Perfectly pleasant, adept, and without a moment of originality, a very nice 2 hours delving into Michael Jordan and his first sneaker contract. You will likely enjoy the movie, and then you’ll never think about it again.

Of note is the easy charm of Ben Affleck as Nike founder Phil Knight, the dogged everyman turn by Matt Damon playing Nike basketball scout Sonny Vaccaro, the wry Jason Bateman (Nike Marketing manager Rob Strasser), and the steely resolve of Viola Davis playing Michael Jordan’s mother. All give superb, professional, wholly unchallenging turns that complement both each other and Alex Converey’s tight, predictable script. Marlon Wayans playing Jordan coach and confidante George Raveling also contributes in a poignant scene where he advises Vaccaro on how to approach the budding star.

On the minus side, this is a movie about signing a basketball player to a shoe deal, and the film doesn’t really find anything particularly insightful about this mundane negotiation, other than Damon’s dawning that Jordan will be a God amongst men. So godly is His Airness that while he is present, inexplicably, we only see the back of his head. Jordan never speaks, which both reinforces the picture’s theme that he is near-deity and serves as a tremendous cop-out and missed opportunity.

 I mean, don’t we all want to know what God thinks when negotiating a shoe deal?

Mind you, the script is larded with b.s. Nike’s underdog status in the competition to sign Jordan is poppycock, as is the fact that his agent David Falk (a hilariously entertaining Chris Messina) was hostile to the deal. The dollar amount the young upstart company was allotted to go after Jordan is also understated by half.  And Vaccaro never made the decision to breach negotiating etiquette by going over Falk’s head to visit Jordan’s parents in North Carolina, a fiction seminal to the movie. 

The mushy camaraderie of this band of Nike visionaries may also have been a bit much. Worse, the truth may have made for a more interesting picture. Per Slate, “Vaccaro, as might be expected, disputes all these other versions of events robustly, saying “Phil Knight’s lying, Michael’s lying more than Phil, and Raveling is insane. All three of them need to destroy me to live happily ever after. Everyone’s trying to rewrite history. It goes beyond Jordan. I am the savior of Nike.’ It seems that Vaccaro, far from being the easygoing, collegial guy the film depicts, had a tendency to burn bridges. He fell out with Raveling in 1991 and was fired by Nike without explanation that same year.’” Now, that’s a guy I want to see a movie about, not the milk-and-cookies, faux cynical but really schmaltzo character Damon cooks up.

Okay. It’s not a documentary – enough of my curmudgeonly nitpicking. There is certainly greater appeal here for others. When I watched Winning Time on HBO – the laughably ridiculous rendition of the Lakers ascent in the late 70s/early 80s at the advent of Magic Johnson – it was hard to stifle a laugh throughout, and my wife and daughter joined in. But they also liked the series more than me. It was set in a milieu and about a subject they knew nothing about and they were more than happy to enjoy it without worrying about accuracy or any hackneyed presentations. Here too, though she found if “Hallmarky,” my daughter dug Air and noted that she didn’t really know much about any of it before seeing the movie.

Also, if you pine for all things 80s, from Cyndi Lauper to Tecmo Bowl to skateboards, run, don’t moonwalk, to Amazon Prime, because this thing is loaded with “Let’s Get Physical” Reagan-era montages.   

Ridley Scott makes damn fun pictures, and his historical films are some of his most enjoyable. However, when he gets too wrapped up in the visuals, he often loses the thread of story, as with Robin Hood and Kingdom of Heaven, sumptuous, beautiful, and utterly uninvolving period pieces.

Of course, his triumph is Gladiator, a CGI-infused, sweaty swashbuckling Roman sausage fest, and to answer Russell Crowe, yes, we were entertained.

I declare that I have been entertained yet again. The Last Duel is stunning to look at, standard for Scott (it almost feels like a Rick Steves French castle fantasy tour), but also involving, adroitly tiptoeing the line of serious and playful.

The story is simple. We are in France, Normandy, in the Middle Ages. Two knights (stolid, humorless and blunt Matt Damon and dashing, conniving Lothario Adam Driver) spend a great deal of those Ages bringing heavy swords down on the heads of their enemies, intriguing at court, and eventually, becoming bitter enemies over property disputes and Driver’s influence with a more powerful knight (Ben Affleck). Their enmity reaches boiling point when Driver is accused of raping Damon’s wife (Jodie Comer). The story, based on a non-fiction book, is told through three vantage points: that of Damon, Driver, and Comer.

You may want to stop reading here, as this has just recently been released on HBO, and spoilers will follow.

We live every scene through the eyes of each protagonist. Sometimes, they match up, sometimes there are minor variations, and other times, the recollections are night and day. But the devil is in the details, and some of the differences are quite revealing. The play and import of comparison is one of the niftier aspects of the film.

The picture also has a notable feminist bent, not surprising, given the subservient nature of women at the time and the #MeToo influence during its making. But screenwriters Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said, Can You Ever Forgive Me), Damon and Affleck, if not always subtle, are not heavy-handed and avoid the dour and instructive. In fact, the societal inquiry as to whether Comer could become pregnant via unpleasurable sex/rape is an intriguing line (if memory serves me, not too long ago, a Missouri Senate candidate torpedoed his own bid because he suggested that a woman could not become pregnant through rape).

The entire endeavor is thrilling, nail-biting, and then, because Ridley Scott is Ridley Scott, muscular, bloody and satisfactory.

Damon, who I have raved about for years as the industry’s most underrated actor (criminally ignored in The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Departed, and Contagion), again delivers. After his performance in Stillwater, when, oh when, will he be properly rewarded for his performances? Driver is commanding, and as he showed in Marriage Story, there is a dark pit just underneath his easy bonhomie. Comer is often beautifully vulnerable and you feel for her right off.

But, and hear me out, Affleck near steals the picture as Driver’s sybarite patron, a man who enjoys needling Damon no end, almost as much as his wine and his orgies. Seriousness is tedium to him, and while you are supposed to sympathize with Damon, Affleck is so delicious that at times, you are swayed by his pinpoint cruelty (“He’s no fucking fun!” he kvetches to Driver). But it’s more than a foppish turn; Affleck’s prince knows the kind of harm Damon, with his unyielding sense of honor, can pose to Driver, and he does his best to ward him off.

After a little too long for my taste, the film ends in a brutal battle to the death, gripping and by no means telegraphed in terms of the victor. And while, given its feminist inclinations, it could’ve ended with some kind of solemn tut tut message for all of us (the “Medieval Epic About Believing All Women” reviews were as plentiful as predictable), instead, Scott gives us a weepy and happy Huzzah!

Ridley Scott would not seem to be the first choice to helm this story of an Italian fashion family’s tragica fine, but he does quite nicely, even without a canvas that would more naturally fit his visual talents. The Gucci empire, such as it is introduced to us, is a lucrative endeavor, but held in check by the natural infirmities of family and conservative stewardship. Enter the middle-class ambition of Lady Gaga, who marries Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) and then systematically steers him into fratricidal maneuvering. She opens the doors for massive expansion and wealth while also inviting the germ that will ensure no one in the family, including her, shares in it. It’s sad, sometimes very funny and black, and well-acted.

On the “well-acted” part, there may be some pushback, primarily because 1) none of the characters are Italian and 2) all of them give an Italian accent that sometimes nears Chef Boyardee (or, in the case of Jeremy Irons, lapses into Downton Abbey). Eh, it’s fine, and often, hilarious; there’s not a moment Jared Leto is butchering his accent that you aren’t transfixed (his comic turn nearly steals the film).

Apparently, Lady Gaga worked with a dialect coach to help her perfect the Northern Italian accent, which is ridiculous, because for the most part, she’s not speaking Italian, but rather, English with an Italian flair. No matter. She has advanced leaps and bounds beyond her energetic yet balky performance in A Star is Born. She’s the heart of this picture and as Lady Macbeth of the fashion industry, she’s ferocious and indelible.

You don’t have to rush to the theater for this one. There are no sweeping Scott battles, sea voyages or other vistas that must be viewed on the big screen. The film is made for streaming release and take-out pasta.

Mank is to the truth of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz what Citizen Kane was to the truth of William Randolph Hearst, which I suppose is fitting. What the film lacks in accuracy, however, it makes up for in the beautifully textured black-and-white photography of David Fincher, the inventive and alluring re-creation of old Hollywood, and the crackling dialogue of Fincher’s own father, Jack, who penned the screenplay. The picture makes much of Mankiewicz’s struggle between his own internal liberal ideals and the fact that he is, in essence, a kept corporate cog, one of a gaggle of screenwriters collected, fed, watered and otherwise maintained by the big studios in the 30s and 40s (see Barton Fink, for a darker rendition).  However, the real Mankiewicz was no liberal, he and Hearst were not nearly so enmeshed and cozy, and neither man cared a whit about the California gubernatorial campaign of progressive Upton Sinclair, which is presented as the cause of their rupture.  It is all hooey.

But boy, does this hooey have some moments.  Jack Fincher never engages in caricature.  Mankiwiecz is not tortured; as brilliantly played by Gary Oldman, he’s comfortable, irresponsible, casually cruel, and it nags at him.  And when his indignation becomes righteous, he does not subdue the opposition with his wit and moral force.  To the contrary, he’s compromised and often grotesque.  And the heavies, in particular Hearst (Charles Dance) and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), give as good as they get.  In one scene, Thalberg tries to get Mankiewicz to toe the party line and, like all other studio employees, contribute to Sinclair’s GOP opponent.  Thalberg is both solicitous of Mankiewicz but put-off by his casual, self-serving and spotty high-mindedness, and he sticks it to him.  The scene reminded me of a great one in Good Night and Good Luck, between Edward R. Murrow (David Straitharn) and William Paley (Frank Langella) after the former has just been morally urgent and condescending and Paley reminds him that he is not above constraints:

MURROW

Let’s walk very carefully through these next few moments. The content of what we’re doing is more important than what some guy in Cincinnati…

PALEY
It’s what you’re doing, Ed. Not me.  Not Frank Stanton. You.  “CBS News”, “See It Now” all belong to you, Bill.

MURROW
You wouldn’t know it.

PALEY
What is it you want? Credit?  I never censored a single program. I hold on to affiliates who wanted entertainment from us.  I fight to keep the license with the very same politicians that you are bringing down and I never, never said no to you. Never.

MURROW
I would argue that we have done very well by one another.  I would argue that this network is defined by what the news department has accomplished.  And I would also argue that never saying no is not the same as not censoring.

PALEY

Really? You should teach journalism.  You and Mr. Friendly.  Let me ask you this: why didn’t you correct McCarthy when he said that Alger Hiss was convicted of treason?  He was only convicted of perjury.  You corrected everything else.  Did you not want the appearance of defending a known Communist?

Similarly, the scene where Mankiewicz really sticks it to Hearst is not the crowd-pleasing tell-off a lesser writer would have delivered. In fact, Hearst is nonplussed, a fact that underscores the drunken cowardice of Mankiewicz while Hearst witheringly dispenses with him.

The Finchers’ lack of fealty to the truth is almost Hearst-esque in a “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” sort of way (also fittingly, Hearst likely never said or wrote any such thing) and as such, its fanciful history is not offensive or overbearing. These are, after all, minor historical figures merely making a movie and imbuing false thoughts and actions to them doesn’t presage some sort of larger “truth” or ideological posture. Still, Orson Welles changed “Hearts” to “Kane.” Fincher probably could have called it “Monk.”

Still, the picture is dazzling to watch, often good fun, a decent companion to the Coen Brothers Hail, Caesar!.

On Netflix.