Top Guns

Gunning To Glory

Top Gun
Directed by Tony Scott
USA 1986
Paramount Pictures Blu Ray Zone B

and

Top Gun: Maverick
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
USA 2022
Paramount Pictures Blu Ray Zone B

The first of an occasional series of double, triple and quadruple bills, mostly because I don’t have much to say about any of them as a single movie, truth be told.

Warning: Some spoilers.

I’ve never watched any of the Top Gun films before now. I wasn’t a fan of the young Tom Cruise (and think he’s absolutely great in his later career) and I really didn’t want to watch what amounts to a dressed up Navy recruitment movie. Added to this, I used to work in a record store on Saturdays at the time of the first film, while I was going through college and, honestly, that rubbishy best selling songtrack album was horrible to have to endure week after week.

However, my mother accidentally caught the recent sequel on telly last year and liked it a lot and so, as one of her Christmas presents this year, I got her the double Blu Ray pack of both movies. So, yeah, guess what I had to watch over Christmas this year?

Okay, so both movies are pretty much the same but they are different in the way they do it. Of the two, I think the first one by uber director Tony Scott is the less interesting. It’s not a great movie but it’s not downright terrible either. Just a film about Tom Cruise playing Maverick, a best of the best trainee pilot at the Top Gun flight school in the Navy. His co-pilot is Goose, played by Anthony Edwards (and Goose’s wife is played by Meg Ryan) and Maverick’s high profile rival is Iceman (played by Val Kilmer). Maverick’s love interest is played by Kelly McGillis.

The story is just toned down Porkys humour coupled with fast flying, naval cadets not doing what they’re told, a tragic loss to add a dash of drama and the obvious combat scene at the end. I’m guessing it must have somehow caught a mood at that point in the 1980s which I just wasn’t a part of.

However, it is directed by Tony Scott so there is some great photography and a few moments when he goes ‘full Bava’ on the colour palette, such as when Maverick is cradling Goose’s head (who promptly dies) as they float in the sea waiting for rescue. Harold Faltermeyer’s score is okayish (not as brilliant as Beverly Hills Cop and Fletch) but it didn’t really make much of an impact on me until it was extensively re-used by Hans Zimmer in the sequel, to be honest. Or maybe the mix in the second one was just kinder to it.

Top Gun Maverick hits all the same beats more or less. A still arrogant Maverick is called in to teach a bunch of Top Gun graduates how to pull off an almost impossible mission in a limited timeline. Miles Teller is playing Rooster, son of Goose, so that Maverick has a dramatic arc of survivor’s guilt via the offspring of his old co-pilot. The always watchable Jennifer Connolly plays his new love interest but, yeah, it’s not too hard to pick up on the fact that this is an old and troublesome flame who is mentioned by name a few times in the first film (just never seen until now). Val Kilmer is back as Iceman, suffering from the same illness as the actor did in real life.

The sequel is pretty much the same thing but it seems more interesting and I suspect that’s more to do with the contemporary language and the attitudes in this one, even though they’re employed to tell a similar story. And not just a similar story to Top Gun either... you’ll recognise many aspects of the final mission they are working towards as being exactly the same as the Death Star run in the original Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope and reviewed by me here). They even have a Top Gun equivalent of Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no try.” added into the mix.

Zimmer’s score, which highlights Faltermeyer’s old themes, seems much more epic and useful to the film as a whole (I liked it when I saw him do it in concert at one of his live shows too) and, all in all, Top Gun Maverick is a less bitter pill to swallow. I also trust the older version of Tom Cruise more and find him eminently more watchable than he was as a youngster.

All in all, then, I didn’t have a terrible time with either Top Gun or Top Gun Maverick... I can appreciate the second one more. Neither of them are great films but I can understand, I think, why people gravitate to them. You might well be one of those people so, yeah, please don’t take my word for it.

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau

Soul Survivors

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau
USA 2014 Directed by David Gregory
Severin Films/Nucleus Films  Blu Ray Zone B

Richard Stanley is one of those directors I’ve always liked... and I finally got to experience him in the flesh last year in a Q&A about his latest movie Colour Out Of Space (reviewed here). I’ve never much been interested in seeing the misstep of a movie adaptation of The Island Of Dr. Moreau that Stanley was fired from and which was reshaped and made into the disasterous production starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer as director John Frankenheimer tried to resurrect a phoenix from the ashes of Stanley’s pre-production but I have, over the years, been fascinated by some of the stories coming off the experience so I’m glad I, almost accidentally, stumbled on this relatively recent documentary about how this happened here.

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island Of Dr. Moreau is, as is to be expected, a lot of talking heads but the various heads that are talking here, including sizeable contributions from Stanley himself, are such that this does make a fascinating documentary. Intercut with quick scenes from Frankenheimer’s disastrous finished project for New Line, it goes back right to the kernel of the project with Stanley explaining all the ideas that came from H. G. Well’s famous novel, why he wanted to do a legitimate version of it in the wake of some historically poor adaptations of the material and all of the bad luck which dogged the project leading to his return, after going AWOL for a long time in the jungle, as a ‘dog-man’ extra in the film, unable to reveal his face to the majority of the cast and crew for fear of being prosecuted and not collecting his rejection fee. He’s in the final cut though.

Graham Humphries also turns up with the original concept art he did to help Stanley secure the green light on the film initially... indeed, he also did the cover art for this documentary release. He’s one of those people who seem to have turned up everywhere in the background of a lot of projects I’ve been watching or reading lately so, yeah, it feels almost like fate drew me to this one.

There are some great anecdotes about the politics and mechanics of a film that goes completely wrong which are, in fact, well... maybe not as opulent as the original director covertly returning to star in the film as a dog-man but, certainly, a lot more enlightening about how some of these kinds of train wrecks happen and, frankly, at this point in his career, I would have thought that anyone wanting to work a film set with Brando was kind of tempting fate a little too heavily anyway. Brando’s dead now, of course, so this tale of stardom gone mad, which is in some ways a rerun on a more absurd scale of the way in which he behaved on Apocalypse Now, can’t really hurt him. I tell you what though... if I were Val Kilmer then I don’t think I’d like to see many of these stories seeing the light of day. I’m amazed he went on to work on anything again after the way he comes across, second hand, in this and it’s really no surprise that he’s not in this documentary in anything other than photos, original footage and remembrances.

As with anything connected with Richard Stanley, there seems to be an almost supernatural hand in the way this production was put together, as he employed a witch to cast ‘fixing spells’ on his first meeting with Brando... who subsequently took to Stanley like a fish to water. The death of a couple of people involved in, somewhat, strangely grim ways, including the witch himself (you’ll have to watch the documentary to find out what happened to him) and the way that all the bad things came together at the same time Stanley was more or less fired from the project, are mentioned here and make you wonder just what kind of bizarre creatures of the nether-world that Stanley has stalking him... in either a positive or negative manner.

The film is also fairly educational to a layman like me. I’ve read stories featuring the Dr. Moreau character over the years but never Wells original novel (although I have read a number of his other works) and I had no idea that Wells had a falling out with Joseph Conrad when Conrad published Heart Of Darknesss a few years later which, allegedly, has a central character based on Moreau in a novel which has the same structure as Wells own. Conrad is said to have based the Kurtz character on Henry Morton Stanley (who famously said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”) who, it turns out, is a direct ancestor of Richard Stanley. As far as the Brando behaviour repeating from Apocalypse Now goes... Apocalypse Now is, of course, Francis Ford Coppolla’s take on Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness... so even there, there is a strange kind of spooky symmetry going on, I think. Although that last bit about Brando is not a connection I remember any of them making in this documentary.

It’s extraordinary though, especially Stanley and Fairuza Balk, who was a good friend of Stanley at the time and who was one of the stars of the movie... both the original as it was to be attempted and then again, much against her will it would seem, the fiasco of a version of it that eventually materialised.

As you would expect from Severin Films, the disc is full of extras including a 48 minute series of outtakes of Stanley, followed by some shorter out-takes sections by other cast and crew members, of fascinating stories which never made it into the final cut. It’s interesting stuff and, as I’ve said before, Stanley’s almost soporific accent combined with a keen intellect and ‘mile a minute’ rapidity of speech were always, even on their own, going to be worth the price of admission here.

Bottom line, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau is a great little curio about how a perfectly good film can turn into a nightmare for so many people in some unlikely ways. If you love the cinema then you would surely find this an insightful and fascinating project and it has much to be recommended. I’m glad I got the chance to see this one.

The Snowman

We’re Stalking In The Air...

The Snowman
2017 UK/USA/Sweden
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
UK cinema release print.

The Snowman is set and shot in Norway... being, in some ways, an example of what is popularly becoming known as Nordic Noir. It’s based on a novel by Norweigan writer Jo Nesbø and I saw another, quite good movie based on a novel by him a few years back called Headhunters (reviewed here). This one... well it’s not so good, to be honest... although it does have a nice visual quirk that makes it kinda interesting at times. The trailer was pretty good, however (better than the film and I’ll come back to the trailer) and, since the movie stars the always brilliant Michael Fassbender, this was one of the movies I was looking forward to seeing this winter.

That being said, I’ve read or heard of reviews which have been tearing this to pieces, saying that the movie is incoherent and makes no sense. Well, that one I can certainly put to rest and say that, yes, the movie is certainly coherent and, yes, it makes complete sense... to the point where the identity of the killer might be fairly obvious to the audience, alas. However, to some of the more ‘high profile’ newspaper reviewers of this film I would say that they should maybe concentrate more on what is said when people open their mouths to talk as, you know, the storyline and connections made in this really aren’t rocket science. Or, you know, familiarise yourself with the language of cinema by maybe going out and watching more films... if you really are finding this stuff confusing.

However, what this film does suffer from, I would say, is a lack of on-screen content to allow for the more leisurely pacing that the director brings to this. I’ll get back to that in a minute but I’ll talk about some of the positive things in this first.

The number one positive is the acting in this is all nicely done. Not many duds here. Fassbender’s portrayal of Nesbø regular Harry Hole is pretty great and even though not everything is spelled out for us, we get a real sense that there’s an interesting history to this character (this is a number of books into the series, apparently, so I’m sure there certainly is). The character is pretty much on the rocks, drinking and trying to cope with, at the very least, being dumped by his girlfriend but still maintaining a friendship with her son and also, to an extent, with the son’s ‘new dad’. The way Fassbender plays him shows everything with his body language... you get the feeling that this man is completely out of shape but that he once used to be a brilliant detective and his previous career is briefly alluded to by his new partner, played pretty nicely by Rebecca Ferguson. They’re both ably backed up by an incredible bunch of actors including Chloë Sevigny, Val Kilmer (playing someone who you totally wouldn’t expect Val Kilmer to be playing and making it very different to some of his other work), J. K. Simmons (ditto, he’s certainly not typecasting himself here), Toby Jones and the always utterly compelling Charlotte Gainsbourg as Harry’s friendly ex-girlfriend Rakel.

And the story beats are good too. Once you get into the idea that the scenes with Val Kilmer are flashbacks and slowly start to sew them together in your head with the case Harry is working on, the more sense they make. I did not see the relationship between Kilmer and one of the characters in the modern timeline until it was pretty much revealed, so that’s a good thing. However, this also leads me onto some of the bad stuff like... no matter how stupidly coincidental all of the puzzle pieces are when they fit together, the unlikeliness of them does not detract you from being able to spot the killer a good long while before that identity is made known. So that’s not so good.

Another bad thing is that, when we have the final denouement between Harry and the killer, Harry is competely powerless to do anything much and the demise of said killer is competely coincidental. A serendipitous moment which seems really stupid... ironically poetic given the film’s pre-credit sequence, sure but... yeah, it’s not the smartest ending it could have had. It probably works much better, I suspect, in a novel than it does for an audience when confronted with the irony in a visual manner but, there you go.

Back to my thing about pacing versus content. Yeah, it feels like the film is being rushed and severely edited. For such languid pacing I would have expected something more like a three hour film which takes its time to build up more depth to the characters and the causes of the story they find themselves in. This seems a bit choppy and... this kinda makes sense actually, in terms of the end result. It wasn’t until I was leaving the cinema that I realised that there were a lot more things happening in the trailer than you actually see in the final release print of the movie. So... I might be wrong here but... I suspect the studio shortened it to tighten it somehow when, quite possibly, it would have worked much better as a longer piece. I obviously can’t ever do more than guess at that one but... that’s my very best guess.

Like I said though... some nice things too.

One of them being the director's seeming visual obsession of people looking at things through windows. Most of the characters seem to be constantly putting themselves in situations where they are either outside and showing the audience what’s going on from looking in through a window into a scene or, the reverse... where something’s going on outside and the audience are looking at a character looking outside the window. It’s a really bizarre thing because I’ve not noticed anyone doing this kind of thing quite so often in a movie before and it became fairly amusing waiting for the next ‘through the glass’ shot to pop up.

Also, the murders themselves are quite inventively grizzly. They mostly involve people being cut up into pieces with decapitation clearly a favourite of the killer. The antagonist’s trademark is to build a snowman nearby and, quite often he will either leave a snowman’s head in the bloody neck stump of his victim or, vice versa, plop the victims head onto the body of one of his snowmen. So some interestingly gruesome visuals in this thing, for sure, although the director plumps to not focus on them for very long. There’s a nice moment when someone’s head is blown clean off with a shotgun, too, which is not telegraphed in any fashion and comes as a surprise. So some interesting artistic decisions made around violence and its aftermath in this film, I would say.

And finally we have  Marco Beltrami’s excellent score which nicely captures the languid pacing in the way Harry Hole proceeds about his daily life. It kinda sounds like a spy movie score from the mid to late 1970s in its tone at some points. Not as strident or highly stylised as, say, a John Barry score from that era and more like the kind of ‘softer but definitely a distant cousin’ of that kind of cold war music that you were getting a decade later. It’s a good one and I’m pleased that the score is scheduled to get a proper CD release later in the month. Looking forward to giving this one a few spins away from the movie.

So there you have it. The Snowman is not the terrible movie that some of the critics have been saying, I think but... it is quite disappointing in that it’s not a great movie either. Fassbender and Gainsbourg are absolutely marvellous in these characters and I’d like to see them both return to play them again. Alas, I suspect the box office on this one won’t be so great either so I suspect that’s not a prospect I can look forward to in the near future. This one isn’t essential viewing but it’s okay if there’s nothing else on at your local that you want to see. Maybe give it a go.