top gear (preserved)

This spoiler-rich entry about Top Gun: Maverick nearly failed to ignite thanks to a home screening of Videodrome a few hours after my visit to the local AMC, but I've paused the 'Drome to handle the 'Gun. The Krönenbörg was also inevitably/irrevocably pushing my TG: M thinks into a twinned TG: M + V weaponized technology "meditation," and that's not the flavor that I heat-seek today!

As TG: M's afterburners warm my typing fingers, I'm thinking about how competently it reaches across the [theater] aisle to unite us in pleasure and pride. Top Gun: Maverick is biiig and burnished. It prettily glows, it glowers without fangs, and it radiates fake-but-not-but-? national confidence at a moment when all but our most MAGA truckin' types lack it. The jingoism is kind of sweet--like the recitations of jump-roping playground kids vs. the "sound off" callback of career soldiers--and delivered by tan guys (plus one gal) with whom you would trust your life...and your loins? Look, are you going to tell dead-da* Goose's son Rooster and his junior mustache to stop parroting "follow your instincts" and "it's not the plane, it's the pilot" back to the magic Maverick man/surrogate da/nemesis/teacher that taught him as much?

Oh, man: teaching. The art of instruction gets knocked down and is then extended a serviceman's strong hand, which is not surprising given that America simultaneously decries its educational system while also sending more people than ever to college. A thick-as-a-brick F-14 manual is dramatically dropped into a trash can in front of the class of student-soldiers because, in jetfighterland, it's action that saves asses, not lectures about plane specs. Mav (Tom Cruise is already a perfect name for a fighter pilot, but I digress) at first crinkles his brunette brow when given his adjunct contract--he would obviously prefer to be strapped into a sky chariot--before embracing the assignment and Killing It so hard (so well?) that his pupils rally 'round him in the face of a Very Mad Man (Jon Hamm).

Oh, man: killing it. NO ONE IN TG: M DIES! Well, one special person does, but really they dematerialize into the pearly smoke/heaven-on-earth cloud of a nonviolent 21-gun salute.

The movie also boasts a surfeit of hugs and maybe two tongueless kisses; an inexcusable disappointment. I strongly prefer the lunar cool and shocking (neon) blue of the original TG's ~*love*~ scenes to this one's quilts, Cost Plus lamps, and gassy facial expressions that resemble two amicable divorcees discussing carpool.

In short: 3 1/2 to 4 stars out of 5, depending on the hour of the day :)

*never forget that I'm nominally Irish

fell on 2022-07-15 at 6:14 a.m.

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