Tag: Naomi Klein

Air

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 4 April 2023
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Director – Ben Affleck – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

***1/2

In 1984, a Nike executive lifts the company out of its financial rut by building a line of running shoes around an unknown basketball player named Michael Jordan – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, April 5th

A curious combination of sports movie and corporate drama, this retells the story of how, in 1984, the failing Nike corporation managed to successfully reinvent itself by signing a sponsorship deal with the then-unknown basketball player Michael Jordan and building a product line of running shoes around him. Jordan would go on to become a huge cultural icon in the US and Nike a hugely profitable multinational, due in no small part to its Air Jordan running shoes, which the player endorsed.

This is a Warner Bros. movie and that Studio already has a long-standing connection with Michael Jordan through Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), the live action / animation composite feature that combined basketball with Looney Tunes characters and spawned a sequel in 2021. Air isn’t a Michael Jordan film as such: as a character, he barely appears, but there’s a sense that he’s at the centre of the events portrayed as everything here revolves around him.… Read the rest

Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Fashion Reimagined

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 3 March 2023
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Director – Becky Hutner – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 100m

*****

A fledgling designer appalled by her industry’s environmental record attempts to do fashion sustainably – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 3rd

The title put me off before I even knew anything about this documentary. On further investigation, however, its subject is up-and-coming fashion designer Amy Powney who decided, in the interests of sustainability, not to do fashion as fashion industry wisdom has always done it, but rather to find out if it was possible to do fashion in an environmentally sustainable way.

We are told that if the fashion industry were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest polluter, preceded only by the US and China. So clearly, this is an industry with a problem.

Amy had always wanted to design clothes. At Kingston University, studying fashion, she got hold of and read Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist tract No Logo then felt herself increasingly at odds with the ethos of the course. Her background was a little different from most of the students: she grew up in the Lancashire countryside, off grid, on a farm with her sister and parents.

After college, she got a job sweeping the floor at small, indie UK fashion house Mother Of Pearl where she slowly but surely worked her way up to become first studio manager then the company’s creative director, clearly a very determined and driven young woman.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Default
(Gukgabudo-ui Nal,
국가부도의 날)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 22 May 2019
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(Gukgabudo-ui Nal,
국가부도의 날)

Director – Choi Kook-Hee – 2018 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 114m

****

Drama fictionalises the economic crisis of mid to late 1990s South Korea and the role played by banking, government and speculators – teaser screening from the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) 2019

The year is 1996. The news media are championing South Korea’s economy as it seemingly goes from strength to strength, never questioning whether financial institutions might in fact be pursuing practices which are sooner or later going to have disastrous economic results. Ms. Han Si-hyun (Kim Hye-su) who runs a fiscal policy unit at the Bank of Korea submits a devastating report to the Bank’s governor, explaining that she and her small department have procedures set in place to save the economy and protect ordinary Koreans from disaster.

The politicians have a very different agenda, however, specifically the smarmy Vice-Minister of Finance (Jo Woo-jin) who views financial collapse as a way to weaken the rights of the working class and restructure the economy in favour of large business interests. Although it’s not name checked, there are echoes here of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine and the film based upon it.… Read the rest