The jet-fighter combat footage in The Bridges at Toko-Ri won an Oscar. Obviously primitive by even late 20th Century standards and nowhere close to the knockout aerial footage in Top Gun: Maverick.
But the aircraft carrier landing footage has a docu-realism quality, and even the third-act miniature stuff (the bridge-bombing footage, William Holden crash landing in the North Korean countryside) seems strangely acceptable. There’s something plain and palatable about it.
Dazzling as the Maverick footage is, you’re never quite sure which shots are organic (if any) and what’s digital. I know that some (most?) of the cockpit footage is “real”, but I still don’t trust it.
Some YouTube commenters have actually complained about Toko–Ri spoilers…a film that’s nearly 70 years old and they’re complaining that Illeanna Douglas has spoiled the ending! Prima donnas!
Say it again: TopGun: Maverick is a totally square, totally flash-bang, sirloin steak, right down the middle, Tom Cruise-worshipping, un-woke, stiff-saluting, high-velocity, bull’s-eye popcorn pleasure machine.
If you submit to it, that is. For this is a formula thing, this movie…one super-mechanized, high-style, bucks-up thrill ride with a few heart moments sprinkled in. Au Hasard Balthazar, it’s not, so if you see it with, say, a Mark Harris attitude (and he wasn’t wrong when he put down the original Top Gun nine years ago), you won’t have as good of a time.
If you can just park your quibbles and show obeisance before power…if you can surrender to this military glamour fantasy, this glossy Joseph Kosinski breath-taker, this thundering Cruise + ChrisMcQuarrie + JerryBruckheimer G-force engine, this audience-friendly, holy-shit delivery device…if you submit you’ll enjoy it and then some.
What else are you going to do? Fight it? Stage a protest with speeches and placards?
Everything in TopGun: Maverick is hardcore, highly strategized, mechanized, high-octaned, and totally fucking shameless. It’s like a two-hour trailer for itself. High style, brash energy, fleet editing, classic rock (even the 65-year-old “Great Balls of Fire” is celebrated), movie-star smiles, TopGun nostalgia and a totally driller-killer finale.
Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is a somewhat rakish, middle-aged loner who lives only to fly solo while pushing the limits. After losing his test pilot gig, Mav is assigned to be an instructor at the Top Gun Academy in San Diego. His students include Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Anthony Edwards‘ “Goose” who despises Maverick for taking his name off the Naval Academy list. (There was a reason.) There’s also the brash Hangman (Glen Powell) and a cool woman pilot, Phoenix (Monica Barbaro).
Maverick’s former rival Iceman (Val Kilmer), a retired admiral, has convinced the commanders that Maverick is the best guy to prepare pilots for a top-secret mission — the destruction of a uranium enrichment plant in some snow-covered mountainous region. Fighter jocks need to swoop in, detonate and get the fuck out before enemy missiles and dogfights ensue. You know what’s around the corner.
Remember Luke Skywalker‘s big Death Star challenge at the climax of StarWars: A New Hope? Portions of that classic action sequence are recalled here. Oh, and also like Star Wars, the enemy has no face, only a dark gray helmet…no nationality or ethnicity.
There’s a moment near the end of Top Gun: Maverick when it seems as if the finale of another film about fighter jocks — Mark Robson‘s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (’54) — is being replayed. You’ll recall that it ends with William Holden and Mickey Rooney huddling in a muddy ditch and being killed by North Korean troops. If only the Kosinski-Cruise-Bruckheimer film had gone the distance in this respect.
But the absence of even a shred of wokeness is wonderful. Remember that it’s locked into a mid ‘80s mindset to start with, and that it was written and filmed before the woke thing kicked in bigtime.
Everyone in TopGun: Maverick (even the afflicted Val Kilmer) is attractive — lean, perfectly cut hair, great teeth, fine complexions. Tom Cruise, currently nudging 60 but 56 and 57 during filming, looks like a 48 year old who works out, eats healthily and gets facials. Jennifer Connelly, playing his Maverick character’s 40something girlfriend, has never looked more radiant. Jon Hamm, Ed Harris…all the older dudes have flat abs.
There’s just no room in this well-tended realm for the graying, heavy-set, mid-60ish Kelly McGillis, who played Cruise’s lover, Charlie, in the 1986original. And even if she’d kept herself in shape…let’s not go there. McGillis is fine, she never would’ve made the cut, the producers liked Connelly, let it go.
What does that tell you? I’ll tell you what it tells me. It tells me that Elvisis not a Lubitsch film. It also scares me somewhat. I’ll leave it at that.
“There are basically two kinds of people,” critic Harlan Jacobson observed in the mid ‘80s. “Those who think of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd when they hear Moonlighting, and those who think of Jeremy Irons and Jerzy Skolimowski.”
Last night a Wilton friendo said, “Oh, I saw that. The other one.”
HE: “The Jeremy Irons? It opened 40 years ago.”
Friendo: “The one I saw was five or six years ago. A black kid…”
HE: “That was Moonlight. (beat) Whadja think of that?”
Yesterday New York theatre guy Seth Rudetsky tweeted this photo of himself and 92-year-old Gene Hackman at some Santa Fe event.
Glad to see Hackman in good health (although my first reaction was that he looks like Gollum). but the first Hackman film that came into Rudetsky’s mind was The Poseidon Adventure? Seriously? Not Hoosiers, The French Connection, Crimson Tide, The Firm, The Conversation, Unforgiven, Get Shorty, Mississippi Burning, Lilith, French Connection 2, UnderFire, etc.?
A new still from Jordan Peele’s Nope (Universal, 7.22), andparticularly (l. to.r.) of Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea.
Palmer, of course, has become world famous over the last three weeks (or since 4.20) as the woman whose adverse reaction to a physical prank by Being Mortal costar Bill Murray — i.e., his allegedly yanking her pigtail in a nyuk-nyuk, joking-around way — led to production on Aziz Ansari‘s film being suspended.
This is two months old — from a 3.13.22 Bill Maher-Ben Shapiro podcast discussion. The main reason we’re afraid to talk about obesity is that a hefty percentage of obese people in this country…forget it. I’ll just get smacked. Forget I mentioned it.
Earlier today The Ankler‘s Jeff Sneider announced that one of the gloomiest and dreariest flicks in the history of cinema — Mark Romanek, Alex Garland and Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Never Let Me Go (’10) — is being relaunched as an FX series under the guidance of DNA Films & TV”s Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich. What a perfectly dreadful idea. I’m in instant mourning.
August2010HEcommentary: It’s not a very well-kept secret that NeverLetMeGo deals with a grim-fate dynamic — an oppressive, locked-down situation in which “a long and happy life” isn’t in the cards for the main characters, who have been raised to be organ donors for the rich.
There’s a famous saying about how “the clarity of mind that comes to a man standing on the gallows is wonderful.” As in face facts, sharpen your mind, prioritize.
I’ve always been one, however, to take it a step further and not just prioritize and all that, but to first and foremost revel and rejoice in the immediacy of the symphony of life.
Death is something to be accepted, okay, but primarily fought and strategized against, frequently laughed at, lampooned and pooh-poohed, acknowledged but simultaneously “ignored” (in a manner of speaking), dismissed, despised and raged against (in Dylan Thomas‘s words) right to the end.
There is only life, only the continuance, only the fuel and the fire…only the next step, the next breath, the next meal, the next sip of water, the next hill to climb, the next perfect pair of courdoruy pants, the next adventure, the next hypnotizing woman, the next splash of salt spray in your face, the next staircase to run down two or three steps at a time, the next rental car and the next winding road to concentrate on and carefully negotiate, etc.
