PROJECT RUNWAY

Opening today:

Top Gun: Maverick--When the original Top Gun was released in 1986, I quickly came to regard it as an embodiment of everything that was wrong with American pop culture, and maybe of American culture in general. Setting aside whatever annoyance we can assign to it for turning Tom Cruise into a superstar, Top Gun's mindless, swaggering triumphalism and fetishizing of empty recklessness struck me as a symptom, maybe even a partial cause, of a generational toxicity from which we're still suffering.

Three and a half decades later, on the occasion of this very belated sequel, I'm not sure I see any rational basis for revising the opinion of my pompous 24-year-old self, or of attributing a healthier mentality to the new film. But I will say this: Top Gun: Maverick is much more enjoyable than the original.

The '86 film has become one of the seminal movie texts of our time, but in case there are a few fortunate souls who remain benighted: It's the story of Navy fighter pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise) and his time at the Fighter Weapons School at Miramar near San Diego, known as TOPGUN. Maverick--all the pilots have cute nicknames--is a brilliant flyer but is given to ignoring authority and making his own rules.

In the new film, Maverick is still a Captain after all these years because he's just too darn rebellious to advance. He's still ruffling the feathers of authority figures (huffily played by the likes of Ed Harris and Jon Hamm). He gets called back to the TOPGUN school at the insistence of its commander, his old rival Ice (Val Kilmer, who has one touching scene).

Maverick's job this time is to instruct a batch of young officers with cute nicknames--except for one simply called Bob (the endearing Lewis Pullman)--in preparation for a secret bombing run against a uranium-enrichment facility in a judiciously unidentified hostile country. Among his pupils is Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Maverick's beloved co-pilot Goose (Anthony Edwards), killed during the first film. Rooster bears Maverick a longstanding grudge. There's a bit of love interest, too; Maverick re-meets barkeep Penny (Jennifer Connelly); his previous leading lady Kelly McGillis, though briefly glimpsed in a flashback, goes unmentioned.

Now, let me be clear: Top Gun: Maverick is every bit as insipid and predictable as Top Gun the first, and Tom Cruise seems like just as much a pipsqueak. Cruise can be good, even very good, when he's playing manic and out-of-his-depth, as in Rain Man, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, but when he's in hypercompetent man-of-action mode I've never been able to take him seriously. Even at nearly 60, he still comes across like a boy dressed up in his dad's clothes.

But that doesn't much matter here. Two factors combined to pull the stick out of my butt and allow me to enjoy this movie. One is that technical filmmaking has advanced exponentially since 1986, and the flight scenes have greater clarity and flamboyance than the original's. It's useless to try to claim that the last 30 or 40 minutes of this movie isn't exciting. It's propulsive and spellbinding, even as you see every plot point coming at you as plainly as if it was on a radar screen.

The other factor, especially for those of us who were regular moviegoers when the original came out, is simple nostalgia. The director, Joseph Kosinski, really captures the '80s-movie montage-to-montage vibe, starting right at the beginning with brooding synthesizer tones leading into the most irksome (albeit catchy) song of the estimable Kenny Loggins, "Danger Zone," all of it backing up a full opening credit sequence, not just a quick flash of the title. In this way, Top Gun: Maverick can be like that odd and common phenomenon of encountering somebody you disliked back in the day, and feeling an unaccountable surge of affection.

The Bob's Burgers Movie--Bravely facing off against Tom Cruise's fighter squadron this weekend is the story of a family struggling to keep their burger joint going when a huge sinkhole opens in the sidewalk and completely blocks access to their storefront. It's the feature version of an animated Fox TV series.

Bob is Bob Belcher (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), the depressive dad; his wife Linda (John Roberts) is more upbeat. They live in the apartment above the restaurant with their kids, boy-crazy oldest daughter Tina (Dan Mintz); nebbishy, well-intentioned rock star wannabe middle son Gene (Eugene Mirman) and rabbit-ear-wearing, aspirational youngest Louise (Kristen Schaal). Louise is deeply offended when a girl at school calls her a "baby"; to prove this untrue she descends into the sinkhole.

This leads to a mystery involving everyone from the burger joint's rich landlords to carnies from the nearby amusement park. Other characters enter the story, some performed by name actors: Kevin Kline and Zach Galifianakis as the landlords; Gary Cole as a police detective with an inferiority complex. There are some very peculiar musical numbers, and it all culminates in a suspenseful and action-packed finale. 

This movie is funny even if you've never seen the show. I can attest to this, because I've never seen the show, and I thought this movie was funny. The comedy derives from the Belcher family's flat, affectless manner, contrasted with the convoluted gothic plot and wild action. But there's also a humane warmth to the Belchers that keeps the joke from going sour. If I lived in that town, I'd eat at that place.

RAIN MAN

Of all the Bible stories, the account of Noah and the Ark from Genesis is almost certainly the one that most fascinates children, and it’s not hard to see why—it’s the animals. I remember, as a kid, having a toy Noah’s Ark from some gas station, and every week they’d offer a new pair of animals with a fill-up. I think I eventually had the complete set.

But the animals are bit players in Darren Aronofsky’s new film Noah. They show up in waves—pairs of birds first, then reptiles, then the large mammals, many in prehistoric-looking species that suggest considerable evolution is still to take place post-Flood. They placidly enter the Ark, then lie down and go to sleep, like business travelers settling in to a red eye.

These sequences are sort of magical, but they’re brief, and not at all the point of this Noah. It’s only at first glance, after all, that this seems like a charming fable. Aronofsky remembers what it’s really about—the destruction of the world. Some embellishment was inevitable—in Genesis, for instance, Noah doesn’t even get any lines until after the Flood, when he curses his grandson Canaan, rather passive-aggressively, because Canaan’s father Ham told his brothers about seeing Noah sleeping off a toot in the buff.

Thus the script, which Aronofsky co-wrote with Ari Handel, envisions the pre-flood world as an industrial civilization in decline. The mines are played out, and the landscapes are bleak, scarred gravel fields denuded of trees. It doesn’t look that different than the world through which Viggo Mortensen led his son in The Road. Human society is warlike and hungry, and Noah (Russell Crowe), his anxious wife (Jennifer Connelly) and their three sons hunker down in the rocks, practicing environmental husbandry, avoiding the brutal city folk—though Noah can kick ass with a quarterstaff when necessary—and waiting to see what comes next.

This turns out to be a vision from You Know Who, telling Noah that He’s fed up with people and is about to give the planet a good wash. Noah enlists the aid of hobbling, multi-armed rock giants—Aronofsky’s backstory is that they’re angels who, having tried to help the human race after the Fall, are in a sort of semi-Fallen state themselves—and gets to work.

Human forces, led by the metalsmith/chieftain Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), cause trouble for the Noahs, but not as much as the trouble caused by Noah’s reluctance to provide wives for his sons. He’s pretty sure that “The Creator” (the film avoids the G word) is so done with humanity that he wants them to get the animals through the flood and then let themselves go extinct.

So despite the pre-emptive complaints from conservative Christians and Muslims (Noah is an important prophet in the Quran) about the movie’s liberties and its environmentalism (horrors!), this Noah features war and violence, patriarchal rigidity, generational conflict, terror of women, Abrahamic threats of infanticide—in short, it feels pretty Biblical. Especially, it feels pretty Old Testament Biblical, which is to say it’s strange, and harsh, and morally baffling, and—for me at least—quite compelling.

I went in hoping for an entertaining camp epic in the DeMille manner, and came out appreciating Aronofsky’s efforts to take the material seriously on its own terms. Not everything in the movie works, to be sure, but the occasional unintentional laughs are a relief, and the central drama—the title character’s inner struggle with whether or not humanity has any business carrying on—plays far more satisfyingly than I would have guessed it could.

This is, in large part, thanks to Crowe’s understated, haunted performance. Balancing him is Connelly’s Mrs. Noah, who ages far better over the course of the story than her hubby. She’s not the comic shrew that the role was in the medieval miracle plays, but she wants grandkids, and she’s very in touch with her feelings on this. Emma Watson also pours a lot of emotion into her role as Noah’s daughter-in-law, allowed on the Ark because she’s thought to be barren. The standout in the small supporting cast, however, is Logan Lerman as Ham, the wifeless, brooding, sympathetic middle son.

Anthony Hopkins does drop in long enough to contribute a few wry line readings as Noah’s grandfather Methuselah. At this point, one almost wonders if the makers of big blockbusters even need to call Hopkins any more, or if he just mysteriously shows up at the set, like the animals showing up at the Ark.