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.

HOTSHOTS, HITMEN & HERCULES

Opening this week:
 

Only the Brave—Wildland firefighting is regarded, on the whole, as more strenuous and demanding than structure firefighting, and usually more dangerous. But it isn’t more cinematic. A structure firefighter with a hose gets to enact one of the iconic cinematic dynamics—shooting at an enemy. But the methods of wildland firefighters, while no less agonistic, are subtler—digging in the dirt, cutting trees and brush with chainsaws, and sometimes, counterintuitively for us laypeople, actually setting fires.

This is what we get in the firefighting sequences of Only the Brave, the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the wildland crew connected to the Prescott, Arizona fire department. Nineteen of these young men—all but one member of the active crew—died in the Yarnell Hill Fire in June of 2013, in the worst loss of firefighters since 9/11, and the worst  loss of wildland firefighters since the ‘30s.

There’s terrifying spectacle, certainly, in a wildfire, but the response to it is guys hiking, digging, sawing. So the meat of the film is less this drudgery than the lives of hotshots, and especially that of Brendan “Donut” McDonough (Miles Teller), who was assigned as a lookout that day and thus became the Ishmael of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. McDonough had a history of substance abuse and petty crime until he became a hotshot, and was mentored by Granite Mountain Superintendant Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin).

Despite the hopeful outcome of McDonough’s story, there’s no good way to present this material that isn’t horrifying and heartbreaking, and director Joseph Kosinski doesn’t try. There’s a sense of restraint and dignity to his work, and that of the actors. The flavor for much of the movie’s length is that of a John Ford/Howard Hawks/Raoul Walsh male bonding drama, and there’s action and humor and touching sentiment and inspirational uplift, but a somber tinge hangs over it, at least for viewers who know where the story’s heading.

This is reflected in Brolin’s performance. The movie’s Marsh has a look in his eyes that suggests a foreknowledge of disaster, and a sad acceptance of it. It’s an old-school star turn in the Henry Fonda vein, one of Brolin’s best. He even gets a Sam Shepherd-ish Oscar-clip monologue about the flaming bear that haunts his dreams. But Teller also does strong work in the “tenderfoot” role of McDonough, Taylor Kitsch throws a charge into his scenes as hotshot Christopher Alan MacKenzie, and Jeff Bridges, as wildland chief Duane Steinbrink, has a great moment, a small groan of grief that’s like a gut punch.

I had the opportunity to talk with Kosinksi and Brolin before the film’s opening, and they both stressed how they spent a lot of time in Prescott with the families and friends of the hotshots, and became close to them, in order to achieve authenticity. But this may have led the filmmakers, in understandable deference to the feelings of the survivors, to omit or soften errors or interpersonal conflicts within the crew that maybe had a bearing on the disaster. The climactic scenes, though inevitably powerful, also leave it unclear as to what led to the decisions that placed the crew in the path of the fire.

Partly, no doubt, this is because it remains unclear even from reports of the official investigations. But in terms of the movie’s narrative, it’s just confusing, and it’s about all that keeps this well-crafted, well-acted movie from feeling like a triumph.

You can check out my interviews with Brolin and Kosinski, by the way, on the New Times blog.

On a lighter note...

Killing Gunther—Saturday Night Live alumnus Taran Killam wrote, directed and stars in this broad, zany comedy about murder. Killam plays Blake, a high-end assassin leading a plot to kill a legendary veteran hitman known as Gunther (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Blake's team includes a bomber (Bobby Moynihan), a sniper (Hannah Simone), an insufferable tech whiz (Paul Brittain), a poisoner (Aaron Yoo) and other wacky specialists. The central absurd gag is that Blake has hired a film crew to chronicle the mission, so that as with The Office and Modern Family, this movie can employ faux-documentary devices, including straight-to-the-camera monologues.

It's possible that Killing Gunther simply suffers from unfortunate timing; its bloody shootings and mayhem didn't seem as funny to me right now as they might have at another time. That said, just about any six or seven minute stretch of this movie would make a servicebly amusing SNL sketch, and is good for a few chuckles. The cast is strong, but Schwarzenegger, who doesn't show up until quite late in the proceedings, probably shows more gleeful comic energy than anyone.

Killam's principal comedic mechanism here is deflation. Again and again, someone will be on the verge of a dramatic flourish, and they'll be interrupted, or forget what they were going to say, and the mood will be broken. It's as if the anger under the gags is at life's failure to be like the movies.

One more note: In case you haven't had your fill of me, you can check out my very short article, on The PHiX, about Arizona Opera's production of Hercules vs. Vampires this weekend.

MEDAL HEAD

Opening this week:

  

The Bronze—Along with Race and Eddie the Eagle, this is the third movie in the last month or so about the Olympic Games, and all three are very different from each other indeed. Diminutive Melissa Rauch, who plays the squeaky-voiced Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory, stars in this comedy, which she co-wrote with her husband Winston Rauch. She plays Hope Annabelle Greggory, who finished her routine in Women’s Gymnastics at the Olympics in heroic, soul-stirring fashion, fighting through an ankle injury a la Kerri Strug.

Unlike Strug, however, Hope took the Bronze rather than the Gold, and the injury effectively ended her career. She returned to Amherst, Ohio (“Sandstone Center of the World”), where more than ten years later she’s still treated like a privileged celebrity—her own parking space, free stuff at the mall and the diner, her name on the sign coming into town. Unemployed, she still lives with, sponges off of, and verbally abuses her long-suffering widowed postman Dad (Gary Cole). She’s bitter, selfish, defensive, deceitful and extremely foul-mouthed.

Despite the raunchy, raucous tone, this very plausible story has a poignant edge, and for a while I thought it was going to sink the movie. An ongoing shtick on The Big Bang Theory is the steeliness and bullying threat that regularly burst out of Rauch’s Bernadette, in contrast to her superficial cuddly sweetness. The Bronze starts out as, more or less, a whole movie hinged on this gag, and while it’s funny for a while, Hope seems too mean and unpleasant to hold our interest at feature length.

When her old coach dies, however, Hope receives notice of a sizable inheritance, if she takes over the training of the promising young gymnast Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), who idolizes her. At first, fearful that her pupil will outdo her and usurp her place in town, Hope blatantly sabotages her, but eventually…

Well, you see where it’s heading. There’s even a love interest, in the form of the talented young comic Thomas Middleditch. The good news is that Rauch shades her characterization from despicable to sort-of-likable gradually and incrementally, and director Bryan Buckley keeps the proceedings lewd and crude throughout. As a result, the story’s potential sentimentality is held at bay, and sure enough, we start to care about, and develop some hope, for Hope.

 Allegiant—As with the high school romantic comedies of a decade or so ago, the futuristic teen dystopias are starting to run together in my head. It takes me a minute to be sure that I’m not mixing Divergents with Maze Runners and Hunger Gamers and Surfers of the 5^th Wave.

Assuming I’m not, then this third entry in the series based on Veronica Roth’s Divergent books—it’s called The Divergent Series: Allegiant on the posters—has heroine Tris (big-eyed Shailene Woodley) and her pals fleeing Chicago, now in a turmoil of summary trials and executions. Beyond the city’s walls they find a toxic wasteland, beyond which they find a force field, beyond which they find a futuristic complex in what used to be O’Hare Airport.

Presiding over this is Jeff Daniels as a scientist who’s been studying Chicago’s various factions, trying to produce a person who is “genetically pure” instead of “damaged.” Talk like this tends to make people uneasy, but the guileless Tris thinks Daniels is a good egg. The hunky Four (Theo James), quickly pronounced “damaged,” isn’t buying it, however.

That’s just the gist of the plot of Allegiant, which is a good deal more twisted, with schemes and betrayals and redemptions spilling out everywhere. The dialogue is quite poor, but luckily it occurs mostly in little pockets, linking together director Robert Schwentke’s big, lavish action scenes. These are reasonably exciting, in their mindless way.

Alongside the pretty youth are some vets, like Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer and Ray Stevenson. The unctuous Daniels makes a capable if less elegant replacement for Kate Winslet, whose honking American villainy was the best aspect of the previous flicks. Or at least the sexiest.

THE INSURGENT CROWD

Opening this week:

Insurgent—This sequel to 2014’s Divergent continues the saga of heroine Tris Prior. She’s at odds with a bleak—and, to maudlin teenage sensibilities, brilliantly appealing—post-apocalyptic society, in which people are pigeonholed in carefully constructed social identities according to personality type. Those with special abilities, known as “Divergent,” are hunted down by the authorities.

Shailene Woodley, wide-eyed and sad-faced, plays Tris, who is put through one of the nastier movie martyrdoms since Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. She’s gruesomely hooked up to cables and tortuously required to complete five virtual simulations.

If Tris succeeds in passing all of these trials—each of which correspond to the strengths of one of the social factions—some sort of magic box will open and the tyrannical leadership will obtain vast power, or so they think. Meanwhile her hunky boyfriend Four (Theo James) marshals rebel forces, including those of his mother (Naomi Watts), against the cruel regime led by Jeanine (Kate Winslet).

Anyway, that’s the best I can do to summarize Insurgent, adapted, like Divergent, from a Veronica Roth novel (it’s referred to as The Divergent Series: Insurgent on the posters; a third novel, Allegiant, remains). There are a number of exciting action scenes, and some cool surreal flourishes in the simulation sequences. But my favorite element of the movie was Kate Winslet as the gorgeously lacquered, oddly sexy blue-clad villainess Jeanine, with her flat, heartless Midwestern voice. I was thoroughly ready to see Tris get revenge on her.