dunk” manga series, Hanamichi is the central character.
The road to the championship isn’t easy, of course. There are crushing defeats, injuries, self-doubt and conflicts among the team members. The basketball scenes are absolutely thrilling and will make viewers almost feel like they’re watching a live-action game. There’s also a little bit of romance, since Haruko Akagi (Takenori’s younger sister, who also plays basketball) is the love interest of Hanamichi.
The voices of “The First Slam Dunk” characters are portrayed by different cast members, depending on the version of the movie. The original Japanese version (with English subtitles) has Shugo Nakamura as Ryota Miyagi, Kenta Miyake as Takenori Akagi, Jun Kasama as Hisashi Mitsui, Shinichiro Kamio as Kaede Rukawa, Subaru Kimura as Hanamichi Sakuragi and Maaya Sakamoto as Haruko Akagi. There’s also a U.S. version, with the dialogue dubbed in English, that has Paul Castro Jr. as Ryota Miyagi, Aaron Goodson as Takenori Akagi, Jonah Scott as Hisashi Mitsui, Aleks Le as Kaede Rukawa, Ben Balmaceda as Hanamichi Sakuragi and Abby Espiritu as Haruko Akagi.
You don’t have to be a basketball fan to enjoy “The First Slam Dunk” movie, which is well-written from beginning to end, with many captivating visuals. Hanamichi has the flashiest personality on the Shohoku High School basketball team, but sensitive and thoughtful Ryota is the most endearing team member and is the heart and soul of the movie. “The First Slam Dunk” is not just the name of this move but it could also describe the triumph that the movie is for Inoue as his feature-film directorial debut.
GKIDS released “The First Slam Dunk” in select U.S. cinemas on July 28, 2023. The movie was released in Japan on December 3, 2022. “The First Slam Dunk” will be released on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on February 28, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in various parts of the United States, mostly in 1949 and 1950, the dramatic film “Sweetwater” (based on true events) features an African American and white cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton experiences racism and other obstacles on his way to becoming one of the first African American basketball players in the National Basketball Association.
Culture Audience: “Sweetwater” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of basketball and sports biopics, but viewers should not expect an engaging or realistic-looking story in “Sweetwater.”
Everett Osborne in “Sweetwater” (Photo by Ian Fisher/Briarcliff Entertainment)
“Sweetwater” could have been an inspirational biopic about a groundbreaking basketball player. Instead, the movie is a stale cesspool of awful dialogue, corny scenarios and problematic racial condescension that depicts greedy basketball racists as heroes. People who don’t know anything about Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton (the second African American basketball player to play in the National Basketball Association) before seeing this sorry excuse for a biopic won’t learn much about him from the shallow way that he is presented in this film.
For starters, “Sweetwater” inaccurately depicts him as the first African American to play in the NBA, when in fact that achievement was accomplished that same year (1950) by Earl Lloyd, who was a player with the Washington Capitols. Harold Hunter of the Washington Capitols (who was cut from the team before ever playing in the NBA) and Clifton both signed contracts with the NBA in 1950, but there have been historical disputes over whether Hunter or Clifton should get credit as the first African American to sign a player contract with the NBA. In 1990, Clifton died in relative obscurity in Chicago. He was 67. In the last years of his life, Clifton was working as a taxi driver. Just like the business people who exploited Clifton in real life, the “Sweetwater” movie uses him as a pawn to make money off of his talent, and to present a self-congratulatory image of looking racially progressive.
“Sweetwater” (written and directed by Martin Guigui) doesn’t care about portraying Clifton as a whole person in this movie, because he is mainly presented in the context of what white people wanted to get from Sweetwater (played by Everett Osborne) as a commodity. (For the purposes of this review, the real Clifton is referred to as Clifton, while the movie’s Sweetwater character is referred to as Sweetwater.) The “Sweetwater” movie barely shows anything about Sweetwater’s loved ones in the African American community. The movie also doesn’t care to give much importance to his inner thoughts and feelings.
The closest that the movie shows of Sweetwater’s family background and connection to his family are a few, very brief flashback scenes that last for a combined total of less than 10 minutes of this 114-minute movie. In one scene, his mother (played by Ashani Roberts) gives 7-year-old Sweetwater (played by Ca’Ron Jaden Coleman) some sugar water, which was her way of cheering him up, and it became his favorite drink as a child in Arkansas. (Hence, the nickname Sweetwater.)
In another scene, Sweetwater is shown mournfully saying goodbye to his mother because his father Joe Nathaniel (played by Clifton Nathaniel) had decided to relocate with Sweetwater to Chicago, in search of better job opportunities in Jim Crow-plagued America. It’s in this scene that his mother says that Sweetwater needs to change his name from Clifton Nathaniel (which was his birth name) to his new name of Nathaniel Clifton. The movie gives no explanation for why his mother told Sweetwater to reverse his first and last names.
And (cringe alert) the movie makes a point of having a closeup of the cotton being picked in the field by Sweetwater and his father before they move away from Arkansas. The palms of Sweetwater’s hands have small cuts from the cotton thorns, so his mother gives him some sugar water, to help him with his discomfort. As a child, Sweetwater stares at the palms of his hands when he gets these cotton thorn cuts. And several times in the film, when Sweetwater is an adult, he stares at the palms of his hands in the same way, as if he’s remembering that he literally used to be a cotton-picking kid. It’s filmmaking that goes beyond being trite and plummets right into the depths of being racially tone-deaf.
Viewers of “Sweetwater” never get to see vivid details about what inspired him to start playing basketball and who were his earliest coaches. Instead, the movie erases that part of his life to focus on showing how white people in the basketball industry “discovered” Sweetwater and “rescued” him from a life of poverty. In other words, they wanted a piece of him so they could make money for themselves and get credit for being “visionaries.”
This “rescuing” part of the movie is shown almost immediately. The first scene of Sweetwater playing basketball is when he’s a 27-year-old underpaid player with the Harlem Globetrotters in 1949. At the time, professional basketball in the United States was segregated by race. Only white players were allowed in the NBA. And needless to say, the white basketball players, even the semi-pros, were making a lot more money than professional basketball players who weren’t white.
After a mock championship game where the Globetrotters defeated the Minneapolis Lakers (an all-white team), Sweetwater is approached by New York Knickerbockers coach Joe Lapchick (played by Jeremy Piven), who tells Sweetwater that he wants Sweetwater to play for the Knickbockers. (The Knickerbockers would later shorten their name to the Knicks.) Sweetwater, like most of the characters in the movie, thinks it’s impossible for anyone who isn’t white to play in the NBA.
But Joe, who is presented as a crusading “hero,” is determined to prove all the naysayers wrong. “I think you can help make the change,” Joe tells Sweetwater about breaking racial barriers at the NBA, even though throughout the movie, Joe wants to take all the credit for making the change. “You can be the first,” Joe adds, even though the movie wants to forget all about Lloyd of the Washington Capitols.
Joe attends a meeting with the NBA board of directors (who are all white men) and gets a mixed-to-negative reaction when Joe brings up the idea of recruiting Sweetwater for the Knickerbockers. Some of the board members support the idea, but they are outvoted by a majority who want to keep the NBA an all-white group. New York Knickerbockers owner Ned Irish (played by Cary Elwes) is one of the most adamant opponents to racial integration of the NBA, and he makes racist comments to prove it. NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is open to the idea of racial integration of the NBA, but he will only go with what the majority of the NBA board wants.
One of the worst scenes in the movie is when Joe’s wife (played by Dahlia Waingort Guigui), gives a pep talk to Joe when he thinks he’s failing to convince the necessary people to let Sweetwater join the NBA via the Knickerbockers. Joe keeps rambling about the wall of racism that Sweetwater can’t break through in order to get in the NBA. Joe mentions this “wall” several times in the movie.
Joe’s wife tells him, as if he’s pioneering civil rights activist: “You are Joe Lapchick! You don’t need to break through a wall. You just go get Sweetwater and you climb over that wall with him!” If slogan T-shirts were popular during this time period, then Joe and his wife would be wearing T-shirts that say, “We Are White Saviors.”
Meanwhile, Harlem Globetrotters coach/manager Abe Saperstein (played by Kevin Pollak) has put the Harlem Globetrotters on the basketball equivalent of the “chitlin circuit.” The overworked Globetrotters go on grueling tours to entertain audiences of different races. But because of racial segregation laws, the Globetrotters are treated like second-class citizens and denied entry or service at “whites only” places. The Globetrotters are paid a pittance, while Abe keeps much of the Globetrotters’ earnings for himself.
At times, “Sweetwater” tries to make it look like Abe is an ally to these black Globetrotters whom he is exploiting. When the Globetrotters are denied lodging at a hotel that has an unofficial “whites only” policy, the front desk clerk defensively says, “I don’t make the rules.” Abe puts on a big show of indignation and replies, “Yeah, like Nuremberg,” in reference to the excuse that Nazi officials made while on trial for World War II crimes in Nuremberg, Germany.
But Abe’s “outrage” about racism is really fake allyship. In a later scene on a tour bus, Sweetwater is the first person on the team to openly question Abe about the low payments for the Globetrotters (who win most of their games), compared to the white people (including Abe) who get considerably more money for being involved the same basketball games. When Sweetwater points out this inequality, Abe angrily snaps at him: “I’m the reason this team exists! … Just stick to playing basketball!”
And not long after Abe figures out that Sweetwater is questioning Abe’s exploitative business practices, Abe sells off Sweetwater like cattle to New York Knickerbockers owner Ned. Even though Ned is blatantly racist, he’s changed his mind about Sweetwater joining the team when Ned finally admits (after much pestering from Joe) that Sweetwater can help the team win games and sell more tickets. In other words, it all comes back to not really caring about the racial inequality that Sweetwater and other black basketball players experience. It’s about making more money for the white men in power positions, who want the money and the bragging rights about how “visionary” they are.
Most of the acting in “Sweetwater” is terribly unconvincing. Osborne’s performance is very stiff. Piven hams it up too much. Elwes acts like a robotic wax dummy. Pollak tries to be comedic, but it comes across as annoying. Dreyfuss looks emotionally disconnected, like he just signed up to be in this movie for the paycheck. Eric Roberts has a useless cameo as a racist gas station owner named Judd. Jim Caviezel has a very hokey cameo in the movie, as a sports journalist who meets Sweetwater in 1990, by being a passenger in Sweetwater’s taxi.
The movie’s dialogue is mind-numbingly horrible. Joe treats Sweetwater more like a freakishly tall money-making machine than as a human being. Early in the movie, Joe smugly comments that the size of Sweetwater’s hands “makes the [basket]ball look like a grapefruit.” Two radio announcers named Howard (played by Frank Buckley) and Marty (played by Todd Ant) at the Knickbockers basketball games give exposition-heavy play-by-plays about what was already shown in a scene, as if viewers are complete idiots and don’t understand what was already shown a few seconds earlier.
Forget about seeing anything in the movie about any friendships that Sweetwater might have developed with any of his fellow basketball players on any team. None of that meaningful camaraderie is in this dreadful biopic, which makes almost all the other basketball players nameless and generic. The basketball playing scenes in “Sweetwater” are disappointingly predictable and mostly dull. The movie reduces and downplays the racist blackash that Sweetwater got in real life after joining the NBA and instead makes it look like the worst thing that happened to him was a racist referee singling him out for unfair foul penalties.
The closest thing that the movie shows to what Sweetwater is like outside of basketball is when he begins courting a white singer named Jeanne Staples (played by Emmaline), whom he immediately asks out on a date when they meet after one of her nightclub performances. Jeanne sings jazz, but she’s a big fan of blues music, so Sweetwater takes her to a blues club on their first date. Real-life blues singer/musician Gary Clark Jr. has a cameo as in “Sweetwater” as a blues singer/musician named T-Bone, who is an acquaintance of Sweetwater’s.
“Sweetwater” shows this interracial romance, but none of the realistic conversations that would be a part of this romance. No one in Sweetwater’s inner circle makes any comments about this interracial relationship. (Jeanne’s friends are never shown.) Although a few white people glare with disapproval when they see Sweetwater and Jeanne together in public, neither Sweetwater nor Jeanne expresses any concern for their own safety for being in an interracial relationship, even though it would definitely be a concern in real life during this time period. In America in the 1940s and the 1950s, a black man would be in physical danger for dating a white woman, even in states where racial integration was legal.
But you’d never know it from watching this movie, which erases that type of historical context. What makes this erasure look so phony and inconsistent in “Sweetwater” is that the movie has many scenes where racism is a big problem for Sweetwater and his fellow Globetrotters when it’s related to their basketball work, but the movie tries to make it look like racism doesn’t exist when Sweetwater decides to date a white woman. (The movie never shows him romantically interested in any other women.) It’s another example of how the “Sweetwater” filmmakers have huge blind spots because of how they mishandle realistic depictions of race relations when telling this story. And in this male-dominated movie, it looks very sexist that Jeanne is the only female character who is given a name.
By removing so many authentic details about the real Clifton’s life, “Sweetwater” is ultimately a fake-looking, watered-down biopic. Fascinating aspects of Sweetwater’s life before he became a pro basketball player (such as serving in the U.S. Army during World War II) are barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. And the filmmakers of “Sweetwater” should be ashamed that they made his entire existence look like it only mattered in the context of how he elevated the status of the white men who used him for their own benefit.
Briarcliff Entertainment released “Sweetwater” in U.S. cinemas on April 14, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in 1984, primarily in Oregon and in North Carolina, the dramatic film “Air” features a predominantly white group of people (with some African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Against the odds, Nike executives convince a young Michael Jordan to sign with Nike, which makes a historic deal to create the Air Jordan shoe brand entirely around him.
Culture Audience: Besides appealing to the target audience of fans of Michael Jordan, Air Jordan shoes and the movie’s headliners, “Air” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching movies about landmark business deals, from the perspectives of the business executives.
Matt Damon and Viola Davis in “Air” (Photo by Ana Carballosa/Amazon Content Services)
“Air” is designed to be an awards-bait movie with mass appeal, but it has a very selective agenda in which characters get the most importance in the story. This dramatic origin story of the Air Jordan business hits many familiar beats of sports underdog movies. The acting and writing are engaging, but Michael Jordan is a sidelined character. His mother is at least given credit for being a smart dealmaker. “Air” had its world premiere at the 2023 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
Directed by Ben Affleck and written by Alex Convery, “Air” takes place in 1984, in the months leading up to the September 1984 launch of Nike’s very first Air Jordan shoes, also known as Air Jordan 1. According to several reports, Nike (which is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon) had $5 billion in sales from Jordan Brand (Nike’s division Air Jordans shoes) in 2022. In “Air,” the underdogs and main heroes of this sports story are not athletes but the Nike executives who played crucial roles in conceiving and launching this industry-changing athletic shoe brand. It’s a very feel-good, slanted view of a fascinating story, but “Air” is a scripted drama, not a documentary.
The main protagonist of “Air” is Sonny Vaccaro (played by Matt Damon), a Nike basketball recruiter who’s been mainly working with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in selling Nike basketball shoes. Vaccaro is often credited with being the person who came up with the idea to have Nike pay NCAA colleges to have their basketball teams wear Nike shoes as product endorsements meant to influence people to buy the shoes. This type of product endorsement is now commonplace in the NCAA.
Sonny is passionate about basketball. And because he is deeply entrenched in NCAA basketball, he has a knack for being able to predict which NCAA players will be the top recruits by the National Basketball Association (NBA). But getting the top recruits for Nike endorsement deals requires a lot of money that Nike doesn’t have. The problem is that in 1984, Nike is financially struggling from decreased sales and massive money losses.
In terms of basketball shoe sales, Converse was the market leader at the time, with 54% of the market share, according to a statistic mentioned in “Air.” Converse had endorsement deals with NBA stars such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Adidas, which was Converse’s closest competition in 1984, was popular with hip-hop stars, such as Run-DMC. Adidas was also Jordan’s first choice on where he wanted to sign an endorsement deal as a 21-year-old rookie for the Chicago Bulls.
Meanwhile, in 1984, Nike had only 17% of the market share for basketball shoe sales before the historic deal with Jordan. Nike also had an image and reputation of being an outdated company whose specialty was shoes for joggers. Basketball fans come in all different races, but NBA basketball is mostly played by African Americans. As Nike vice president of athlete relations Howard White (played by Chris Tucker), who is African American, half-jokingly comments in the movie: “Black people don’t jog.”
Nike vice president of marketing Rob Strasser (played by Jason Bateman) isn’t as passionate about basketball as Sonny is, but he is passionate about making profits from his marketing ideas. Rob is cynical about Nike’s office politics, and he has a world-weary attitude about him. He gives the impression that he is very annoyed with being part of a losing company, but he doesn’t want to quit Nike because he’s convinced that he can be part of the team that turn things around for Nike. Privately, Rob is afraid that no other company would hire him if he wanted to leave Nike.
“Air” makes a point of showing that middle-aged Sonny (a bachelor with no children) is at a crossroads in his life and at Nike. Sonny’s life revolves around Nike, which is in a slump. And he’s got a lot to prove, because Sonny’s self-esteem is very wrapped up in his job. Observant viewers will also see that Sonny likes to gamble a lot in his free time, which is a possible addiction that the movie never really explores. The parallels are obvious: Sonny is about to make the biggest gamble in his career with the Jordan deal.
Someone else who’s also got a lot to prove is Nike founder/CEO Phil Knight (played by Affleck), who is exactly the type of upper-class jogger that Nike has been courting for years. But there’s no denying that basketball shoes will be a driving force of sales for athletic footwear. Nike has been slow to adapt. Sonny says to Phil: “Basketball is the future.” Phil is skeptical: “Basketball is dead.”
In a Nike executive meeting that includes Sonny, Rob and a few other employees, Rob asks everyone in the room who their top choices are for NBA recruits who should be pursued by Nike. Sonny wants Jordan. Sonny also gets frustrated because everyone else names safe choices of basketball players who probably won’t achieve greatness. Sonny berates the employees by saying: “I have no tolerance for people who have no insight.”
In the men’s restroom, Rob tells Sonny that Sonny should be more diplomatic in these meetings. Sonny brushes off this advice. He is determined to sign Jordan and will do whatever it takes. Sonny thinks Nike should be spending even more money on the Jordan deal, while Phil wants to spend less.
Part of Sonny’s goal includes persuading Phil to spend Nike’s entire $500,000 recruiting budget on Jordan, before Jordan even starts playing for the Bulls. It’s unprecedented. And at the time, its seems like more than a big risk. It seems like financial suicide for Nike.
Sonny reminds Phil that Phil took a big risk by founding Nike. And he needs Phil to take a big risk on Sonny’s gut instinct that Jordan is the one and only NBA player that Nike should sign for this basketball season. Sonny tells Phil that if Sonny is wrong about Jordan, then Sonny will probably resign from Nike.
Sonny’s enthusiasm (or obsession) to sign Jordan means that Sonny inevitably offends people with his aggressive tactics. One of those people is Jordan’s agent David Falk (played by Chris Messina), a fast-talking, foul-mouthed New Yorker, who has some of the funniest scenes in the movie when he has raging meltdowns every time Sonny bypasses David to try to close the deal. David makes threats to Sonny that’s just a lot of empty, blustering talk. David is also one of the naysayers who thinks that Nike won’t be able to afford Jordan. In real life, Falk is credited with coming up with the name Air Jordan, but “Air” pokes a little fun at this claim to fame.
As part of his preparation for the deal, Sonny watches footage of Jordan’s college games and figures out the inner workings of Nike’s competition. He also gets some important advice from Jordan family associate George Raveling (played by Marlon Wayans), who was an assistant coach of the U.S. Olympics basketball team at the time. It’s a short but well-acted scene in the movie, where George tells Sonny a memorable story about being in the crowd during Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.
“Air” depicts Sonny as being inspired to create an entire Nike shoe line around Jordan after Sonny sees an old TV ad with tennis star Arthur Ashe talking about his custom-made tennis shoes that have been replicated for people to buy. Ever the wheeler dealer, Sonny makes a bold move to pitch the idea directly to Jordan’s parents Deloris Jordan (played by Viola Davis) and James Jordan (played by Julius Tennon), by driving to the Jordan parents’ home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and showing up unannounced. (Davis and Tennon are married in real life.) Deloris is the outspoken and savvy business person of the couple, and she makes the best power play in the entire story.
And where is Michael Jordan during all of these schemes and deals that wouldn’t exist without him? “Air” depicts Michael Jordan (played by Damian Young) as an occasional bystander who says very little in this story, and he is mostly filmed with his back to the camera. There’s some archival footage of the real Michael Jordan, but the screen time in “Air” for these clips is also very brief.
In the production notes for “Air,” director Affleck explains this choice: “Michael Jordan is so famous that I truly felt if we ever saw an actor playing [him], it would be hard to get the audience to suspend their disbelief, because, in my opinion, there’s no convincing anybody that someone who isn’t Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan. We felt a more interesting way to tell the story would be for him to exist in the ether of the movie. To be talked about by everyone but not seen is somewhat analogous to the experience of celebrities and sports stars in modern life, because most people go their whole lives without ever meeting or seeing their favorite sports star or celebrity in person. So we only see Michael in clips and flashes. We don’t ever fully see him in person because to see him in person would be to put his feet on the ground in a way that the movie doesn’t want to do.”
In other words, Affleck didn’t want any character to overshadow the Sonny character, played by Affleck’s longtime friend Damon. (Affleck and Damon are two of the producers of “Air.”) The fact of the matter is that this movie could have shown a little bit more respect for Michael Jordan’s role in this monumental deal. The “Air” movie depicts Michael Jordan as mostly caring about getting a new red Mercedes 380SL as part of the deal, while his parents (especially his mother) did almost all of the talking for him. It’s hard to believe that Michael Jordan didn’t speak more in these business meetings.
Another thing that looks very fabricated for the movie is how the first Air Jordan design came about, because it’s depicted as a “race against time” over a weekend to get a prototype ready in time for a Monday meeting with Michael Jordan and his parents. It’s the prototype for the shoe that would become Air Jordan 1. Peter Moore (played by Michael Maher) is portrayed as the artistic visionary who came up with the design for the shoe all by himself. The movie mentions a team of designers who worked with Peter to bring his vision to life, but these team members are nowhere to be seen in “Air.”
It’s another misstep that doesn’t properly acknowledge the contributions of an untold number of real-life people who were essential members of the team. “Air “didn’t have to single out all of these people in the movie, but they could have at least been characters seen in the movie as background extras. It’s odd that with so much of Nike’s Air Jordan deal riding on the actual product (the shoes), so little thought in the movie is given to the shoemakers who helped make the first Air Jordans a reality. Instead, “Air” makes it look like it was only Peter Moore in a Nike shoe design room who created the first Air Jordan.
What “Air” does get right is having an infectious energy in the behind-the-scenes drama that went into making this deal happen. The dialogue is snappy and intelligent but accessible. And the performances, especially from Damon and Davis, are above-average for movies of this type of subject matter. “Air” also has excellent soundtrack choices, with well-placed pop songs from the 1980s, such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian,” Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Ain’t Nobody” and Squeeze’s “Tempted.” The movie also has Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing,” which actually wasn’t released until 1985, but that’s a minor dateline error in an otherwise commendable soundtrack.
A movie like “Air” obviously wants to be more important than just a story about how Nike made a comeback by signing a young Michael Jordan in what would turn out to be the most lucrative celebrity endorsement deal in athletic shoe history. (For a deep dive into the cultural impact of Air Jordans, the 2020 documentary “One Man and His Shoes” is worth seeing.) The story depicted in “Air” serves as an example of how some of the best risks are taken by people who’ve got a lot to lose but take the risks anyway. It’s too bad that Michael Jordan’s perspective of this inspirational story is completely erased from the movie.
Amazon Studios will release “Air” in U.S. cinemas on April 5, 2023. Prime Video will premiere the movie on May 12, 2023.
Culture Representation: In the documentary film “One Man and His Shoes,” a racially diverse group of people (African American, white and a few Latinos and Asians), who are all connected in some way to professional basketball, discuss the story behind the massive business of Air Jordan athletic shoes, inspired by Michael Jordan and made by Nike.
Culture Clash: As Nike’s Air Jordan shoes became more popular as a status symbol, criticism increased over the higher retail prices for the shoes and the violence caused by Air Jordan shoe thefts.
Culture Audience: Besides appealing to the target audience of fans of Michael Jordan and Air Jordan shoes, “One Man and His Shoes” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching documentaries about shoe culture and how popular brands are marketed to consumers and the down sides of brand popularity.
Air Jordan XII shoes (launched in 1996), in a scene from “One Man and His Shoes” (Photo courtesy of Vice)
“One Man and His Shoes” offers a fairly comprehensive look at the highs, lows and everything in between for the popularity of Air Jordan athletic shoes, made by Nike. This documentary’s biggest void is not having the participation of Michael Jordan or anyone in his family. “One Man and His Shoes” has an epilogue stating: “Nike and Brand Jordan did not to requests to be interviewed in this film.”
However, “One Man and His Shoes” admirably doesn’t sugarcoat or ignore that behind the glamorous image of the lucrative Air Jordan business is a very ugly truth: There have been deadly repercussions of how the Air Jordan brand has been marketed as a status symbol. Certain people have literally been killed for Air Jordan shoes. Most of these murder victims are African Americans. “One Man and His Shoes” brings up issues of corporate and celebrity responsibility when a people are killing each other to get a celebrity brand product that’s marketed to low-income people who might not be able to afford that product.
Directed by Yemi Bamiro, “One Man and His Shoes” has interviews with mostly sports journalists; cultural experts/historians; and former Nike executives who have been involved with making and selling Air Jordan shoes. The movie begins with this striking statement: “September 15, 1984: Nike created Air Jordan. On October 18, 1984, the NBA [National Basketball Association] threw them out of the game.” For people who don’t know why, it’s because in 1984, Michael Jordan, the future superstar Chicago Bulls player, was wearing the first version of Air Jordans, which violated the NBA’s rules of not having enough white on the shoes.
The Air Jordan 1 shoes were boldly designed in mostly black and red, with some white, but not enough white to meet NBA standards. Of course, Jordan still got to play in the NBA and went on to become the most famous basketball player in the world. In the early days of Air Jordan, he was fined for wearing the shoes during NBA games. However, Nike (which is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon) happily paid the fines, which were a tiny fraction of what would become the multibillion-dollar Air Jordan business. In 2022, Nike had an estimated $5 billion in sales from Jordan Brand (Nike’s division for Air Jordans), and those annual revenues are expected to increase.
Jordan getting fined for wearing Air Jordans was a clever marketing strategy for Nike, since the fines immediately created a “rebellious but cool” image for Air Jordans. In addition, he wore the Air Jordan shoes for five or six months before they went on sale at retail. The NBA “ban” on the shoes helped fuel sales.
Peter Moore, the original designer of Air Jordans, comments in “One Man and His Shoes” about how Air Jordans saved Nike from declining sales and cultural irrelevancy. Before the invention of Air Jordans, “Nike started out as a running [shoes] company. By 1984, they weren’t doing well.” (Moore died in 2022, at the age of 74.)
Before the invention of Air Jordans, the company that had the largest market share for basketball shoes in 1984 was Converse (which had NBA stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird as celebrity spokesmen), followed by Adidas. Nike was in a distant third or fourth place. It’s a well-known story that in 1984, 21-year-old NBA rookie Jordan was leaning toward signing with Adidas, which was the leading athletic shoe brand at the time for hip-hop culture.
However, Nike won over Jordan and his parents because Nike promised an entire shoe franchise named after Jordan, as well as Jordan getting a share of the revenue. It was a deal that was unheard of at the time for any NBA player, let alone a rookie. The documentary mentions that Jordan currently makes about $130 million a year from Air Jordan sales. David Falk, who was Jordan’s agent at the time, reiterates this story in the documentary. Falk is also widely credited with coming up with the name Air Jordan for the shoe brand.
Sonny Vaccaro, a former Nike executive, is credited with being the one to come up with the idea to have Nike make this huge investment in Jordan. He is also credited with changing the business of college sports sponsorship by paying National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) colleges for their teams to wear Nike shoes. In the documentary, Vaccaro shows a pair of Nike shoes that Jordan wore when he injured his toe in the 1991 NBA playoffs between the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Rob Strasser (who died in 1993, at the age of 46) was the Nike marketing executive who decided to market Air Jordans to inner city kids. Julia Strasser Dixon, Rob Strasser’s widow, is a former Nike marketing manager. She says in the documentary: “Everybody in the business knew that the main consumer[s] for athletic shoes [are] 16-year-old boys. The biggest sport to get to the masses is basketball.”
Professor Antonio Williams, a sports marketing lecturer at the University of Indianapolis, comment in the documentary: “Marketing the Jordan brand to the African American community has been the core of success of the Jordan brand.” Sports journalist Jemele Hill adds, “Black people have always been the arbiter of cool.”
Rick Telender, author and Chicago Sun-Times basketball columnist, has this observation: “You could say it was about race and ethnicity. But as always, it’s about poverty, it’s about economic disparity, about hope, and about a chance to move ahead to become a part of the Great American Ladder, where you can start anywhere and make it to the top.”
The success of the Air Jordan brand had a lot to do with Jordan’s star power and how Nike marketed it. Spike Lee’s association with Nike (he has directed and starred in Air Jordan commercials) are mentioned as being part of the effective marketing campaign for Air Jordans. DJ/music producer Clark Kent describes Lee as “the father of sneaker culture.”
David J. Stern, who was commissioner of the NBA from 1984 to 2014, mentions that the Puma Clyde shoe (inspired by former NBA star Walt Frazier) was the first “cool” player/shoe alliance. Jordan and Nike took that concept to a whole other level. Other people who offer comments about the marketing of Air Jordans are sneaker analyst Matt Powell, Michael Jordan biographer Roland Lazenby and Jim Riswold, a former creative for advertising firm Wieden & Kennedy, which has created the most well-known Air Jordan ads, including “It’s Gotta Be the Shoes” for the Air Jordan 5.
But there were also other cultural forces that made the Air Jordan brand a huge business success. Jordan came along at a time when young people, particularly African American youth, were looking for a new basketball hero. Jordan’s celebrity name also helped increase tourism in Chicago, according to basketball/sneaker writer Russ Bengston, who says: “Until [Michael] Jordan came, Chicago really wasn’t a destination for anybody.”
From the beginning, Air Jordans have been marketed to inner-city youth. However, the prices for these shoes are often out of reach for this target audience, thereby causing a phenomenon called “Air Jordan envy.” And envy for material things often can result in theft and violence. Meanwhile, filmmaker/author Robbito Garcia notes that even though Nike wanted to get a lot of money from certain communities, Nike didn’t show enough concern about how Nike products (specifically Air Jordans) were negatively affecting anyone in those communities: “There was a gap in the support for the youth,” says Garcia.
In all fairness, “One Man and His Shoes” mentions the charitable causes that Jordan and Nike have contributed to, in order to help underprivileged youth. But the documentary also mentions that Jordan and Nike have been slow to respond to murders that were directly related to Air Jordan thefts. People have also continued to question the prices for Air Jordans. Critics of Air Jordans have described these shoes as overpriced and overrated.
One of the people interviewed in “One Man and His Shoes” is Dazie Williams, a Houston mother whose 22-year-old son Joshua D. Woods was murdered for his Air Jordans in 2012. Williams says that even though her son’s murderers are solely responsible for this heinous crime, she believes that her son would not have been murdered for any other shoes. She also says that Jordan gave her a tone-deaf sympathy gift of a pair of Air Jordans after her son was killed. Williams compares this sympathy gift to giving candy to a crying kid.
Sports journalist Scoop Jackson and other people in the documentary say that even though Jordan could have done more to address the violence connected to Air Jordans, it’s really Nike that bears most of the burden to have a responsible reaction to this violence. It’s because Nike is the entity that markets Air Jordans and make the most profits from Air Jordans. Williams doesn’t mince words when he says, “Nike has a little blood on their hands too.”
“One Man and His Shoes” isn’t all gloom and doom. The documentary also shows the fun side of Air Jordan fandom. Some people who are Air Jordan collectors are interviewed in the movie, including entrepreneur Hawaii Mike Salman and Paris-based print designer Air Ruddy. A Detroit-based collector, who did not want to be identified on camera, says he’s been collecting Air Jordans since 1985.
At the time this documentary was made, this unidentified collector had more than 1,175 Air Jordan shoes, and his Air Jordan collection was insured for more than $1 million. A female Air Jordan collector in Tokyo is also interviewed, but she did not want to be identified on camera. This secrecy gives more credibility to the belief that people who go public about owning many valuable Air Jordans could be putting their own lives at risk.
The origin story of Air Jordan shoes has been made into the 2023 dramatic film “Air,” directed by Ben Affleck, who co-stars in the movie as Nike founder Phil Knight. It’s a very glossy version of the story that makes the Nike executives the main heroes. “One Man and His Shoes” is worth watching for more of the real story that’s not included in “Air,” including the harsh reality that people have died because of greed for Air Jordan shoes.
Vice premiered “One Man and His Shoes” on May 25, 2020. The movie is available on digital and VOD, as well as free streaming on Crackle, The Roku Channel and Tubi.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Boston, Los Angeles, Memphis, Charlotte and Cincinnati from June 2018 to June 2019, the documentary “Gap Year” features a group of African Americans and white people representing the middle-class and wealthy in this chronicle of basketball player Darius Bazley’s year after he graduated from high school and before he found out if he would be drafted into the National Basketball League (NBA).
Culture Clash: Bazley gets praise and skepticism for his decision to accept a $1 million internship from New Balance during this “gap year.”
Culture Audience: “Gap Year” will appeal mainly to people who are interested in stories about how basketball players prepare for the NBA.
Darius Bazley in “Gap Year” (Photo courtesy of 1091 Pictures)
The documentary “Gap Year” sometimes comes across as a gimmicky marketing ploy for New Balance, but it’s still an enjoyable watch because of basketball player Darius Bazley, the movie’s engaging star. The documentary chronicles what happened in the year after Bazley graduated from high school and did a marketing internship with Boston-based sports footwear/apparel company New Balance while he trained for the NBA. This wasn’t just any internship: New Balance paid Bazley a $1 million salary for this internship, with the idea that it was a starter salary for Bazley to be a New Balance spokesperson if he ended up becoming a star in the NBA.
Directed by Josh Kahn and T.J. Regan, “Gap Year” has a breezy 75-minute total run time. It’s just about the right amount of time to tell this story, which ends in with Bazley finding out in June 2019 if he got drafted into the NBA or not. “Gap Year” begins in June 2018, when Bazley (a native of Cincinnati) has graduated from high school and is considered a hot prospect for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the traditional stepping stone to get into the NBA.
However, Bazley doesn’t want to go to college. He wants to be drafted into the NBA within two years after graduating from high school. It’s a bold and risky move that has paid off for only a small percentage of NBA players—most notably, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett.
As NBA analyst Jay Williams (a former Naismith College Player of the Year) comments on the NCAA to NBA rule: “We live in a society where everybody abides by the rules. And we don’t even know what the rule is or where it came from. They just abide by it.” Williams adds that Bazley’s decision to take a year off from the NBA G League to train while doing the New Balance internship was “the most fascinating and disruptive thing I’ve ever seen in basketball.”
ESPN college basketball/NBA draft analyst Jay Bilas says, “When [Kevin] Garnett and Kobe [Bryant] came out, I think people were still having a hard time—myself included—wrapping their head around the idea of a high school kid going into the NBA.” David Stern, who was the NBA’s commissioner from 1984 to 2014, comments: “I think at the time, my own view was that we didn’t want out scouts in high school gymnasiums.” Michele Roberts, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association union, offers a different point of view on the NBA recruiting players right out of high school: “Frankly, I don’t see the difference between that and seeing them in a college gym.”
Rich Paul, CEO of Klutch Sports Group, which represented Bazley during this post-high-school transition, has this to say about Bazley bypassing college to get to the NBA: “I believe college is necessary for most kids. It was truly about trying what’s best for Darius.” The movie shows some footage of Bazley in gyms with basketball trainer Mike Mills in Memphis and basketball trainer Pierre Sully and physical trainer Bryan Doo in Boston. However, the majority of the documentary footage is showing Bazley’s internship at New Balance headquarters in Boston.
In January 2019, Bazley temporarily moved to Boston, where he was given corporate housing at an apartment bulding, with all expenses paid for by New Balance. His internship was only for a three-month period, but he was expected to learn a lot of the ins and outs of marketing for New Balance, particularly in the launch of new products. Not only was it Bazley’s first time living away from home but it was also his first office job.
As expected, Bazley experienced some culture shock. On his first day on he job, Bazley had to call his manager because Bazley didn’t know how to fill out a tax form. And being a tall, African American teenager, he stood out in an office environment consisting of mostly white people who are older than he is. A few of the white female employees seem intimidated by Bazley at first when they interact with him, possibly because of his race but also possibly because he’s so tall.
Still, Bazley seems to sense that he won’t adjust easily to this office environment because although people are friendly to him, they don’t seem interested in becoming his “work friend.” He’s also visibly uncomfortable using computers when he first arrives on the job, which makes you wonder what kind of education he got in high school to not be familiar with using computers as a high school graduate. Bazley is willing to learn what he’s taught on the job, which is a good sign that he’ll have the right attitude in the real world of professional careers.
Later in the documentary, Bazley settles into a work routine that he admits is lonely: He comments that after work, he spends time in his apartment alone, and it’s not unusual for his dinner to consist of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Klutch Sports CEO Paul says in an on-camera interview that he purposely left Bazley alone during this internship because he didn’t want to coddle Bazley. “One of the things I want is for him to align himself with his good habits,” Paul comments.
Being a restless teenager, Bazley does gripe a little about the monotony of an office job. The documentary show a few things that break up his routine. In February 2019, Bazley went to Charlotte for the NBA All-Star Weekend, which was a great motivation for his NBA dreams. It’s easy to see that because of the business knowledge he gained in the internship, Bazley is now equipped to making better-informed decisions about endorsement deals than if he didn’t have that behind-the-scenes internship experience.
In another scene, entertainer Jaden Smith visits New Balance headquarters for a meeting about a collaboration. Bazley gets to hang out a little bit with Smith during this meeting and says he’s impressed with Smith’s maturity. Bazley also seems to enjoy himself at a New Balance focus group at a high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It’s at this focus group (when he’s around people in his age group) that Bazley seems to enjoy his internship the most, because he can see how the focus group has a direct impact on marketing decisions.
After his internship ended, another big day for Bazley was in May 2019 at Klutch Pro Day in Los Angeles, where he sees firsthand how deals are made for pro athletes to get endorsement deals. It’s an eye-opening experience that gives him a sneak preview of what types of opportunities can come his way if he makes it into the NBA. Although this type of dealmaking might be nothing new to viewers who know the business of sports, what “Gap Year” does very well is convey Bazley’s perspective of someone who’s new to it all.
When it comes to his basketball skills, Bazley is confident but not arrogant. His personality is a little bit on the quiet side, but he has a lot of positive energy that makes him very easy to like. His family is briefly shown in the documentary, but the documentary very much keeps the focus on the “coming of age” journey for Bazley, who goes through the adult rite of passage of living away from parents for the first time. Other people interviewed in “Gap Year” include New Balance global marketing director Patrick Cassidy; Klutch Sports employee Brandon Cavanaugh; rapper Dave East, who’s labeled in the documentary as a “former Amateur Athletic Union standout”; New Balance global marketing manager Sean Sweeney; and former Bleacher Report editor-in-chief Ben Osborne.
People who are expecting “Gap Year” to be mostly about basketball training sessions might be disappointed. And the movie doesn’t do anything very spectacular when it comes to cinematography or editing. However, “Gap Year” is a very interesting chronicle of one teenager’s journey to be a nonconformist when it comes to pursuing his NBA goals. The documentary is best appreciated as a story where professional basketball is a catalyst but not the main reason why a child becomes an adult.
1091 Pictures released “Gap Year” on digital and VOD on December 1, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area and in an alternate technology universe, the live-action/animated film “Space Jam: A New Legacy” features a predominantly African American cast of characters (with some white people, Latinos and Asians) representing the middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A computer algorithm traps basketball superstar LeBron James in a technology universe, where he joins forces with Warner Bros.-owned Looney Tunes characters for a high-stakes basketball game against computer-generated villains that want to take over the world.
Culture Audience: Besides appealing to the obvious target audience of LeBron James fans and Looney Tunes fans, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” will appeal primarily to people interested in watching a mindless but harmless family film that overloads on shilling for various Warner Bros. entertainment products and services.
Cedric Joe and Don Cheadle in “Space Jam: A New Legacy” (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is not meant to be a real movie. It’s just a long and witless commercial for Warner Bros. entertainment entities, with LeBron James as a celebrity spokesperson. Even young children and gullible people will notice the over-the-top, shameless plugging of all things Warner Bros. in “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” It’s hard not to miss this obnoxious promotion, because it’s in every scene.
Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” is the sequel to 1996’s “Space Jam.” Both are hybrid live-action/animated movies about basketball superstars who team up with Warner Bros.-owned Looney Tunes characters to play against villains in a life-or-death basketball game. Michael Jordan starred in “Space Jam,” which was also a silly movie, but it had a lot more heart and sincerity than “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” which stars LeBron James.
Both “Space Jam” movies have celebrity athletes portraying themselves. All of these athletes have limited acting skills, even if some of these basketball icons have loads of charisma in real life. However, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” is a much more cynically made movie, because its highest priority is selling Warner Bros. characters and products. At least the first “Space Jam” movie made more of an attempt to be humorous and have several significant characters whose purpose was not to be a mascot for Warner Bros.
It’s not a good sign when a movie has more than four credited screenwriters, because it usually means that there were “too many cooks in the kitchen.” “Space Jam: A New Legacy” has six screenwriters: Celeste Ballard, Keenan Coogler, Jesse Gordon, Terence Nance, Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor. And what’s even worse is that all of these “Space Jam: A New Legacy” screenwriters couldn’t come up with a truly original story for this sequel.
“Space Jam: A New Legacy” essentially copies the same template as “Space Jam,” with just a few changes, such as the reason for the big showdown basketball game that happens in the last third of the film. In “Space Jam,” Jordan has to do battle against basketball-playing monsters from outer space that were literally stealing the talent (by suctioning it out in gas form) from NBA stars. In “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” James has to do battle against a computer algorithm (which can take the shape of a man) that has stolen his younger son and created a team of monsters for the basketball showdown.
Each movie opens with a highlight montage of the basketball superstar’s career, up until the movie was made. Each movie has someone saying more than once, “You can’t be great without putting in the work.” Each movie ends exactly how you think it will end.
In “Space Jam: A New Legacy” LeBron’s 12-year-old son Dominic, nicknamed Dom (played by Cedric Joe), is a computer whiz and aspiring video game developer who has been kidnapped by a computer algorithm called Al G. Rhythm (played by Don Cheadle) into the algorithm’s universe called the Warner 3000 server-verse. Inside this server-verse exists everything Warner Bros., including Looney Tunes World.
Dom feels unappreciated and misunderstood by LeBron, who is pushing Dom to become a basketball star. Dom likes playing basketball and is on his school’s basketball team, but he’s an average player, and he doesn’t have the passion for the game like his father does. There’s a predictable scene in the beginning of the film where Dom is playing in a school game, and he misses a shot that causes the team to lose the game.
Dom wants to attend an E3 Game Design camp, but it’s taking place on the same weekend as a basketball camp that LeBron wants Dom to attend. Father and son argue about it. But in the end, LeBron is the adult in charge and tells Dom that he has no choice but to go to the basketball camp. Dom is predictably resentful about this decision and his father’s control over his life.
The rest of LeBron’s family are just filler characters that don’t get much screen time and don’t add much to the story. LeBron’s wife Kamiyah (played by Sonequa Martin-Green) chimes in early in the movie to say to LeBron about his parenting skills for Dom: “I’m worried that you’re pushing him too hard … He doesn’t need a coach. He needs a dad.”
In this movie, LeBron and Kamiyah have two other children: teenager Darius (played by Ceyair J Wright) and kindergarten-age Xosha (played by Harper Leigh Alexander). Darius’ only purpose in the movie is to be a teasing older brother and occasional basketball practice opponent with Dom. Xosha’s only purpose in the movie is to be a cute and charming kid.
Because “Space Jam: Legacy” is a Warner Bros. commercial, LeBron and takes Dom with him to a business meeting at Warner Bros. Studios headquarters in Burbank, California. Also in this meeting is LeBron’s childhood friend Malik (played by Khris Davis), who is now LeBron’s manager. It’s at Warner Bros. headquarters that viewers first see Al G. Rhythm giving a monologue, as he lurks in the recesses of some giant computer mainframe somewhere in a back room.
Al G. Rhythm can take many different shapes and forms, but he comes out looking like Cheadle when he wants to look like a human. Al G. Rhythm has concocted an idea to use Warner 3000 technology to scan LeBron into Warner Bros. movies so that LeBron’s image can replace major characters in these movies. Warner Bros. executives will present this idea to LeBron in this meeting. The unnamed executives are portrayed in cameo roles by Sarah Silverman and Steven Yeun, who look like they know they’re in a dumb movie and just want a quick and easy paycheck.
Al G. Rhythm has a sidekick named Pete, which is a mute blue blob that doesn’t do much but act as a sounding board for Al G. Rhythm. Before the meeting takes place, Al G. Rhythm gives this monologue: “I’ve searched far and wide for the perfect partner for this launch. And I finally found him, Pete. He’s a family man, an entrepreneur, a social media superstar, with millions of fans worldwide. Algorithmically speaking, he’s more than an athlete. He’s a king!”
Is this an algorithm or a LeBron James fanboy? Al G. Rhythm then continues with his ranting manifesto, “I’m stuck in the server-verse. No one knows who I am or what I do. But all that changes today, because Warner Bros. launches the revolutionary technology that I masterminded. Today, it’s my time to shine! Once I partner with King James and combine his fame with my incredible tech, I will finally get the recognition and respect that I so richly deserve!”
There’s just one big problem. In the business meeting, LeBron says he hates the idea of being scanned and put into Warner Bros. movies as a replacement character. (But in real life, apparently, he had no problem being put into a Warner Bros. commercial posing as a movie.) The sycophantic executives agree, and the idea is scrapped.
Al G. Rhythm is angry and insulted that his idea was rejected, so he kidnaps Dom, who becomes trapped in the server-verse. And the only way that Dom can be returned to his family is if LeBron and a basketball team that LeBron has assembled win in a “death match” game against Al G. Rhythm and the villain basketball team that Al G. Rhythm has assembled. All of this requires LeBron to go in the server-verse to find Dom. When LeBron (in animated form) ends up in Looney Tunes World, you know what happens next.
At first, LeBron arrives in Looney Tunes World in simplistic animated form. But then, Al G. Rhythm shows up to “enhance” all the players who will be on Lebron’s basketball team, so they go from looking like hand-drawn 2-D animation to computer-generated 3-D animation. The team is called the Tune Squad. The Looney Tunes characters who are on LeBron’s team act exactly how you would expect them to act.
The “Space Jam: A New Legacy” filmmakers got their money’s worth because a small number of voice actors protray several of the Looney Tunes characters, instead having all of the characters each voiced by a different actor. Jeff Bergman is the voice of Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear. Eric Bauza is the voice of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd and Marvin the Martian. Gabriel Iglesias is the voice of Speedy Gonzales. Zendaya is the voice of Lola Bunny. Candi Milo is the voice of Granny. Bob Bergen is the voice of Tweety Bird. Fred Tatasciore is the voice of Taz.
In opposition to the Tune Squard, Al G. Rhythm has created the Good Squad by enhancing real-life NBA and WNBA star players into computerized mutant super-villains. Anthony Davis is The Brow, a giant blue falcon-like creature with a 30-foot wing span. Diana Taurasi is White Mamba, a super-sized mutant snake. Klay Thompson is Wet/Fire, a creature that can create flames and water, as if that wouldn’t be considered a major foul on a basketball court. Nneka Ogwumike is Arachnneka, a large mutant spider. Damien Lillard is Chronos, a time-manipulating creature that can use Dame Time to slow down opponents while he can quickly use fighting techniques.
The big basketball showdown that serves as the movie’s climax is so formulaic that it will be easy to get distracted by trying to spot all the characters from Warner Bros. movies that are in the audience. The audience is supposed to consists of thousands of LeBron’s social media followers who were beamed in from the Internet. But somehow, those who ended up getting the most prominent placement in the front rows were various characters from Warner Bros.-owned entertaint entities, such as Harry Potter, King Kong, Joker, Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Scooby-Doo, Neo from “The Matrix,” Austin Powers, plus characters from “The Wizard of Oz,” “Game of Thrones,” “Gremlins,” “The Mask,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
Some of the Warner Bros. promotion overload is ridiculous and embarrassing to those involved. There’s a scene where Bugs Bunny is dressed as Batman and LeBron is dressed as Robin. There’s a scene where Porky Pig starts rapping in a way that’s has as much hip-hop cred as Judy Garland singing in “The Wizard of Oz.” (In other words: none.)
And there’s even a scene where Al G. Rhythm yells, “King Kong’s got nothing on me!” It’s a famous line said by Denzel Washington in his Oscar-winning role as a corrupt cop in 2001’s “Training Day,” which is (you guessed it) a Warner Bros. movie. After Al G. Rhythm shouts, “King Kong’s got nothing on me!,” King Kong is shown in the audience, crossing his arms in a snit, like a kid who’s been insulted on a playground.
The “family-friendly” messages of “Space Jam: Legacy” are secondary to the constant regurgitation of whatever “intellectual property” Warner Bros. is hawking. The word “inellectual” is an oxymoron for this idiotic film. The animation and visual effects aren’t going to be nominated for any major awards. Much of what happens in the movie is duller than it should be. And even the big basketball game toward the end isn’t very exciting. There’s a big “reveal” about someone on the Goon Squad that’s not surprising at all.
Cheadle is the movie’s only live-action cast member who seems to be having some fun because his performance is deliberately campy. His computer algorithm character has more personality than the human characters in this movie. The rest of the cast members in the movie’s live-action roles give mediocre and bland performances.
Ernie Johnson and Lil Rel Howery portray the basketball game’s announcers in what should have been hilarious roles, but everything these characters say is uninteresting. And unlike the original songs in the first “Space Jam” movie (which featured R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”), none of the original songs in “Space Jam: A New Legacy” will become a hit anthem. The lines of dialogue given to the animated characters are also forgettable. The jokes fall flatter than Daffy Duck’s beak.
And as for LeBron James (who is one of the producers of “Space Jam: A New Legacy”), even the filmmakers know he wasn’t cast in this movie for his acting, because he says this line in the movie’s scene with the Warner Bros. executives: “I’m a ball player. And athletes acting—that never goes well.” That’s probably one of the most genuine things said in this overly contrived corporate movie that pushes plenty to sell but ultimately has a shortage of good filmmaking.
Warner Bros. Pictures released “Space Jam: A New Legacy” in U.S. cinemas and on HBO Max on July 16, 2021. The movie is set for release on digital and VOD on September 3, 2021, and on Blu-ray and DVD on October 5, 2021.
Culture Representation: Taking place in 2019 in New York City, the dramatic film “Boogie” features a racially diverse cast of characters (Asian, African American and white) representing the middle-class and working-class.
Culture Clash: A Chinese American teenager, who’s in his last year of high school, has conflicts with his parents about his dreams of becoming a professional player in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
Culture Audience: “Boogie” will appeal primarily to people who want to see a different type of basketball coming-of-age story, but the movie could be a turnoff because it doesn’t live up to the story’s engaging potential.
Taylor Takahashi and Taylour Paige in “Boogie” (Photo by Nicole Rivelli/Focus Features)
The dramatic film “Boogie” takes a good concept (a Chinese American teenager with goals to play NBA basketball) and squanders it on uneven acting, subpar filmmaking and an obnoxious main character. The movie tries to look gritty and unique. But in the end, it becomes a predictable mush of banality. And unfortunately, “Boogie” panders to some very negative and racist stereotypes of immigrants and urban people of color in the United States.
Written and directed by Eddie Huang, “Boogie” (which takes place in New York City in 2019) has many flaws, but one of the biggest is in the movie’s erratic casting. For starters, almost all the main characters who are supposed to be teenagers in the movie look like they’re in they’re mid-20s or older. It’s distracting and lowers the credibility of this movie, because not once does it look believable that these actors are in the same age group as students in high school.
“Boogie” has a cast that’s mixed with experienced and inexperienced movie actors—and it shows. Taylor Takahashi and the late Bashar Jackson (also known as rapper Pop Smoke), who portray basketball rivals in the movie, make their feature-film debuts in “Boogie,” which is also Huang’s first feature film as a writer/director. Takahashi’s and Jackson’s acting skills are far inferior to those of “Boogie” co-stars Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and Taylour Paige, who also portray high-school students in the movie.
Lendeborg and Paige are way ahead in their acting talent, compared to Takhashi and Jackson. This discrepancy results in some awkward-looking moments in the movie where the more talented/experienced actors have to share scenes with those who are less talented/experienced. It doesn’t help that a lot of the dialogue is just plain awful.
Takahashi portrays the movie’s title character—Alfred “Boogie” Chin (whose Chinese first name is Xiao Ming)—as an entitled, arrogant “not as smart as he thinks he is” brat, who often shows disdain for women and willful ignorance of what it takes to be a respectful and respected human being. He is singularly focused on his goal of becoming a basketball player for the NBA. And he doesn’t seem to care much about learning about life beyond basketball, dating, and getting the perks of possibly becoming rich and famous.
It’s no secret that Asians are rare in the NBA, so the filmmakers of “Boogie” used that hook to make it look like the movie is an “against all odds” story. But one of the lousiest things about this movie is that it’s not even convincing in showing any dazzling basketball skills that Boogie supposedly has. There are too many cutaway shots with obvious body doubles. And so, viewers are left wondering what’s so special about Boogie. He’s definitely not the extraordinary basketball player that the filmmakers want people to think he is.
Most of the movie consists of Boogie getting into conflicts with his family. His parents are Chinese immigrants who’ve settled in the New York City neighborhood of Flushing, Queens. It’s shown in the beginning of the movie that in 2001, when his mother was pregnant with Boogie (who is an only child), Boogie’s parents went to see a fortune teller to get advice about their crumbling marriage and to find out the baby’s gender. The fortune teller said that she didn’t know the gender of the child, but she advised these two spouses that if they stay together, “Love will melt the sharpest sword.”
Boogie’s parents did stay together, but they don’t have a very happy marriage. They also have very different approaches to parenting and how Boogie should reach his NBA goals. Boogie has major issues with his mother, which explains why Boogie has misogynistic tendencies. The movie doesn’t even bother to give Boogie’s mother a first name.
Boogie’s father Lawrence Chin (played by Perry Yung) is fairly lenient with Boogie, except when it comes to basketball. Mr. Chin is an ex-con who is obsessed with the idea that the best way for Boogie to get to the NBA is by defeating a local teen named Monk (played by Jackson), who is a star basketball player at a rival high school in Brooklyn. Mr. Chin believes that basketball talent scouts will flock to Boogie if Boogie triumphs over Monk. It sounds very illogical (because it is), but Mr. Chin is fixated on Monk as the biggest obstacle to Boogie’s basketball dreams.
Boogie’s mother Mrs. Chin (played by Pamelyn Chee), who is a homemaker, thinks that Boogie’s best way to the NBA is through a college basketball scholarship, preferably at a Big 10 university. She’s the family’s disciplinarian and planner. But apparently, she’s terrible at finances because Boogie’s parents are heavily in debt, to the point where they’re past due on their utility bills. Even though Boogie’s parents can’t afford to pay for any college tuition, Boogie and his parents don’t want to apply for financial aid. They want a full scholarship for Boogie, or else he doesn’t want to go to any college.
Mr. Chin has spent time in prison for operating an illegal gambling business of sports betting. He’s still making money this way, but he and his brother Jackie (played by “Boogie” writer/director Huang) have been laundering their gambling money by operating a small business as town car drivers. It’s too bad that this movie uses the very tired cliché that a working-class family of color in a big American city has a patriarch who’s a criminal and/or an absentee father. Because Boogie’s father spent time in prison, he’s trying to make up for that lost time with Boogie.
Mr. Chin tells Jackie about their illegal gambling business, “Keep taking bets through the end of the current football season. Then I want to wash my hands of it. We’re in the basketball business now.” And by that, he means that he expects Boogie to make it to the big leagues of the NBA, so that Boogie can become rich and pass on some of the wealth to his parents.
Early on in the movie, Mr. Chin reminds Boogie that Boogie’s parents transferred him to City Prep, Boogie’s current high school, so that Boogie could have a better chance of being discovered by basketball scouts. Boogie is in his last year of high school, so the pressure is on for him to get an opportunity that will eventually take him to the NBA.
At school, it’s unclear what type of grades that Boogie is getting, but it’s clear he’s not getting into any university on an academic scholarship. In his Advanced Placement English class (the only class that he’s seen attending in this movie), Boogie mouths off at the teacher Mr. Richmond (played by Steve Coulter) in a “know it all” way that’s not endearing. It just makes Boogie look like a pompous idiot.
There are plenty of ways that Boogie shows his crude and offensive side outside the classroom. This is what he has to say about real-life NBA basketball player Jeremy Lin: “Jeremy Lin can suck my dick. He’s more model minority Jesus freak than Asian.”
One of the students in the English class is named Eleanor (played by Paige), who is Boogie’s obvious crush. Boogie’s best friend Richie (played by Lendeborg) is in the same class and is on the school basketball team with Boogie. One day after class, Boogie and Richie are at a school gym and ogling Eleanor and her friend Elissa (played by Alexa Mareka), as they do some weightlifting.
Here’s the way that Boogie tries to make a move on Eleanor: Boogie says to her, “Nice pants.” Eleanor replies, “You’ve got a staring problem.” Boogie replies, “You’ve got a nice vagina.” Eleanor angrily says, “Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit! You better respect my mind!” As Eleanor and Elissa walk away, Boogie smirks to Richie, “She wants it.”
Any self-respecting person would be put off by Boogie’s rude sexism. But one of the many things that’s so annoying about this movie is it brushes off and excuses Boogie’s blatant hostility toward women and makes Eleanor fall for him. A dumb movie like this with a jerk as the main character usually likes to show how he can get a love interest who will roll over and be submissive, no how matter how this jerk insults her.
It’s hard to take Eleanor seriously when she acts like an attention-starved girl who’s willing to overlook Boogie’s disrespectful and selfish attitude, just because she wants a boyfriend. Sure, the movie does the very predictable back-and-forth banter between Boogie and Eleanor, in a very weak attempt to make it look like she’s playing hard to get. But in the end, based on the way that Eleanor is written in this movie, she does exactly what Boogie predicts and expects. Any “romance” in this movie looks very fake.
The movie tries to make it look like Boogie is just trying to have the same mindset of a “thug” rapper, since he and so many of his peers admire rappers. But his disrespectful attitude toward women just makes him look pathetic and ignorant. “Boogie” predictably has a hip-hop soundtrack featuring multiple Pop Smoke songs, such as “AP,” “Fashion” and “Welcome to the Party.” (The movie’s end credits have a dedication to Pop Smoke, who was tragically murdered during a home invasion in 2020.) Pop Smoke does not rap in the movie.
Boogie’s horrible personality isn’t shown in just one isolated incident. When Monk deliberately assaults another player on a street basketball court (the other player’s ankle is broken during the attack), Eleanor expresses her disgust with this bullying, but Boogie tells her that Monk did what he had to do to win. Boogie is so arrogant that he calls his other team members “hot trash” to the team leader Coach Hawkins (played by Domenick Lombardozzi), because Boogie thinks the team would be nowhere without him. And later in the movie, Boogie shows how ill-tempered he is during a crucial basketball game at school, and this temper tantrum costs him dearly.
How do we know that Boogie is a legend in his own mind? He’s not getting any scholarship offers. And the feedback from college basketball scouts, including one named Patrick (played by Lenard McKelvey, also known as real-life radio personality Charlamagne Tha God) is that they might want to recruit Boogie, but not on a scholarship. After witnessing Boogie’s on-court tantrum, another college basketball scout questions Boogie’s mental stability. Coach Hawkins also has reservations about Boogie’s temperament and reliability.
If this movie is supposed to be about Asian cultural pride, it has an odd way of showing it, because it makes most of the Asian characters look like self-hating caricatures. There’s a Chinese insult scene of Boogie and Richie going to Manhattan’s Chinatown and Boogie complaining that he almost forgot how much Chinatown smells bad.
Boogie then sneers, “How is Chinatown next to SoHo? These gremlin keepers ain’t learned how to boutique their shit.” (It’s a reference to the 1984 horror movie “Gremlins” about gremlin creatures that are sold in Chinatown.) Imagine if a white person said this very racist and degrading comment. Just because an Asian person says it doesn’t make it okay.
Boogie is an immature twit who doesn’t have much to offer to the world except basketball skills that definitely are not ready for the NBA. His mother is written as a domineering and lazy shrew, while his father is a morally dubious hustler. The only Asian character in the movie who seems to show common sense is someone named Melvin (played by Mike Moh), an acquaintance of Boogie’s mother whom she asks to become Boogie’s manager.
And here’s an example of the movie’s terrible dialogue. Boogie whines to Eleanor about his ethnicity, with no self-awareness that he perpetuates negative stereotypes: “Chinese people would be so much better if this country didn’t reduce us to beef and broccoli.” Eleanor replies, “You could be so much more too.” Boogie then says, “It’s so hard. I feel like a piece of beef surrounded by sprouted greens and MSG.”
So with all of the family drama, ethnic drama and dating drama that are badly written and sometimes poorly acted in “Boogie,” that leaves the basketball scenes to possibly salvage this dreadful movie. But “Boogie” fails to deliver as a thrilling sports movie too. There’s a big showdown at the end that checks all the boxes of predictable and unimaginative clichés of a basketball game filmed for a movie.
There’s also some phony sentimentality thrown into the story, which contradicts the crass and raw tone that the movie was trying to push on the audience for most of the film. “Boogie” looks like it wanted to be a vulgar and tough portrayal of urban life, as well as a sweet family film. You can’t really have it both ways, or else you end up with a movie like “Boogie,” which is a jumbled, fake-looking and shoddily filmed mess.
Focus Features released “Boogie” in U.S. cinemas on March 5, 2021. The movie’s VOD release date is March 26, 2021.
Culture Representation: The true-crime documentary “The Scheme”—about a corruption scandal involving the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and an aspiring manager of basketball players—interviews a mix of African Americans and white people representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: Christian Dawkins, one of the men at the center of the scandal, says that he was the “fall guy” for widespread corruption in the NCAA and that he was unfairly entrapped by the FBI.
Culture Audience: “The Scheme” will appeal mostly to people who have an interest in true crime and sports scandals, but this documentary is openly sympathetic to Dawkins, the only person involved in the scandal who’s interviewed for the movie.
Christian Dawkins in “The Scheme” (Photo courtesy of HBO)
If high-school basketball stars are paid by people who want them recruited to a college basketball team, is that corruption or is that common sense? In the very slanted documentary “The Scheme,” former basketball wheeler dealer Christian Dawkins says it’s common sense. The law takes the opposite stance, and it’s why Dawkins was busted in a 2017 FBI sting that led to two trials and Dawkins becoming a convicted felon.
“The Scheme,” directed by Pat Kondelis (who won a Sports Emmy for Showtime’s 2017 documentary “Disgraced”), doesn’t even try to be about the filmmakers doing any original investigative journalism. Instead, it’s mainly concerned with being the first TV interview that Dawkins has given since he was arrested in 2017 and later served time in prison for fraud and bribery charges.
Although the epilogue of “The Scheme” mentions that key figures in the wide-ranging NCAA scandal declined to be interviewed for the movie—including others who were arrested; coaches who were implicated but not arrested; and officials from the FBI and NCAA—this documentary instead gives a wide berth to Dawkins’ side of the story. “The Scheme” also relies heavily on interviews with journalists who actually did the investigative work that’s used in the movie, but the filmmakers chose not to do their own further investigations.
Dawkins even says in the documentary, “I don’t even want to tell my side of the story as much as I want to tell the bigger story and my opinion.” And yet, “The Scheme” filmmakers don’t follow up on the widespread corruption claims that Dawkins brings up while being interviewed. This failure to follow up is the equivalent of being handed a ball in a sports game and dropping the ball.
Dawkins was 24 years old when he was arrested in the 2017 scandal, which involved an extensive FBI investigation and federal prosecution by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, since many of the transactions took place in New York City. By his own admission, Dawkins is cocky, because he has long considered himself to be a marketing-savvy entrepreneur who’s destined for greatness. And, as the documentary shows, he has a tendency to stretch the truth or lie if it will make him look good or make him money.
The beginning of the film goes over his upbringing and background to explain how Dawkins ended up serving the longest prison sentence (18 months) out of all of the people arrested in the scandal. “The Scheme” interviews Christian Dawkins’ parents Lou and Latricia Dawkins, seated on a couch together, and they confirm that the family’s life revolved around basketball, because Lou was a basketball coach at top-ranking Saginaw High School in their hometown of Saginaw, Michigan.
All three of the Dawkins kids—Christian and his younger brother and sister—played basketball in school. Their father Lou Dawkins says in the documentary that basketball was the children’s choice of sport and they took the initiative to play basketball, and not because of pressure from him. The skeptical “rolling eyes” reaction of Lou’s wife Latricia puts some doubt on that perspective, and she says, “I don’t know if that’s all true, but I’ll go with it.”
What the parents do agree on is that Christian showed signs of being interested in business from an early age, when he was about 10 or 11. Instead of sports magazines, he would be more likely to read business magazines. Lou says about Christian’s basketball skills as a child: “He was good, but he was stubborn,” and that Christian often had a hard time listening to advice and rules that his father gave him. But his parents lovingly describe him as “intelligent.” And his mother Latricia says about Christian: “My child has always been different.”
According to Christian, one of the biggest influences in his life was the 2000 non-fiction book “Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed, and the Corruption of America’s Youth,” by Dan Wetzel and Don Yeager. (Wetzel, who covered the 2017 NCAA scandal for Yahoo Sports, is interviewed in the documentary.) Reading the book led to Christian starting a “basketball insider” website called Best of the Best Prep Basketball Scouting, which he started while he was in high school. The website charged $600 per person to get access to information about the best high-school basketball players in Michigan and other parts of the Midwest. Christian’s mother said she didn’t find out about this business until checks started arriving in the mail for Christian.
And showing his tendency to lie in order to make money, Christian admits in the documentary that he once ranked himself as a No. 1 basketball player on the website, even though he was an average basketball player. Christian’s attorney Steve Haney, who says he’s known Christian since Christian was about 10 or 11 years old, laughs when he remembers that Christian even lied about his height on the website, by claiming he was 6’2″, when he’s actually 5’10”. The documentary has archived pages from the website that actually show the rankings with the false 6’2″ claim.
But then tragedy struck the Dawkins family: Christian’s younger brother Dorian, who was a star basketball player in high school, died of an undetected heart condition when Dorian was 14. Christian says that Dorian is still the best friend he ever had. Dorian’s untimely death led Christian to start a charity basketball tournament with the American Heart Association, and the Saginaw hometown team switched its name from Team Pride to Dorian’s Pride. Christian also says he was responsible for getting Dorian’s Pride a hefty sponsorship deal with Under Armour. He claims that Dorian’s Pride was the only Midwest high-school team at the time to get a sponsorship with Under Armour.
Christian makes several other claims in the documentary, such as that he was the “general manager” of the Dorian’s Pride team when he was 16. He says that he “picked all the coaches and players, the tournaments we played in,” but there’s no sense that the filmmakers did any independent fact-checking for many of his claims, and they just took his word for it. All that Christian’s attorney Haney says about Christian’s role in Dorian’s Pride was that Christian “had an eye for talent and, more importantly, he worked.” Because of Christian’s accomplishments while still in high school, and because he was a better wheeler dealer than he was a basketball player, Christian says he decided not to go to college, so he convinced his parents that he didn’t need a college education.
According to Christian, his first real job out of high school was as “managing director of financial services” at a company he doesn’t name. The company name isn’t as important as what Christian claims that he accomplished while working there: He says he became the youngest person to sign basketball players who ended up being first-round picks for the NBA: Elfrid Payton and Rodney Hood. Again, there’s no independent verification that Christian was the official representative of these two players at the time. He could have recommended that they get signed to his company, but that doesn’t mean he was the company’s authorized person to sign and represent these two players.
Whatever his real or imagined responsibilities were, Christian’s prodigy-like success caught the eye of sports agent Andy Miller, who recruited Christian to work for him. Looking back on their working relationship, Christian says in the documentary: “We were like Whitney [Houston] and Bobby [Brown]: We shouldn’t have been together.”
In yet another example of Christian having a tendency to exaggerate or embellish the truth, he claims in the documentary that while he worked for Miller, he was an “agent or a junior agent.” But Christian’s own attorney contradicts this claim, by saying that Christian was just a “runner,” an industry term for a person who cultivates relationships with athletes but doesn’t have the authority to sign or represent them. (Miller was not interviewed for this movie.)
During his tenure working for Miller, Christian ran into his first major legal scandal, when he was accused of misappropriating funds. In the documentary, Christian calls the scandal “Ubergate” because he was accused of running up a $42,000 Uber bill while working for Miller. In the documentary, Christian admits that his expense accounts were abused, but he puts most of the blame on unnamed people whom he claims had access to the accounts. Christian wasn’t arrested or sued over the scandal, but he was fired and his reputation was severely tarnished.
It was around this time that Christian said that he met a man named Marty Blazer through a mutual acquaintance: a banker named Munish Sood. Christian told them that he wanted to start his own sports management company specializing in representing high-school basketball players who would be recruited by colleges, but Christian needed investment money.
The company was going to be based in Atlanta, but Christian frequently made trips to New York City to meet with potential investors. Christian called his management company Loyd Management Inc., because “loyd” was an acronym for “live out your dreams.” Knowing that Christian was looking for investors, Blazer (a shady character who turned out to be an informant for the FBI) introduced Christian to a man named Jeff D’Angelo, who was described as a wealthy guy who made his fortune in real-estate. Christian was also introduced to D’Angelo’s right-hand person Jill Bailey.
D’Angelo gave Christian hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to bribe college basketball coaches and certain Adidas executives to recruit high-school basketball players, who would also be steered to Christian’s fledgling management company for representation. Christian didn’t like this idea because he says he wanted to pay basketball players directly, instead of adding an extra unpredictable set of people to the mix.
“Paying players is the cost of doing business,” Christian says. He also repeatedly mentions in the documentary that he thinks all sports players (including those in school) should be paid salaries for playing sports. (It’s currently illegal for players in U.S. non-professional basketball leagues to be paid salaries for playing basketball.) Christian says that he was initially very uncomfortable with this business model of paying coaches and other officials, but D’Angelo kept pressuring him to do it, and Christian eventually went along with it since D’Angelo was paying for all of it.
But, by his own admission, Christian said he got greedy and kept most of the payment money for himself and spent a lot of it on “entertainment” (including strip clubs) for himself and the coaches that he was supposed to be bribing. Unbeknownst to Christian until it was too late, D’Angelo and Bailey were FBI agents. (Those names were aliases.) And the reason why “Jeff D’Angelo” kept pushing hard for Christian to pay coaches was because NCAA coaches are considered public officials, and it’s a federal crime for them to accept bribes.
In the documentary, Christian and his attorney admit that although Christian took the money (they couldn’t deny it, since many of these transactions were caught on FBI surveillance video), he was not guilty of directly giving any of the money to the coaches and Adidas officials. It’s why Christian pleaded not guilty to the charges, and the case resulted in two trials for him: one involving fraud charges, and the other involving bribery charges. A great deal of the movie is about Christian giving his perspective of being “set up” by the FBI.
Throughout the documentary, Christian’s grandiosity and high opinion of himself are very apparent. He claims to know “everybody in basketball” and brags about being smart when it comes to business. But, for a guy who’s supposedly “smart,” he made a lot of dumb mistakes.
For starters, Christian admits that the sudden appearance of an angel investor (“Jeff D’Angelo”) who spared no expense (deals were done on a yacht and in lavish hotel suites) made him suspicious at first, but he didn’t do a thorough background check on D’Angelo. Christian says he thought about hiring a private investigator, but he decided not to do that because he asked a Drug Enforcement Agency contact (who’s not named in the documentary) to look into D’Angelo’s background, and the DEA contact told Christian that D’Angelo was legitimate.
Another big mistake that Christian made was trusting Blazer, who had a long history of arrests and lawsuits (which were all public record), but Blazer mysteriously wasn’t in prison for his crimes. Any “street smart” person would immediately figure out that Blazer was probably avoiding prison time by being a confidential informant. And, as revealed by Christian’s two trials and journalists’ investigations, Blazer was indeed an informant for the FBI. But Christian, who repeatedly describes Blazer and “D’Angelo” as “idiots” and “stupid,” missed that big red flag. In the end, Blazer spent zero time in prison for his involvement in the scandal. So, who’s the stupid one?
And there was another red flag that Christian foolishly missed: The person calling himself “Jeff D’Angelo” (his real name still remains a secret) suddenly stopped doing business with Christian, and let his right-hand person “Jill Bailey” take over the transactions. The excuse was that “D’Angelo” had to go to Italy to visit his dying mother. But Christian didn’t try to find out if that story was true, because he said he didn’t really like “D’Angelo” anyway, and “Bailey” was easier to deal with on a business level.
In reality, as it came out during news investigations, “D’Angelo” had been removed from the case because he was allegedly stealing the FBI’s cash too. Haney says in the documentary that he tried to subpoena the mysterious “Jeff D’Angelo,” but the subpoena was denied. The documentary also mentions that it’s not known if “Jeff D’Angelo” is still working for the FBI. Even without the testimony of “Jeff D’Angelo,” the bottom line is that as long as the money kept flowing, Christian didn’t really care who was giving him the money. In the end, greed was Christian’s undoing.
“The Scheme” has a lot of re-enactments with Christian, as well as actual FBI surveillance and wiretaps. And the filmmakers are obviously sympathetic to Christian and his attorney Haney, given all the screen time that they have in the movie.
What’s missing from the documentary is any sense that the filmmakers cared about investigating the bigger picture that everyone interviewed in the documentary says exists—the NCAA’s widespread corruption, which includes the participation of major athletic-shoe companies (such as Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour) that pay millions to colleges for star athletes to wear their products. Unlike NBA players, the school players aren’t supposed to be paid to play basketball (a policy called “amateurism”), and the NCAA is a non-profit organization that gets massive tax breaks for the money it earns.
Christian was the one who spent the most time in prison for the scandal, while other people implicated in the scandal who are much higher up in the NCAA food chain did not even get arrested. Although the documentary is basically a platform for Christian and his attorney to complain about Christian’s prison sentence, the filmmakers don’t bother to ask why higher authorities were not held accountable in this scandal. And although the documentary includes statistics about how much money certain colleges and universities get from athletic-apparel companies, the filmmakers fail to detail or investigate how that money is moved around in possibly corrupt ways.
Christian even names some of the NCAA colleges and universities that he says are some of the worst offenders when it comes to misappropriating funds and bribing players to join their teams, yet the filmmakers don’t follow up on these claims. Christian also comes right out and says that it’s not uncommon for college coaches to use college basketball funds to hire hookers for high-school basketball players, as part of the recruiting process. Instead of uncovering anything new or looking into Christian’s claims about corruption and cover-ups, the documentary interviews journalists Rebecca Davis O’Brien (who covered the scandal for the Wall Street Journal) and Wetzel to rehash information that these journalists already covered for their media outlets.
“The Scheme” also doesn’t adequately explore the issue of racial inequalities in criminal justice. Christian frequently mentions in the movie that he was able to be “successful” because of his relationships with college-bound or NBA-bound basketball players and their families. (Toronto Raptors player Fred VanVleet is the only basketball player interviewed in the documentary, and he says he owes his career to Christian.) Because college-level and NBA-level basketball is a sport played by predominantly African Americans, Christian says that gave him an advantage to establish a type of racial rapport with players that agents and head coaches (who are predominantly white) do not have.
However, the filmmakers don’t ask Christian how his race could have been a disadvantage when he got caught in the FBI sting. “The Scheme” completely ignores the glaring fact that almost all of the people arrested in the FBI sting were people of color: Christian Dawkins; banker Sood; Emanuel “Book” Richardson (former assistant basketball coach at the University of Arizona); Lamont Evans (former assistant basketball coach at Oklahoma State University and the University of South Carolina); Tony Bland (former assistant basketball coach at the University of Southern California); and Merl Code, a former Adidas executive who was like a mentor to Christian. Jim Gatto (former Adidas executive) was the only white person arrested.
Meanwhile, the head basketball coaches at these universities (all of the head coaches are white) escaped arrest and in most cases got to keep their jobs. In the documentary, Christian claims that University of Arizona head basketball coach Sean Miller and Louisiana State University head basketball coach Will Wade blatantly lied to the media and the public about not being involved in illegal basketball deals. (Although Wade was suspended from his job, he was eventually re-instated.)
Christian says that Miller should be an “actor” for his performance at a press conference where Miller denied any involvement in the NCAA scandal. And the documentary includes Wade’s public denial of doing business with Christian by juxtaposing it with FBI wiretaps of Wade talking business with Christian. Christian and his attorney say that these head coaches who escaped arrest must have felt confident that they would be protected when they made their public denials.
Despite all this finger-pointing, the documentary does little to appear objective in trying to gather all of the facts. Instead, “The Scheme” is mostly concerned with letting Christian run the narrative. It’s clear that he did the interview to promote the fact that he’s trying to make a business comeback, but this time in the music industry—something that’s mentioned at the end of the film. (At least he’s smart enough to know that his sports career is over.)
Why the music industry? Because convicted felons aren’t as taboo there, says Christian. His attorney said that, in an example of Christian’s hustler mentality, while Christian was on trial, Christian secretly had meetings with people in the music industry to start his own record label.
And now that he’s out of prison, Christian has teamed up with Atlantic Records to fund and distribute a record label he’s founded called Chosen, even though he has no prior experience in the music industry. In the documentary, Christian doesn’t talk about any artists he’s signed to his record label, but he seems very happy with the undisclosed amount of money he’s gotten from Atlantic Records. Given his track record in handling funds, Atlantic might want to closely watch where that money is going.
In the end, “The Scheme” is kind of a reflection of the person whose perspective dominates the movie: There’s a lot of talk, but not a lot of new facts brought to the table.
Kittens in the inaugural “Meow Madness” TV special. (Photo courtesy of Hallmark Channel)
The following is a press release from Hallmark Channel:
Hallmark Channel, the exclusive home of kitten sports and the highly rated “Kitten Bowl” franchise , announces the network’s latest pet-centric programming buzzer beater , “Meow Madness ,” a Hallmark Channel Original Special Event, will premiere at 8 p.m. ET on April 3 , 2017.
“Meow Madness” features author and animal advocate Beth Stern as host and Peabody Award-winning reporter Mary Carillo as commentator. The special will showcase adoptable kittens in the most competitive tournament the basketball world has ever seen. Hallmark Channel enjoys home court advantage for the inaugural “Meow Madness” special as 100 adorable, adoptable “cat-letes” purr-fect an unstoppable zone defense while taking shots from the “flea throw” zone as each team claw s its way to “The Final Fur.”
“Meow Madness” is produced by 3 Ball Entertainment. Executive Producers are Todd A. Nelson, Ross Weintraub, DJ Nurre and Jeff Altrockm, with Kathy Sutula serving as co-executive producer. 3 Ball Entertainment credits include “Extreme Weight Loss” (ABC), “Bar Rescue” (Spike) and “My Cat From Hell” (Animal Planet), among others.
