SCHOOOOOOL'S OUT FOR! SUMMER!
Movies
This is an impeccable piece of craft, and the dogfights are great. I also understand why people want to reclaim the movie based on its homoeroticism and Dudes Rock ethos, and more power to those people who can, but I kind of had trouble approaching the movie from that angle. The sincerity of the male camraderie in this film is very sweet, but what this movie unintentionally underlines for me are the ways in which this type of open affection among men is only really permitted in certain very specific settings in which you have to perform very aggro-male behaviors to be welcomed, among which is the military. If you try to approach these spaces without being willing (or able) to perform the masculine scripts, they can become very hostile, and this spills out into broader culture in general, where even among fairly nonconforming, progressive spaces, it's hard to have male-to-male interactions without a kind of stand-off-ish-ness that makes affectionate camraderie difficult. While it's certainly not specifically Top Gun's fault that this is the case, I personally found it pretty difficult to embrace the characters with the innocence and openness the story demands of viewers, knowing that the domineering, hyper-male environment depicted here is what gatekeeps the acceptance of close male friendship elsewhere. I had steeled myself for the blindly imperialist, rah-rah military stuff that permeates this movie, but I was caught offguard by the way I struggled with the gender stuff. Still, an incredible piece of filmmaking in terms of basically every technical aspect. This is the movie the '80s were made for. Grade: C+
If it's possible to be even more jingoist than the original, this one does it, with the central conflict orbiting around the question of whether it is better to blow up "the enemy" with drones or with human-piloted planes, and like, I know it's a metaphor for the film industry, but it also isn't, not with the Pentagon actively involved in your production. But anyway, coming to Top Gun expecting a critique of the American military is the most quixotic of quixotic film-viewing postures. More importantly, like a lot of these legacy sequels, this one isn't nearly as dramatically sturdy as the original: the well-defined bros-being-bros camaraderie between Maverick and Goose as well as the frenemy status of Iceman have been traded for a pretty anonymous cast of youngsters with very little chemistry neither as-written nor onscreen—the film is just a whole lot less energetic in building the connections between these characters, and considerably less homoerotic as a result, too, which takes away some of the interesting subtext from the original. The "Maverick has to reconcile with Goose's son" stuff is, though a lot clearer than the rest of the film's relationships, weirdly morose—this movie reminds me a lot of Rocky Balboa, aka "Rocky 6," in the degrees to which it takes a mostly triumphalist movie property and allows it to be thoroughly haunted by mortality, which maybe would play better for me if I had cared at all about the characters in the first Top Gun. I'm not sure how much I miss the bro-camaraderie aspect, though; this film is definitely less-textured without it (and without the evocative Tony Scott/Jeffrey L. Kimball pop-art cinematography), but the absence of that also saves me from the noxious, oppressive masculinity of the original, too, so I guess I can call that a draw. But why am I talking about the characters? All of that is, as it was in the original, immaterial to the real draw of the film, which is when the planes go vroom-vroom and pew-pew, and anytime Top Gun: Maverick puts its characters in a plane, God is my witness this becomes the best tentpole action film in years. There's just not a sophisticated way to explain the ways that the flight scenes tickled my lizard brain—I was enthralled, particularly during the magnificent climax. The whole movie is more or less one long training for the characters to do what basically amounts to the Death Star trench run but with F-18s, and when the movie finally got to the moment when they have to do the mission, I felt giddy. The flying is one of the only ways in which this movie improves on the original, and honestly, it's the only way that really counts, and it so completely blows the first movie out of the water in this regard that it kinda doesn't matter whatever else negative I could say about the film. The vroom-vroom parts freakin' rock, and the movie has the good sense to make the entire final 30 minutes full of vroom-vroom parts. My critical faculties just can't stand up to whatever sorcery this film is doing with planes. It's a good movie, y'all. Grade: B
Begins as a five-star, A+ experience before ultimately settling into something pleasant but disappointingly conventional—which, to be fair, is basically the trajectory of the VU anyway, and given how meticulous and intentional a filmmaker Todd Haynes is, it's hard to know if this is on purpose or not. But boy, do I wish this had kept with the style of the opening 60-ish minutes, which finds Todd Haynes leaning heavily into his penchant for pastiche as he apes Andy Warhol and a bunch of that '60s avant-garde scene in depicting the cultural context of the Velvet Underground's rise. The film seems curiously incurious about the band itself, whose storied discography it practically sprints through over the course of about 45 minutes, but it makes up for it by having basically nonstop needledrops from the Velvet Underground and associated NYC acts. My music tastes have gone in a lot of different directions since I was a senior in high school falling in love with that scene, but that music remains a comforting home base for me, and you won't hear me complaining about hearing it for two hours. Grade: B+
I remember seeing the trailers for this when it was first coming out and being really intrigued by it. I was very into space mysteries and aliens at the time, and I read a bunch of Isaac Asimov and William Sleator and watched a bunch of The Twilight Zone and stuff like that. I never got to see it back then, and if I had, I probably would have been disappointed by how little it focused on the Mars mystery stuff compared to the relationships between the characters. Seeing it now, as an allegedly mature adult who likes feelings and relationships, I'm struck by how open-hearted and sentimental the relationships are. The big action setpiece in the middle, when they have to connect to that satellite and land it, is at least 50% just the characters crying and saying that they don't want to lose each other, which is kinda sweet. It would be even sweeter if it didn't have the same stilted flatness that you get when the hard sci-fi authors like Asimov tried to write emotional arcs, but that's definitely what this felt like. Still, I appreciate the effort. Also, I thought the Mars mystery stuff was cool, though I guess I'm still ten years old, because I wish there was more of it. Grade: B
Television
I somehow missed reviewing Season 11 last year, but it doesn't really matter because at this point, all Bob's Burgers's seasons are functionally the same. The show has its formula down to a science by now, to the point where even its off-format episodes have their tropes (an extended pop-culture riff, you say? elaborate musical sequences, you say?). It's been years since we learned something surprising about these characters or that the show did something genuinely unprecedented, but that's fine in my book; this is pure comfort-food viewing for me now, and I'm glad this show has found a stasis and has stuck to it rather than pushing for newer and more questionable beats like its Fox colleague The Simpsons was doing when it was Bob's Burgers's age. In the era of streaming and prestige television, the ability for a show to consistently deliver the same kind of mild entertainment week-in, week-out has become undervalued, but this is why I still love network sitcoms. I'm also stoked for the movie, so I guess we'll see how that turns out. Grade: B
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