The Gun is Top Again

With all due respect to the late Tony Scott, 2022's Top Gun: Maverick is a better film than the original. The story is still very softball, playing within the bounds of a very narrowly defined fantasy world, but the use of practical effects, especially having the actors actually in jets, push this film into genuinely good territory.

Tom Cruise returns to the role he originated twenty-six years ago. Still a hotshot flyboy, now he's tasked with training a team of young pilots to take on an impossible mission: a strategic strike at an unnamed country.

It's kind of amusing how successfully the film avoids any and all specifics as to the enemy country's identity. We hear no names of people or places, no scraps of language, we don't see any flags or insignia except a generic red bird painted on the side of an old jet. It's amazing because so much of the last, very exciting, portion of the film hinges on the details of fighting this nameless enemy.

Before that, we get a lot of downtime in my hometown, San Diego. Maverick spends some time connecting with the new kids and with his old flame played by Jennifer Connelly.

In her first appearance in the film, in her bar, you can hear David Bowie's "Let's Dance" in the background, presumably reminding the audience that her big star-making role was opposite Bowie in Labyrinth, released the same year as Top Gun. Connelly was not in Top Gun, Kelly McGillis was the love interest. Where's McGillis? According to Wikipedia, her last role was in 2018 Lifetime movie called Maternal Secrets. My suspicious is the makers of Top Gun: Maverick ruthlessly aimed to make the movie pure indulgence--Connelly has aged a lot better than McGillis.

It's true, Val Kilmer's not looking great these days, but, on the other hand, he's a much bigger star and his ordeal with cancer has garnered more public attention. Still, he only has one scene in Maverick.

I do find it curious that Kilmer's health would not permit him to take part in the Willow series yet he managed to show up in Maverick. I suspect he knew something about the people and the intentions behind both projects. I forgot to write about the latest episode of Willow which featured Christian Slater in a small role--obviously in a modified part originally written to be Madmartigan, Kilmer's character. The show is reminding me a little of She-Hulk (unsurprising since it shares some writers) as it seems often to be written by people who not only hate action scenes, they hate anyone who likes action scenes. The same could certainly not be said for Top Gun: Maverick, thank God.

You seeing this, Disney? One of these made a billion dollars, one of these can't scratch the top ten in the ratings. You really want to keep doing this?

Twitter Sonnet #1655

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Beyond the reach of stars the spell is cast.

Building a Pool Castle

In most careers or artforms, one must except an inevitable decline in prowess. Those who've reached the highest summit might expect the more terrible or humiliating fall, but perhaps the expectation in many cases exceeds the reality. This is the question that haunts Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, Martin Scorsese's 1986 sequel to 1961's The Hustler, both based on books by Walter Tevis. A film that focuses much more on the technical aspects of hustling than its predecessor, it's always engaging and fascinating. Some of the shots of pool cues striking balls are reminiscent of some of the visceral, inside-the-ring shots from Raging Bull but The Color of Money is far from one of Scorsese's greatest films and it's not quite as good as The Hustler. Still, it's pretty damn good.

We find Eddie, again played by Paul Newman, retired from playing pool and hustling, now sitting atop a lucrative counterfeit liquor racket.

It always amazes me how different Paul Newman looked and sounded when he was older. His voice is totally different--deeper and much more gravelly--and all his facial features seem harder edged and sunken. He looks old and very sharp so when he decides to mentor two young hustlers he certainly looks like an authority.

The two young hustlers are a couple of lovers, Vince and Carmen, played by Tom Cruise and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, respectively. Cruise is such a vain doofus in this, constantly showboating or making obnoxious boasts. He's certainly credible in the role with that 10k watt grin of his, and also because Cruise trained hard to genuinely be able to pull off his pool feats. His girlfriend is also his manager and she and Eddie commiserate whenever Vince does something boneheaded, at least when Carmen isn't trying to seduce Eddie.

And here's another point where he seems a credible mentor--he won't sleep with her, he's more interested in getting her to employ her feminine charms strategically, which she finally does when she threatens to withhold sex from Vince if he keeps winning games he needs to lose in order to fix the betting odds.

The trouble really starts when Eddie tries to play casually and finds he's not even a shadow of his former self. Watching him go through the humiliating experience of finding the student is well beyond the teacher--and inclined to be an obnoxious braggart about it--makes for some sharp, painful cinema thanks to Scorsese's unflinching vision and performances from Newman and Cruise. And then you really root for Eddie as he starts to slowly and carefully rebuild what he was.

The Color of Money is available on Disney+ in most countries.

Twitter Sonnet #1452

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The Car and Motorcycle Shuffle

I wish I could speed through Paris on a motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour and not worry about hitting a kid or a dog or something. Walking around at a shopping centre after seeing 2018's Mission: Impossible--Fallout, I felt irrationally frustrated by all the obstacles preventing me from moving faster. People crossing on the sidewalk in front of me seemed malicious impediments to me realising my potential as a cannonball. Good thing we have movies to address such needs and this one has very little slack in that department.

I haven't watched a Mission: Impossible movie since I saw the second film in the theatre in 2000. I remember it being better than the first one, which I also only saw in the theatre, but mainly I remember the evening because I ate a whole box of chocolate covered coffee beans. I certainly didn't leave the theatre feeling sleepy though as I recall the main hook for the second film was shots of Tom Cruise slowly creeping his way around the underside of a rock at high altitude.

Good old Tom Cruise. Fifty six years old and the biggest daredevil in Hollywood. Constantly doing his own extravagant stunts, including a super high altitude skydive in this film, has become an integral part of his fame. And it's certainly a benefit for M:I--Fallout--there are subtle, natural reactions an actor has to a physical situation that cgi simply can't predict. A truly talented artist can make cgi action interesting but such sequences are at their best when they're expressions of those artists' sensibilities. The personality in Spider-Man flipping about between buildings has a different appeal than the sense of volatility in Cruise suddenly, unexpectedly scrabbling on the side of a rooftop.

Henry Cavill gives a flat performance but he's a good refrigerator--I still believe it'd hurt when he slams into someone. Simon Pegg seems like he must have been a lot of fun when his character was introduced a couple years earlier and he's perfectly satisfactory now. Mainly, though, the film is about Cruise's relationships with women.

The film's primary thematic appeal is very traditional for the spy genre and some might say retrograde--it primarily revolves around a hypercapable male protagonist's anxiety over the increasingly difficult task of protecting the woman he loves, or even just the woman he feels a raw sexual attraction to, an anxiety especially complicated by the ambiguity of the woman's motives. I've always argued that the James Bond movies are really imitations of Hitchcock movies and the true originators of this genre are Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959)--but especially Notorious. That one put all of the details in place--a handsome, suave, resourceful agent (Cary Grant) and the beautiful female spy (Ingrid Bergman) whose sexuality seemed connected to the peril surrounding the mission. And, of course, there's exotic travel and uranium.

Plutonium turns out to be the deadly McGuffin in Mission: Impossible--Fallout. There are three women on Ethan Hunt's mind this time--Rebecca Ferguson as an MI6 agent with the cool name Ilsa Faust, Michelle Monaghan as a wife named Julia from an earlier film, and a sexy weapons broker called the White Widow played by Vanessa Kirby.

He protects the White Widow in the film's most stylish sequence set in a club with a corridor of mirrors that reminded me of the sabre fight in Phantom Menace. Ambiguities about who Ethan is, who she is, and what both of them want add spice to an action sequence with a lot of physical intimacy and the always lovely garter pistol Kirby produces at one point.

The film's effective cocktail of relentless, expertly contrived action and sexual subtext never quite hits the heights of the Raiders of the Lost Ark gold standard and the last act of Fallout sags a bit with some logical inconsistencies but it's still a very fun film.

Twitter Sonnet #1139

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