With Top Gun: Maverick having played nationwide for the last three days, candid reactions would be greatly appreciated. Here, un-paywalled, is my two-week-old review that appeared on 5.12. If I over-stated something or was unfair in some way, please explain how, who, where, why and what-the-fuck.

Say it again: Top Gun: 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 + Chris McQuarrie + Jerry Bruckheimer 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 Top Gun: 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, Top Gun 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 Star Wars: 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.

What I’m absorbing from this new Maverick: Top Gun teaser is Tom Cruise‘s Maverick doing loop-dee-loops in the manner of Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon…a lot of wild-ass, bordering-on-reckless stuff. Plus the usual testosterone shenanigans, some of which alarms Jon Hamm‘s three-star admiral. Plus confirmation that Jennifer Connelly‘s “single mother running a bar near the Naval base” is in fact an age-appropriate romantic partner for Maverick. And yaddah yaddah.

There’s a brief shot of a flag-draped coffin so who buys it? My money’s on either Miles Teller‘s “Rooster” Bradshaw or Monica Barbaro‘s “Phoenix”.

Boilerplate: “When Maverick finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission, he encounters the chip-off-the-old-block son of Maverick’s late friend ‘Goose’ Bradshaw. Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will fly it.”

Posted on 7.18.19: “San Diego-based fighter pilots!….the aura of studly military rock stars, coping with buried anger and the burden of expectations, brusque and strapping and throwing their heads back in laughter while playing piano in a honky tonk.

“And the women who both love and compete with them. With the big climactic test of skill and character looming. And so on.

“I haven’t read the script (co-authored by Peter Craig, Justin Marks, Christopher McQuarrie and Eric Warren Singer) but I want a scene in which Cruise tells Connelly that Kelly McGillis‘ Charlie Blackwood left him for another woman, and then (beat, beat) Connelly tells Cruise, ‘Yeah, I know…it was me.’ Or: ‘I’m sorry, that’s tough. (beat) She left me too.’

Any thoughts you may have had about Jerry Bruckheimer and Joseph Kosinki‘s Top Gun: Maverick possibly dealing subtle cards and not necessarily using sledgehammer tactics are now…well, let’s just say that hopes along those lines are temporarily dashed. If this just-released teaser is any kind of indication, I mean.

San Diego-based fighter pilots!….the aura of studly military rock stars, coping with buried anger and the burden of expectations, brusque and strapping and throwing their heads back in laughter while playing piano in a honky tonk. (Like Miles Teller‘s son of Goose Bradshaw character does in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip.) And the women who both love and compete with them. With the big climactic test of skill and character looming. And so on.

I haven’t read the script (co-authored by Peter Craig, Justin Marks, Christopher McQuarrie and Eric Warren Singer) but the tip-off is a Wikipedia description of Jennifer Connelly‘s character — “a single mother running a bar near the Naval base.”

A single mother! Running a bar! Who dispenses sage advice while mixing a killer Mojito! With, I’m guessing, a possible age-appropriate interest in Tom Cruise‘s Maverick, who’s now a creased and weathered Naval flight instructor. And perhaps, in keeping with the theme of launching the new generation, with an aspiring fighter-jock daughter? Or am I pushing too far?

I want a scene in which Cruise tells Connelly that Kelly McGillis‘ Charlie Blackwood left him for another woman, and then (beat, beat) Connelly tells Cruise, “Yeah, I know…it was me.” Or: “I’m sorry, that’s tough. (beat) She left me too.”

Ed Harris to Cruise: “Captain…what is that?” Jon Hamm playing some kind of tough nut. And Val Kilmer back for seconds. All the young dudes of the original Top Gun are now in their late 50s and early ’60s.

Best shot in the trailer: Crew-cutted Cruise riding a motorcycle without a helmet, bathed in magic-hour amber, loving the wind and grinning the grin.

Cruise’s six career-best roles (in this order): (1) Vincent the assassin in Collateral, (2) the titular Jerry Maguire, (3) Joel Goodson, the U-boat commander of Highland Park, (4) Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man, (5) Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, and (6) Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia. Honorable Mention: Mitch McDeere in The Firm.

On 7.3 I assessed the Baz Luhrmann / Elvis Presley casting situation, as reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming. Four contenders had recently screen-tested for the Presley role in Luhrmann‘s biopic about the relationship between the iconic rock star and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and it was my view that three of them — Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller and Harry Styles — weren’t right.

My judgment was that 28 year-old Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die, the grubby and psychotic Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) seemed “the most interesting possibility among the four.” Today Fleming reported that Luhrmann had agreed and gone with Butler.

Yesterday Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that four contenders were recently screen-tested for the Elvis Presley role in Baz Luhrmann‘s biopic about the relationship between Presley and Colonel Tom Parker (to be played by Tom Hanks).

I’ll tell you right now that three of them aren’t right. Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver, West Side Story) is way too tall and just doesn’t feel like a fit. (Elvis wasn’t a basketball player.) The 32 year-old Miles Teller doesn’t resemble Presley even a little bit, and couldn’t hope to convince as the young Elvis, who began to catch on at age 20 in 1955. And Harry Styles (Dunkirk) bears no resemblance at all.

The 28 year-old Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die, the grubby and psychotic Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) seems the most interesting possibility among the four.

You know who could theoretically rock the role, at least in terms of genetic follow-through? Elvis’s 26-year-old grandson Benjamin Keough, who’s nearly a dead ringer. I’ve no idea if Keough can act or sing or anything, but he’s a chip off the old block.

My all-time favorite Elvis? Kurt Russell in John Carpenter‘s Elvis, a 1979 made-for-TV flick that was well above average.

(l.) G.I. Blues Elvis in ’60; Benjamin Keough.

Last night I finally watched episode #1 of Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Too Old To Die Young (Amazon, 6.14). I have nine more episodes to go, but I’ll tell you right now I’m not much of a fan.

I “respect” the noirish-arthouse atmosphere (solemn, menacing, gates-of-hell atmosphere) and the slow, snail-like pacing. By which I mean that I’m okay with Refn’s decision to shoot it this way as, you know, a stylistic “look at me” signature thing. But I didn’t find it involving. Like, at all. It’s basically about ugliness, evil, malevolence, posing, slowness, dark lighting, irony, set design, death, perversity.

“This is not human behavior as I know it,” I kept saying to myself. “This isn’t even noir behavior. In the first scene it takes…what, 15 minutes for a cop to hassle and interrogate a young woman that he’s pulled over and apparently wants to take advantage of in some fiendish way? Less? Feels like 15. They talk and talk and talk and talk…what is this?”

If human history progressed at this pace we’d still be back in the heyday of the Roman Empire. I’d be wearing a toga and sandals and writing for the Foro Romano Gazette. Everyone takes too damn long to speak or do anything, for that matter. I asked myself again, “Why the fuck am I watching this?”

To be honest, I watched TOTDY because I’d heard it was a problematic slog and I wanted to see Miles Teller struggle. I’ve had it in for this fucking guy ever since that 2014 Hollywood-Highland escalator episode (“Don’t be a pervert, man”).

“This is not going to add to my understanding of or appreciation for the wonder of God’s universe,” I went on. “This isn’t going to turn me on or make me laugh and drop to my knees like I’m watching the second coming of Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s just going to irritate me so you know what? Fuck this series. Okay, I’ll probably watch a few more episodes.”

Even though Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood wasn’t announced as a Cannes Film Festival selection this morning, Hollywood Elsewhere is confident it’ll be included. (A well-positioned little bird has told me not to sweat it.) What I’d like to know is, what the hell happened to Pablo Larrain‘s Ema, which also wasn’t announced? Was it deep-sixed, as rumored, because of an alleged Netflix acquisition?

As expected, Pedro Almodovar,’s Pain and Glory and Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life were also announced, in addition to Dexter Fletcher‘s out-of-competition Rocketman and Jim Jarmusch‘s previously confirmed The Dead Don’t Die (competition), which will open the festival on Tuesday, 5.15.

HE is all hopped up about Marco Bellocchio‘s The Traitor, allegedly some kind of Godfather-ish crime and betrayal flick.

I’m also regarding Nicolas Winding Refn‘s non-competitive Too Old to Die Young — North of Hollywood, West of Hell warily, but with a muted excitement. It’s not a feature but a segment or two from an Amazon crime drama series, starring Miles Teller and Billy Baldwin, that’s slated to pop on 6.14.19.

HE regrets to confirm that Xavier Dolan‘s Matthias & Maxime is now an official competition selection, as Dolan has almost always infuriated me, the exception being Mommy, which I was half-okay with despite hating the lead performance.

Ditto Bong Joon Ho‘s Parasite (competition), as HE had enormous problems with the grotesque, family-friendly Okja (“A well-directed megaplex movie for kids, and cliche-ridden like a sonuvabtich”). I respected but didn’t exactly surge with pleasure over Snowpiercer and The Host, but…well, BJH just rubs me the wrong way. Always has, always will.

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne‘s The Young Ahmed will also play in competition….the respectably relentless Dardennes! Not to mention Ken Loach‘s Sorry We Missed You…Loach! And Ira Sachs‘ Frankie.

I’m not down on my knees but what happened to Benedict Andrews‘ Against All Enemies, the Jean Seberg movie with Kristen Stewart?

There’s this dispiriting notion afoot in Hollywood culture right now, which is that a film isn’t marketable if it’s “just” a drama, “just” a crime thriller, “just” a touching story about a desperate woman in a jam, etc. By this jaded formula new movies made in the mold of Chinatown, The Parallax View, Kramer vs. Kramer, No Way Out and Mississippi Burning (if someone was dumb enough to do this) would all go straight to cable.

The thinking, as everyone knows, is that only big-event movies can open theatrically, and everything else has to go straight to Netflix or Amazon or HBO or some other home-media option. The lowbrows and none-too-brights go to the plexes for their lowest-common-denominator, jizz-whizz, porno-violent franchise fantasy bullshit (Jigsaw, Tyler Perry’s Boo 2!, Geostorm, Happy Death Day) while smarter, older, more cultivated viewers prefer to watch new films at home on their 60-inch monitors.

This, at least, is how it seems to be. The theatrical realm has been so mongrelized and generally degraded by the big studios. Multiplexes have essentially become FX funhouses, indoor amusement parks, places where lower life forms (i.e., the dregs of society) congregate. Every now and then a really good film will do well financially, but more and more, it seems, films that are spirit-drainers or flat-out painful to sit through sell a lot of tickets also.

And then you turn around and watch David Fincher‘s excellent Netflix miniseries Mindhunter, and you think “well, who cares if the theatrical experience has become simultaneously degraded and over-priced? I just finished watching all ten episodes of Mindhunter, and I was riveted all the way through. Way more satisfying than most theatrical features I’ve seen this year.”

Obviously my situation is special. I’m going to continue to see worthwhile or semi-worthwhile films all year long at festivals and press screenings, so I’m not dealing with the same kind of hard choices that upscale, well-educated ticket-buyers are facing. But if I wasn’t an accredited journalist I’d probably be saying “Jesus, I don’t know about theatrical any more…I’m getting sick of superhero flicks and I hate effects-driven material, and more and more I’m thinking ‘fuck it…I’ll watch what I want to watch at home.”

On Thursday night I paid $17 and change to see Jason Hall‘s Thank You For Your Service, a character-driven struggling-vets drama. No, I didn’t love it but I respected what it was putting out and was once again taken by another first-rate Miles Teller performance, and at no time did it make me feel angry or frustrated. But there weren’t many people in the theatre, I can tell you. 25 or 30 at most.

TYFYS opened yesterday on 2054 screens and made about $1.5 million, averaging about $733 per situation. George Clooney‘s Suburbicon is doing worse — 2046 screens, earned $1.1 million yesterday, averaging $538 per screen. The completely respectable, undeniably well made Only The Brave, which opened last weekend (10.20), is naturally doing worse this weekend — $1,055,000 yesterday, $409 per screen.