Review: Top Gun: Maverick

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Until the mostly solid reviews dropped recently, here's a twist I wouldn't have seen coming: "Top Gun: Maverick" is not only significantly better than the original film - of which I was never much of a fan, other than a few songs on the soundtrack - but it also probably the best summer blockbuster of recent memory. 

"Top Gun" was one of the first big hits to come out of the Jerry Bruckheimer/Don Simpson factory in the 1980s - and it was followed in the 1990s by "Armageddon," "The Rock" and "Con Air" - and the original picture had some of the same flashy style, macho dialogue, over-the-top chest-thumping patriotism and emphasis on spectacle over all else of those later movies.

The original film had its highlights - that Berlin song, some great moments of '80s cheese, some decent work by director Tony Scott and, perhaps, the most memorable volleyball scene of all time - but it was otherwise, in my recollection, not quite worthy of its massive success. It's not a film that I abhor, but rather it didn't leave much of an imprint.

So, it's pretty surprising that "Maverick" is not only a significantly better action movie, but it's also funnier, more engaging, at times genuinely warm and, in at least one scene, pretty moving. It also helps that Tom Cruise has turned up this movie star-ness to 11 in this film. 

Over the years, some people have tired of Cruise's persona - and forget that when challenged, he could take on difficult roles with aplomb, such as "Magnolia," "Born on the 4th of July," "Vanilla Sky" or "Eyes Wide Shut" - but there's no doubt when watching "Maverick" that he's a genuine movie star, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of it, especially at a time when people - that is, actors - are being overshadowed by concepts, content and extended universes. This is a summer blockbuster that is driven by a movie star delivering the goods - and, yes, some exhilarating stunts - and not marketing tactics.

As for the plot, it's pretty simple, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise) is seen at the film's beginning making a Mach 10 test run that pisses off military brass when, as usual, Maverick doesn't follow orders. This explains why he has remained a captain and not moved up the military ranks like his old pal/nemesis Iceman (Val Kilmer, in a moving cameo performance).

The film follows the "one last mission" style of many action movies before it. Maverick is chosen by Iceman - much to the dismay of military leaders, especially Jon Hamm's Cyclone - to train a group of young recruits to fly a dangerous and seemingly impossible mission to take out a nuclear facility being developed somewhere across the world - Iran is mentioned, but there's little in the way of politics to be found in the picture. The twist is that one of the recruits, Rooster (Miles Teller), is the son of Maverick's old friend Goose, who died during a flight with Maverick in the first film.

Rooster is upset about Maverick's sudden presence in his life, especially after Maverick essentially helped to stall his career several years prior. The reason, of course, is that Maverick didn't want to see the young man meet the same fate as his father, and had promised his mother - Meg Ryan is sadly missing in this film - that he would do what he could to prevent that from happening.

So, much of the film follows these training exercises, which are exciting and fun, and it even includes a beach football scene that's an obvious throwback to the volleyball sequence, although less tongue in cheek. There's a nice moment when Maverick is sitting at a bar watching the young recruits bond over a game of darts, and he obviously recognizes that'll never be him again.

Also thrown into the mix is a relationship between Maverick and Penny (Jennifer Connelly), who was only referenced in the first film and now owns a bar near the Navy base. She's wary of his return, considering he once broke her heart, but their burgeoning romance in the film is oddly charming, considering that we're watching a "Top Gun" sequel. It's as if Cruise was channeling "Jerry Maguire" for that particular plot strand. 

The film still has some of the problems of the original - some of the macho dialogue among the young recruits sounds a little stilted and the film, much like the original, still feels like an advertisement for the Navy. That being said, this is a summer blockbuster with a surprising amount of heart, some incredible action sequences involving real stunts and a legitimate movie star cashing in on that persona in a successful manner. Regardless of what you feel about the guy, he delivers here.

Review: Men

Image courtesy of A24.

Not since Darren Aronofsky's "Mother!" (which I loved, by the way) is a movie as sure to rankle audiences as Alex Garland's "Men," a strange folk horror film with some timely and interesting concepts - and an unsettling atmosphere - that ultimately doesn't pay off in the way it's meant to, even if it remains fairly engaging throughout.

Garland's previous directorial work has been unsettling sci-fi dramas - such as the acclaimed "Ex Machina" and the underrated "Annihilation" - and "Men" is his first foray into horror. The film has the type of ending that will likely leave audiences scratching their heads - or, in some reported cases, booing the screen - but will ultimately pay some dividends for those willing to put in the work.

The film opens with a harrowing scenario - a young wife, Harper (Jessie Buckley in a solid performance), is trying to reconcile a tragic situation. She was in the middle of a separation from her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu) when an argument broke out and he struck her. Shocked, she told him to leave and never to return. He threatens to kill himself, and moments later we see them make eye contact as he falls to his death from a balcony above their apartment. Whether he actually committed suicide or - we are told he broke into the apartment above in an attempt to gain entry into Harper's apartment - slipped and fell is unclear.

Harper finds a gorgeous and secluded home in the English countryside where she goes alone for an escape and to clear her mind. Almost from the moment she gets there, something seems amiss. There's the amusingly cheery landlord (Rory Kinnear) and an eerily abandoned train tunnel where Harper first gets a glimpse of a naked man who will continually show up on the lawn of the rental cottage, prompting her to call the police.

Other men in the town - all of whom are played by Kinnear, including a teenager with seemingly intentional shoddy special effects - begin to harass Harper in ways that, at first, appear mild, but later become more frightening.

In most of the cases, the men blame Harper for their own bad behavior - the teenaged version of Kinnear calls her a "bitch" for refusing to play a game with him, a vicar who at first seems sympathetic insinuates it's her fault that her husband died and, in flashback sequences, James consistently tells Harper that she is to be blamed for his behaving the way he does.

So, what exactly is going on here and what is Garland hinting at? In the film's gruesome finale, continual stages of rebirth - I can't describe this any further without giving things away, but trust me when I say you'll know when you've reached this sequence - perhaps suggest that toxic masculinity is passed down from generation to generation, and Harper's character is seen as powerless against the gaslighting male structure in which she is a prisoner, that is, until she realizes that the demands of the apparition haunting her are pretty pathetic. 

So, even if it doesn't completely come together in its finale, there are some interesting concepts at play here, and how the film incorporates the concept of toxic masculinity - especially in how men try to make Harper feel as if their personal failings are her fault - leaves much to think about afterward.

But it's a little unfortunate that the manner in which we reach this conclusion is a bit of a drag. From the moment that the story takes a home invasion turn, it begins to lose a little steam, both visually and story-wise, even if the theme continues to remain interesting. A series of attacks in the cottage that grow increasingly bloody make the film's horrors a little too literal - as opposed to the much more effective creepiness of suggestion throughout the film's first half - and the gory piece de resistance in the finale gets repetitive, although that's probably the whole point. 

"Men" is what I'd call an interesting movie - it doesn't completely work, but I can appreciate a movie that aims to please no one during a movie season that is typically all about fan service. I prefer Garland's other films, but his latest is, if nothing else, not quite like anything else you're likely to see in a theater any time soon.

Review: Senior Year

Image courtesy of Netflix.

The new Rebel Wilson Netflix comedy "Senior Year" takes two well-trodden formulas - the person returning to their high school as an adult and the awaking-from-a-coma scenario - and plastered them together in a film that mostly yields expectable results. It's a perfectly OK high-concept comedy that gets some mileage out of Wilson's style of comedy, which relies on mostly inappropriate behavior.

Stephanie (Angourie Rice as a teenager, Wilson as the adult version) transferred to the United States as a young girl and never quite fit in in middle school. Through much effort, she made herself a popular teenager and captain of the cheerleading squad by the time she was ready to graduate high school in the early 2000s. She'd even snagged the most popular jock, stealing him away from rival cheerleader Tiffany (Zoe Chao plays the adult version).

But a cheerleading routine gone wrong resulted in Stephanie ending up in a coma for 20 years. When she awakens - in 2022 - she is basically still the same 17-year-old girl in a 37-year-old woman's body. She moves home with her agreeable father, and finds out that the two less-popular friends who adored her during high school are now her former school's principal (Mary Holland) and librarian (Sam Richardson). The former - who tells Stephanie that using the words "retard" and "gay" are no longer suitable - is now openly gay, while the latter has long harbored a crush on her.

Rather than try to take up an adult life of some sort, Stephanie decides to finish her senior year of high school and, in the process, again become the captain of the cheerleading squad and the prom queen. I know that in comedies such as these, there's a certain extension of disbelief required, but that Holland's seemingly well-intentioned principal would allow a grown woman to attend a month's-worth of classes and disrupt the other seniors at the high school is a little on the far end of that extension.

There's some humor to be found in the culture clash element of Stephanie's 20-year-old views on popular culture and cultural norms - the cheerleading squad is now mostly comprised of the school's nerds, whose cheers have to do with gun control and saving the environment, rather than the sexed-up routines to which Stephanie was accustomed at the turn of the century. 

The film exists in a fantasyland of how high schools probably exist at this moment - all of the students are socially conscientious pupils who spend their lives on their iPhones (that part is true enough), and this would be nice to believe if we weren't living at a moment when the spawn of less conscientious members of society were shooting up grocery stores in neighborhoods of color or crossing state lines to kill protesters. The student body that Stephanie encounters in 2022 is, perhaps, way too good to be true.

"Senior Year" doesn't go anywhere you don't expect it to - she screws up time and time again, and is again welcomed back by those who actually care for her before having an epiphany - but Wilson's dedication to the slightly cliched material makes it easier to swallow. There's some fun to be had here, even if you see it all coming from a mile away and its depictions of how life on this planet actually operates has nothing to do with what you're experiencing onscreen. In terms of silly Hollywood comedies, you could do far worse than "Senior Year."

Review: Firestarter

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Stephen King film adaptations tend to be a mixed bag. Some of the best - "The Shining" or "Stand By Me" - deviate from the original source material, whereas some of the others that work very well ("Carrie," for example), stay pretty true to it. The original 1984 version of "Firestarter" - which was based on King's 1980 novel - stayed fairly true to the novel, but this new version takes some liberties - while neither version is particularly great, the Drew Barrymore film had more going for it than this remake, if you can call it that, which is mostly just lacking in inspiration.

In the new film, young Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is a girl with extraordinary powers - she can cause things to burst into flame by using her mind - or, more accurately, when she becomes upset and loses control. Her parents, Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon), also have their own powers - Vicky can move objects with her mind, while Andy possesses some form of mind control, which he uses to make money by helping people quit smoking.

Charlie wonders why they do not possess cell phones or computers and seemingly keep off the grid in general. At school, she is occasionally bullied, and it's after an episode in a gym class when she loses control that she realizes why they live the way they do. Attention is drawn to the family and a woman named Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben), who runs a shady facility for those with special powers known as The Shop, sends a taciturn Native American hitman named Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) to try to capture the family. In the process, he kills Vicky, and Andy and Charlie go on the lam.

The film's story is fairly simplistic and much of it is either spent on the run or shacked up at the farmhouse of an older man (John Beasley) and his extremely ill wife before the showdown finale at the psychiatric institute takes place. The backstory of how Andy and Vicky took part in experiments that resulted in their powers is fairly nebulous, and there are a fair amount of holes in the story - for example, how Charlie managed not to kill her mother while she was pregnant with her when she clearly can't control her powers as an infant and nearly burnt up her crib as she slept in it.

Although not all Blumhouse films can rise to the level of "Get Out," the budgetary constraints are often made up for by using directors who use imagination to get around them. This latest, however, just seems somewhat cheap compared to the original - the effects are ho hum and the only real bit of inspiration is the '80s-sounding electronic score by the legendary John Carpenter.

There is at least one improvement here. Although George C. Scott was a phenomenal actor, his portraying the Rainbird character was, perhaps, ill advised, so the choice of Greyeyes - who gives a haunted and often ferocious performance - was a good one. 

"Firestarter" was written during a period in which King often focused on young people with extraordinary powers - such as Charlie, Danny in "The Shining" and Carrie White. While the 1980 novel mined that concept well, this film is mostly a cheap exploitation picture that doesn't have much to say on the matter. The film ends on a grim note as Charlie turns into a killing machine in a manner from which the original mostly shied away. "Firestarter" isn't the worst King adaptation - in fact, there are many that are significantly more dismal than this one - but it's among the least inspired.

Review: Petite Maman

Image courtesy of Neon.

 Celine Sciamma's "Petite Maman" is a deceptively simple film - it runs a mere 72 minutes and there's not a whole lot in the way of narrative - but it's far from what one might call slight. In fact, the film packs a fair amount of weighty material and an emotional punch into its brief story of a young girl surrounded by grief.

The film opens with a sweet and charming sequence during which young Nelly (Josephine Sanz) feeds her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), some snacks as she drives, holds up a juice box for her to sip and then wraps her arms around her neck in a moment of affection. It's hard not to smile along with Marion.

But there's not a whole lot of smiling during the course of the picture, which finds Marion and her daughter joining Marion's husband at the home of her mother - and Nelly's grandmother - who has recently died. The cleaning out of the house becomes too much to bear for Marion and she flees, leaving Nelly alone with her father.

There are a number of poignantly thoughtful lines in the picture and one comes early on when Nelly regrets that she didn't get to give her grandmother a proper goodbye. Marion tries to comfort her, saying that she probably did and didn't realize it, but Nelly notes that the "last goodbye wasn't good."

During her brief stay at her grandmother's lonely, soon-to-be-deserted home, Nelly wanders into the woods and meets a young girl who is building a tree fortress. As it turns out, the young girl is named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), and Nelly soon finds out that this is no coincidence as she follows the girl home and realizes that the house is her grandmother's home -  but from years earlier. Marion is her mother as a girl and the older woman occupying the house is Nelly's grandmother.

This may sound like the plot to some sort of fantastical science fiction story, but it's far from that - "Petite Maman" tells its story in a straightforward manner and doesn't cater to anyone's genre needs. We learn that Marion is soon to have an operation and that it is to spare her from the disease that has plagued her own mother - an ailment that has finally claimed Nelly's grandmother in the present time frame.

There's a lot of charm to be had in the young girls' bonding - from the whimsical (a funny attempt at making pancakes) to the mesmerizing (a boat ride out to an odd structure in the middle of a lake) - and a lot of power to be derived from the concept of a young person meeting their own parent as a child and, in the process, learning more about oneself and one's family in the process.

The film tackles some heavy subject matter - young people coming face to face with death and loneliness. Regarding that latter topic, it's easy to see that the older Marion, despite having a loving family, is lonely in her own existence. There's a thoughtful concept spoken late in the picture by the younger Marion that really stuck with me - sometimes people are filled with secrets not because they are afraid to tell anyone, but because there's no one to tell them to.

"Petite Maman" is a lovely little film from one of France's most interesting modern filmmakers - Celine Sciamma, who is responsible for the underrated drama "Girlhood" and the ravishing "Portrait of a Lady on Fire." Her latest might seem more minor in scope - but "Petite Maman" is a film that sneaks up on you and makes you realize how much it fits in, thematically and emotionally, into its brief running time. It's one of 2022's best offerings so far.

Review: We're All Going To The World's Fair

Image courtesy of Utopia.

More interesting in concept than execution, director Jane Schoenbrun's debut, the moody but opaque "We're All Going to the World's Fair," has the potential to be a creepy coming of age story - and there are a few images that will likely send chills down your spine - but its overall formlessness and a curiously anticlimactic ending kept me from fully engaging with it.

The film's opening shot sets the tone with an overly long static shot of a bedroom in which a young girl - who seemingly rarely leaves the house, and when she does it's always alone - named Casey (Anna Cobb) is preparing to take part in a ritual known as the World's Fair Challenge, a horror rite-of-passage similar to saying the Candyman's name or "Bloody Mary" multiple times in front of a mirror (but in this case, a computer screen).

During the opening sequence, Casey stops and starts her introduction - and, at one point, begins again from scratch - as she participates in the ritual, which includes a finger poking sequence that might make you cringe. As is the case through most of the rest of the film, the emphasis is not only on Cobb's performance - the film is about three-quarters a one-woman show - but also Casey's. In other words, she's performing for her web-based audience.

Therein lies the question of "We're All Going to the World's Fair": Are the occasional horrors we see depicted onscreen a result of Casey's participation in the ritual - which is said to result in bodily changes for the participants - or are they concocted by Casey to please her audience? That audience is not particularly large, which can be noticed by the dwindling number of views that are displayed in the corner of the screen whenever she posts one of her new "World's Fair" videos.

Casey finally plays to an audience of one - a somewhat creepy, but lonesome, older man who uses an unsettling sketch for his online avatar. This man seeks Casey out because of his similar interest in horror, but also because he seemingly lives alone in the gigantic home through which we occasionally see him walking. The film sets the audience up to believe that Casey is, perhaps, being targeted by an online predator, but the relationship takes some odd turns, and there's ultimately little payoff to it.

As for the horror-related sequences, they are occasionally frightening, especially during scenes in which other participants in the World's Fair challenge have horrific things happen to them - a young man pulls a string of theater tickets out of his arm, while another is pulled into the computer screen in a scene reminiscent of "The Ring." The eeriest moment is one involving a late night session during which Casey records herself sleeping, and something scary is noticed by the lonely man she befriends.

So, while the film may be short on story, explanation and even character motivation, it somewhat makes up for it in mood and tone. Haunting music on the soundtrack often accompanies Casey's lonesome moments in her bedroom - although there's one particularly odd scene in which she sings along to a pop tune, only to interrupt it with a bloodcurdling scream - or her solitary walks in the woods. And the opening gloomy shots of a depleted middle America - empty Toys R Us stores, chain fast food restaurants in otherwise desolate parking lots and highways with scattered cars passing by - help to give a sense of the lonely places that the film's characters inhabit.

But "We're All Going to the World's Fair" is ultimately somewhat of an enigma - and not necessarily in a compelling way. The filmmakers make a wise choice by focusing so much on Casey because Cobb is a game performer, but there are also obvious dangers involved in primarily setting a film inside a drab-looking bedroom, especially if not much happens, and also if there's little in the way of payoff at the film's end. Schoenbrun displays some talents as a director - and her experimental nature scores some points - but ultimately, the film, while occasionally compelling, never quite coheres.