Re: Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski, 2020)
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:07 pm
I'm there simply because I want to continue to see Tom Cruise learn how to do crazy things like fly jet fighters for his movies.
Be aware that you are still allowed to be on Tumblr due to their allowance for 'non-human genitals'. Which is presumably part of why we are now in a world where the Cats film is a real thing.cdnchris wrote: Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:30 pmOK, I won'tswo17 wrote: Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:25 pm Chris, please change DarkImbecile's custom rank to "Don't talk about my visible cat breasts"
OK, I willDarkImbecile wrote: Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:29 pm You know what, I'm not going back in the closet: change it to "Ask me about my visible cat breasts"
I would totally be in for a new Hot Shots!, but then I suspect I'd be immediately disappointed when watching the film. (I'm holding out hope that Bill & Ted Face the Music doesn't do this to me).bearcuborg wrote: Fri Jul 19, 2019 1:37 am Fingers crossed they bring back Charlie Sheen’s Topper Harley for the spoof...
I would expect Justice to do the score for this film!colinr0380 wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2019 2:42 pm At the very least, this being a Joseph Kosinski film, we know that it will likely have a couple of good flying sequences and a great score!
DarkImbecile wrote: Tue May 31, 2022 4:25 pm This is one of those cases where both sides of the general critical response are simultaneously true — much like the original film, Top Gun: Maverick is both top-notch blockbuster filmmaking driven by increasingly rare true star power AND thinly veiled can-do American jingoist propaganda — and where you land on Kosinski's sequel ultimately comes down to a very subjective question of which overpowers the other for you.
When it comes to the original (which I discovered upon rewatching last week I had actually never seen all in one sitting, despite it being so culturally ubiquitous during my childhood that I knew all the major plot beats and lines by heart), there's something about the Reagan era context that makes its unsavory traits stand out more prominently than the sweaty sexiness and aerial suspense. For every moment that delivers an adrenaline (or other hormone) boost, there are two others that make you wince.
Maverick, meanwhile, appears in a cinematic context in which its utility as a military recruitment tool seems less important than Kosinski and Cruise's ability to play the audience like a synthesizer, relying on big emotional beats, spectacular aerial cinematography (or at least green screen fakery so well-done as to be indistinguishable from strapping a camera to the outside of a jet), and just the right amount of nostalgia to give the whole thing a pleasantly bittersweet flavor for people who grew up with both the Cold War and Tom Cruise as an unadulterated movie star. I can't exactly put my finger on how it does it, but the ridiculousness of the Pentagon-approved script somehow manages to ride the perilous line between the kind of absurdity that invites eye-rolling disdain and the bland four-quadrant agreeability that makes most other big budget summer blockbusters so forgettable immediately upon leaving the theater.
Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, and the rest of the cast do excellent work at being beautiful and/or hypermasculine, and Kosinski handles the camaraderie and testosterone-fueled rivalry elements just as well as the action sequences, the sound and rollercoaster intensity of which make the IMAX surcharge more than worth it if you have the opportunity. There are just enough moments of levity and emoting to balance out the action, and the script is appropriately rooted in the original without being too obnoxiously reverential or a pure rerun. Like the Mission: Impossible movies (not entirely surprising as Christopher McQuarrie serves as one of the screenwriters and producers here as well), Maverick pulls off the magic trick of making Tom Cruise out to be both something of a benevolent demigod and a charming underdog hero, slightly subverting his on-screen image for laughs and dramatic tension while by the end of the film fully reinforcing it.
If you can't set aside your reservations about the flag-waving militaristic excess and wallow in the not-too-dumb fun and audio-visual overstimulation, I wouldn't hold it against you, but if you have the moral/intellectual flexibility, this will probably be the best bombastic studio spectacle you see all year. It may be a guilty pleasure, but at a time when overly aggressive American militarism is shockingly low on our list of global and domestic problems, maybe this is the rare window where one can safely emphasize the pleasure more than the guilt.
Yeah, there’s nothing as invested in bloody vengeance as the Scott movie (which actually came out in 2001 only a few months after 9/11, and I remember being uncomfortable with it in that context as well). This has both upsides and downsides, as the bloodless violence inflicted on a faceless, unnamed enemy state doesn’t evoke anything like the specific discomfort of watching a first world military slaughter Africans in one of the most underdeveloped nations in the world, but one of the absurd conceits of Maverick is the idea that a nameless ‘rogue state’ also has an advanced nuclear program and fighter jets so advanced that they ‘level the playing field’ with the U.S. military. Basically the script contorts itself to the edges of credulity to make the Americans the underdogs against as generic an enemy as possible: like I said, your tolerance of this kind of jingoist fantasy may vary, so consume with caution.beamish14 wrote: Tue May 31, 2022 7:03 pm My partner saw Jerry Bruckheimer/Ridley Scott’s 2003 propaganda piece Black Hawk Down during its opening weekend and she said that the audience’s cheering and clapping at Americans butchering Somalis is one of the most unsettling experiences she’s ever had with a crowd.
I haven't seen the new film (and I don't like the original and remember very little about it), but it's interesting you draw comparisons to anime, as - in my admittedly-thin experience with certain anime series - they often do draw a fair-handed congruous balance between initially competitive social dynamics and deep-rooted vulnerable emotional cores related to insecurities and family histories that are relatable amongst their previously-antagonist peers. I'm not saying that Top Gun earns the punch these series do, but it doesn't feel entirely problematic as a narrative trajectory linking up characterizations, where people who saw one another as enemies are able to shed their egos for the sake of sensitive camaraderie, subverting the faux-heroics into lucid juvenilia. Though I get the feeling that it's the particulars of Top Gun that inhibit the successful payoff of such a change- perhaps a lazier attempt to have one's cake and eat it too whereas those series take economical strides to deserve the evolution...Never Cursed wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 6:52 am It’s all very high school football drama/shounen anime in the pettily competitive social dynamics, which is to a point fine, but this same mood is totally incongruous with the heroic pathos parts, the dewy-eyed “my dad served with your dad” bits and moments of portentous self-doubt that cannot possibly effectively play for drama when the film’s characters (and approving treatment thereof) are so consciously juvenile.
Oh I don't have any issue with that narrative structure in and of itself, it's more that the Top Guns are so unbelievably self-unaware - the surface-level of these films doesn't work if the audience is not sincerely convinced of the awesomeness of what are ultimately a bunch of very juvenile people posturing at adulthood. These movies are stylistically quite tame compared to the look of an average shounen anime, but I find that the best of those works are more willing to either use the brash youthfulness of its main characters in the service of more interesting developments or at least provide some moments of levity at the expense of the milieu. These are directions that the Top Guns, for a multitude of reasons, just can't take; to save the projects of the gigantic action blockbuster and the military recruitment vehicle, all perceived routes to subversivity must be closed off ("Don't think, if you think up there, you're dead," our hero intones). (I think this is why the most popular subversive reading of the first film, that relating to its perceived homoeroticism, depends so much on finding elements that are understood to have been placed in the film unintentionally - it is a reading that attempts to subvert the rather heterosexual stated aims of the movie itself, not just the world depicted within). To put this in other terms, imagine if Neon Genesis Evangelion did not have its halfway-mark turn into hell and instead grew to care on the most straightforward and boring level about the pilots, eschewing the examination of what it means for them to be soldiers in favor of bolstering the "coolness" of what they're doing. If the series ended with Shinji and Asuka getting back from the final mission, whereupon Asuka gives Shinji a hug and says "you can be my wingman anytime" as the sun sets and the water is all twinkly, that would not convince me of the awesomeness of the whole enterprise.therewillbeblus wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 3:13 pmI haven't seen the new film (and I don't like the original and remember very little about it), but it's interesting you draw comparisons to anime, as - in my admittedly-thin experience with certain anime series - they often do draw a fair-handed congruous balance between initially competitive social dynamics and deep-rooted vulnerable emotional cores related to insecurities and family histories that are relatable amongst their previously-antagonist peers. I'm not saying that Top Gun earns the punch these series do, but it doesn't feel entirely problematic as a narrative trajectory linking up characterizations, where people who saw one another as enemies are able to shed their egos for the sake of sensitive camaraderie, subverting the faux-heroics into lucid juvenilia. Though I get the feeling that it's the particulars of Top Gun that inhibit the successful payoff of such a change- perhaps a lazier attempt to have one's cake and eat it too whereas those series take economical strides to deserve the evolution...Never Cursed wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 6:52 am It’s all very high school football drama/shounen anime in the pettily competitive social dynamics, which is to a point fine, but this same mood is totally incongruous with the heroic pathos parts, the dewy-eyed “my dad served with your dad” bits and moments of portentous self-doubt that cannot possibly effectively play for drama when the film’s characters (and approving treatment thereof) are so consciously juvenile.
It more or less does what the original film does in this respect. There's now a female pilot in a sports bra present during the sports montage, but all the other pilots are still shirtless testosterone-fueled beefcakes. Humorously enough, the actual (het) sex scene in this new one has no shots of the two having sex, basically turning into a conversation with a punchline centering around Cruise getting dressed. Does this answer the question/sell a ticket?zaladane wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 2:06 pmWhat's the level of simmering homoeroticism in the sequel compared to the original? That will prob drive my decision to see it or not (I'm looking for an answer simliar to "A lot!")
What were the logistics of shooting the plane scenes? As I understand, they were operating the cameras themselves?
Well, they weren’t operating them. The cameras were fixed. It was six cameras in the cockpit, two facing forward over the Navy pilot, four facing backward at the actor. Different compositions, different lenses, all wired to one switch that turned them all on and off. Every morning, we’d start with a two-hour brief with all the actors, all the Navy pilots, myself, Tom, the DP Claudio Miranda, the editor Eddie Hamilton, and we’d go through every single storyboard, every single scene, every line of what we needed to achieve that day. Weather, safety, terrain, light placement. It was very tedious — it would bore you to tears. Then I would take the pilot and the actor who was flying down to a mock-up of the F-18 cockpit with a mock-up of the dashboard, the switch, the camera, and everything. They’d sit in their positions, and I’d walk them through the day. “This line, you’re going to look to the right, you’re going to say, ‘Break right.’” That kind of stuff. It’s just, again, very tedious. We’d rehearse for an hour until it was muscle memory. They would go up, fly for an hour, do the footage, come back. We’d load the cards into a monitor; we’d all watch it together. Very high pressure for the actor. And every time they did something wrong, give them a note. When they did something right, we’d cheer for them. When they threw up, we’d cheer. It was a great team-building environment. And we’d send them up again in the afternoon. It felt like we did that for months until we had all the shots we needed.