The Screengrab : kenny loggins

Yesterday's Hits: Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott)

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Readers, I have a little confession to make: up until last week, I’d never watched Tony Scott’s Top Gun from beginning to end. Yes, I’d seen parts of the film here and there on television, but I’d never actually sat down for the purpose of actually watching Top Gun in its entirety. However, I was familiar enough with the film by reputation and through hearing others talk about it that I was fairly sure I wasn’t missing much. Yet the film was so popular in its day that it was almost inevitable that I would be writing it up for a column sooner or later. So in writing this week’s column, I wouldn’t be simply reviewing Top Gun on its own merits, but viewing it through the prism of its pop-cultural impact- not normally the way to review a movie, but more or less the modus operandi here at Yesterday’s Hits. So get ready to take a ride on the highway to... the danger zone!

Why was Top Gun a hit?: In the days of Old Hollywood, the big splashy entertainments were usually distinguished by their sheer magnitude, with towering sets, far-flung locations, and the proverbial “cast of thousands”. But all of this changed in the 1970s, when directors like Spielberg and Lucas made hugely popular blockbusters that were distinguished less by their largesse than for their momentum. By the time 1986 rolled around, audiences were feeling the need for speed, and Top Gun delivered. Top Gun boasted eye-popping aerial photography and combat sequences that rivaled almost anything that had been shown onscreen up to that point, and allowed the U.S. Navy to show off some of their most state-of-the-art fighter planes.

But if audiences came for the jets, they stuck around to witness the birth of a new superstar, Tom Cruise. Cruise had made a big impression three years prior in Risky Business, but it was Top Gun that propelled his career into the stratosphere. Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell isn’t a great role, but it was tailor made to Cruise’s onscreen persona- boyish, driven, confident, almost impossibly handsome. Maverick such was a quintessential eighties hero (his goal: to be “the best of the best”) and so successfully did Cruise fit the role that he represented the kind of man who women wanted to be with and men wanted to be like. Top Gun became the runaway hit of 1986, taking in $176 million in the United States alone. In addition, the film became an invaluable recruiting tool for the Navy, which stationed recruiters outside of many theatres, resulting in an almost unprecedented number of applications.

What happened?: After its theatrical release, Top Gun became a sizable hit on home video and maintained most of its popularity through the end of the decade. However, by the time the nineties rolled around, the alpha-male lifestyle and master-of-the-universe mindset of the eighties had fallen out of fashion, and movies like Top Gun became more interesting for their kitsch value than as entertainment.

Consider the whole Tarantino issue. In the 1994 indie Sleep With Me, Tarantino expounded upon a theory that posited Top Gun as a movie about Maverick struggling with his homosexuality. How well the theory holds up when watching the film is almost immaterial- although scenes like the infamous volleyball game, in which Cruise, Val Kilmer and Rick Rossovich all play shirtless and covered in sweat as Kenny Loggins sings “Playing With the Boys” on the soundtrack certainly don’t discourage this interpretation. But what’s important is how alien the un-ironic brand of manliness in the film translated to the more self-aware age, and how cheesy it all feels in retrospect. Even now, when we can’t look back at the eighties without a certain snickering nostalgia, Top Gun isn’t remotely the manly-man classic it set out to be.

Does Top Gun still work?: Not really. For such a mammoth box office hit, there really isn’t much to Top Gun. The movie’s storyline, such as it is, is just a framework on which to hang a series of flight sequences, interspersed with love scenes and bits of strutting-peacock machismo. From a visual standpoint, the movie’s still fairly exciting when the planes are in the air, but considering that most of these scenes are actually simulated missions rather than actual combat, there’s not a lot of tension to them. As the aviators battle to determine who will be Top Gun, the movie comes off a lot like a baseball movie in which most of the story is devoted to players in spring training duking it out for a spot on the roster. The real combat sequence at the end is considerably more exciting, but it’s too little, too late, once one realizes that the entire preceding ninety minutes have all essentially been the setup.

If the story is thin, the characters are even thinner. From Maverick on down, the people who populate the film are defined by one or two basic motivations. Maverick wants to be the best and discover what happened to his father. Charlie (Kelly McGillis) wants a big promotion in Washington, and to get closer to Maverick for various reasons. Iceman (Kilmer, clearly bored) wants to beat Maverick. The film’s only interesting character is Maverick’s “rear man” (heh heh) Goose, played by Anthony Edwards. Goose is best friends with Maverick and would follow him anywhere, but feels conflicted about risking his life in combat because he has a wife and kids. Naturally, Goose is doomed, but because we actually care about him as a person instead of just an action figure, his death is one of the few parts of the movie that makes an impression.

As a whole, Top Gun is curiously soulless. Looking back at the classics of the past that have truly endured, it’s clear that all of them were lovingly crafted, with the filmmakers taking a real emotional stake in the films they made. This isn’t the case with Top Gun, a movie in which every element is calculated and focus-grouped to appeal to the widest possible audience. For example, there’s the film’s love scene. Cruise and McGillis exhibit almost no chemistry or sexual tension throughout the film, yet test audiences complained about the lack of a love scene, so Scott shot one months after principal shooting was completed. The scene is so perfunctory that it doesn’t work except to satisfy an obligation to a formula, and much of the rest of the film feels the same way. No wonder the theory Tarantino voiced caught on- at least it gives audiences something to entertain themselves while the movie itself is on autopilot.

Oh, and in case you still haven’t seen it for yourself, here’s a clip of Tarantino from Sleep With Me sharing the Top Gun theory, coming to us through the magic of YouTube.

Yeah, Quentin gets the line wrong, but still- it's tough not to watch the film now without thinking "Swordfight! Swordfight!" at least once.

Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When contemplating a subject for the “Vanishing Act” column, I often find myself wondering, “Why hasn’t this person worked in so long?” In the case of Michael Cimino, I did not ask this question. My query was more along the lines of, “How many incriminating photos of which top Hollywood executive blowing what particular kind of farm animal did this person have in order to keep working for so long after Heaven’s Gate?”

Indeed, Gate is such a storied, monumental flop in the annals of motion picture history, it’s some sort of credit to Cimino that it took him so long to vanish. This is particularly true when you consider a slate of aborted projects that makes Terry Gilliam look prolific and bankable by comparison. For instance, did you know that at one time, Cimino was actually hired to direct Footloose? Personally, I would like to see documentary footage of the meeting at which this decision was reached. I’d much rather see that than ever again sit through Desperate Hours or Year of the Dragon, two Cimino films that actually were made. (Quoth Footloose producer Craig Zadan: “Cimino wanted to make a darker movie. We wanted to make an entertainment.” And Kenny Loggins rejoiced.)

The man has never lacked for ambition. Other Cimino projects that never got off the drawing board include an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, biopics of Dostoevsky and Janis Joplin, and a multi-generational American Indian saga to be filmed entirely in the Sioux language. At one time or another, legend has it that he was slated to direct The Dogs of War, The King of Comedy, The Dead Zone and Mutiny on the Bounty. (There’s gotta be a sequel to Final Cut in here somewhere, right?)

Cimino’s final completed feature to date is 1996’s The Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson as a wealthy doctor who is kidnapped by a terminally ill gangbanger hoping to find a magical lake of healing. Grossing a grand total of $23,107 at the box office, the barely released Sunchaser appears to have done what Heaven’s Gate could not: make Cimino a complete untouchable.

In 2001, Cimino published his first novel, Big Jane. The following year he gave a rare interview to the Independent, dispelling rumors that he’d had a sex change operation and talking up a big-screen comeback with an adaptation of Man’s Fate, “Andre Malraux's dense, heady novel about the squelched 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai.” It never happened.

The good news is: they love him in France! Last year, Cimino earned his first film credit in over a decade, contributing the three-minute segment “No Translation Needed” to the omnibus film Chacun son cinema. Don’t call it a comeback yet, but at least it’s a start.

Trailer Review: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The good thing about being Judd Apatow right now is that you can get starring vehicles for practically your entire stock company. The bad news is that, in the words of one Willie T. Sokes, they can't all be winners, kid. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the first starring vehicle for Apatow pal Jason Segel, looks to be in the lower tier of Apatow-produced movies. But what's strange about the trailer is that, casting aside (hey, there's Jonah Hill! And there's Paul Rudd! And look, it's Bill Hader!) very little of the Apatow touch comes through. The film was directed by longtime Apatow writer (sensing a trend here?) Nicholas Stoller, but the trailer makes the movie feel like it could've been made by any nameless director with a yen for 80s-style slobs vs. snobs comedy. The presence of Kenny Loggins' "I'm Alright" (aka "Theme from Caddyshack") seals the deal. All the same, I'm kind of pulling for this movie to do well at the box office. After all, the better it does, the sooner we get a Martin Starr movie, which I think we can all agree would be a very good thing.