Top Gun
The Kenny Loggins still slaps, the flying parts are pretty good, but man…I don’t know about this one, guys.
This isn’t one of those reviews that’s like, “He follows her INTO THE BATHROOM!? #NotOKAY!
I mean, I get it, following a woman into the bathroom in a continuing campaign to pick her up in a bar isn’t a good move, but it’s a fucking movie, flying jets around and shooting Russians(?) with missiles is also not something that real people should be doing, banging on a piano and playing Great Balls of Fire in a restaurant while people behind you are trying to eat is not something you should do, hell, riding a motorcycle without a helmet is pretty stupid, getting super sweaty playing volleyball with your best bros and then showing up at a girl’s house and telling her you plan to immediately take a shower is a real dick move, but ALSO, the individual in the instructor position of an instructor/student relationship would mean the onus is really on you to maintain a professional, non-romantic relationship, and it’s incredibly irresponsible to chase someone in your car and run a stop sign, potentially killing someone, just so you can…finish complimenting someone.
There’s really not much behavior in MOST movies that’s real-life applicable, and I’m fine with that because these are movies, not real life.
I like to judge movies based on their own reality. Top Gun is a weird heightened reality where people call each other by their call signs in real life, where you might graduate from some kind of top gun academy and be dogfighting MIGs like two days later. It’s a reality where you give someone the nickname “Maverick” and then act surprised when the person ACTS LIKE A MAVERICK.
So while a bunch of the stuff in here isn’t 2024 real-world behavior, I think it’s probably aight for 1986 movie world behavior.
Ahem.
Top Gun has some good highs for me, but, man, the parts where we’re not in jets are kind of a drag. The romantic subplot is just kind of meh for me. But I want to focus on my favorite aspect of the movie: the conflict between Maverick and Iceman.
If this movie were made in 2024, the two of them would definitely have a fistfight. But in 1986, Iceman didn’t like Maverick’s, well, maverick ways, he says so, and what’s great is that Iceman is mostly right!
I feel like it’s been a minute since I’ve seen a movie that works on that level, where the primary antagonist is completely correct in his criticisms, delivers them bluntly but not cruelly, and he makes the critiques because they need to be made.
Iceman is opposed to Maverick because Maverick is doing dangerous things that work for him once, but done 100 times, will fail 99 of them. You can’t run a military that way.
AND then, when the Goose stuff happens, Iceman is totally NOT a dick about it.
Again, in a modern movie, Iceman would blame Maverick, probably make some snide comment about it, and they would fistfight,
In 1986, Iceman says something nice about Goose and leaves it at that.
I REALLY liked how that conflict played out. It was realistic, and it had the core of a good conflict in a story: both people are a little bit right.
And I miss that kind of thing in movies. I miss romcoms where the second-best suitor is also a pretty good guy who is deserving of love and unfortunately just isn’t totally right for our protagonist. As opposed to the second best suitor being a tech billionaire who shoots homeless people from a helicopter for sport or whatever.
I miss sports movies where the opposing athlete isn’t an inhuman monster, but is instead a lot like our hero, just from a bit of a different background.
Censor
Can we get an advisory sticker for movies that are like, “We started shooting without having fleshed out an ending and it shows”?
Dreamscape
I wasn’t sure at first why I’d never heard of this one, then I figured it out when the, er, saucy scene came in. That alone would make an interesting movie, the court case and all.
The other big flaw is the miscast David Patrick Kelly, who you might know from his role clinking bottles together and telling the Warriors to come out and play.
It’s not that he’s bad, he’s great. It’s that when he’s in a movie, you instantly know something’s up, and he’s so evil you’re just like, “RUN Dennis Quaid, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!” I think it might’ve worked better if the casting was a tiny bit different, if they swapped him and George Wendt, and then the reveal would be more shocking.
The movie is about dreams, and I think dreams are fascinating.
Yes, I’m a backwards man. I don’t care for time travel stories, but dreams I’m all in.
I think most people hate dreams, and the problem is that we try and talk about dreams narratively, “this happened, then this happened, then this happened,” and that’s not really a good way to describe or talk about a dream. It’s like describing someone’s appearance from left to right instead of from top to bottom, or like describing the baseball game you saw by showing someone a program you filled out. Yes, a baseball game has hits and pitches and so on, but the linear description of those things does not capture the idea of a dream.
What’s fascinating to me about dreams is that we all have them, they can feel very real, and yet we don’t REALLY know what purpose they serve, if any. There is not a scientific consensus as to whether or not they serve a purpose and what that purpose might be. Which seems bizarre to me. There’s a lot science can’t explain, but I feel like the things that almost every person experiences almost every night are things we should know more about, study more.
That being said, I PARTICULARLY hate when a dream is inserted into a fictional narrative in order to provide some kind of context to the character or the viewer. I really fucking hate that. Because that’s not really how dreams operate, in my experience, and I think it’s a very lazy way to either provide backstory, use some interesting lighting effects, or give the character/audience hints about something without doing the heavy lifting.
Run
Little tip if you’re living a secret life: maybe don’t keep a box that serves as a timeline of newspaper clippings, basically a scrapbook confession, in your house. Maybe Marie Kondo that shit.
Road House
The first film about gentrification.
Nightmare on Elm Street 4
Why would anyone think that you could bench press your way out of trouble with Freddy? That’s just gym bro madness.