Maverick: Top Gunned

So what do you suppose Maverick has been doing all these years?

Let's speculate.

The relationship with Charlie never worked out, how could it. Maverick will always love fighter jets more than any woman.

Maverick was all Goosed up...

[Really?-Ed]

...for Desert Storm but ultimately found it unsatisfying. All those Combat Air Patrols without a single engagement.

Maverick was at the infamous Tail Hook conference of 1991, but left the hotel when he saw where things were headed.

Maverick grew bored flying No Fly Zone patrols and boarder still in the Yugoslav War. Ten years after his famous battle over the Indian Ocean Maverick applied for the NASA astronaut training program and passed. He crewed several shuttle missions but was banned from piloting the shuttle after completing a barrel role over White Sands.

In 2001 Maverick went back into carrier aviation just in time for 9/11, and earned his fourth kill shooting down a Taliban helicopter.  He became the first American Ace since the Vietnam War when he shot down an Iraqi Mig in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

After that Maverick was the CAG on two Indian Ocean cruises but lost his most recent CAG assignment for scheduling extra-aggressive Combat Air Patrols in the South China Sea.

Ultimately the war for which Maverick was needed never arrived.

He would have had a great time in the Battle of the Barents Sea. I wonder if I ...

[No, you can't.-ed]

Top Gun or 80's Hell

We don't think we've watched Top Gun in 25 years.

Top Gun is unwatchable today, isn't it? The plot is utterly predictable, the tropes totally 80's. Right?

Tom Cruise is the talented and totally hot Maverick who plays by his own rules. He rides a motorcycle, he plays volleyball, he has a long gone father with the secret past...

[Go on, please? -Ed]

...can anyone really sit through all this today?

This blog wondered if we're just bitter and cyncical. So we looked up Roger Ebert's review of the film, and he saw the same thing. It's interesting that Top Gun's flaws and tropes aren't confined to the 80's, as Ebert notes: 

"Top Gun" settles fairly quickly into alternating ground and air scenes, and the simplest way to sum up the movie is to declare the air scenes brilliant and the earthbound scenes grimly predictable. This is a movie that comes in two parts: It knows exactly what to do with special effects, but doesn't have a clue as to how two people in love might act and talk and think.

Grimly predictable.

All true but audiences didn't care.

Top Gun or Tom Cruise Arrives

Welcome to day two of Top Gun week here at William Stroock dot BlogSpot dot com.

For younger reader(s), in 1986 Tom Cruise was already a well known actor, a young man's young man popular with young women who wanted to love him and older women who wanted to mother him.

[And de-flower! -Ed]

Dude....

Anyway, Cruise's biggest film thus far had been Risky Business, now something of a cult classic. a brilliant film radiating cool in a non-80's way - see Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight.

Before that Tom Cruise did some interesting work. 

All the Right moves, about a high school football star in a factory town, is a typical Tom Cruise vehicle. 

In Taps Cruise played a super-motivated and intense military school cadet. He radiates pent up potential energy.

He was in the Brat Pack ensamble The Outsiders, and as we write this we wonder how he didn't end up in another such film, Red Dawn.

Top Gun was the top grossing film of 1986 and made Tom Cruise a superstar. From there he did a series of well acted though sometimes superficial films, like Cocktail, some very good films like the Color of Money and Rain Man, and crap like Days of Thunder and Far and Away. We're betting Top Gun Maverick will be, er...Top Gun II.

Top Gun: The Triumphant Return

Reader(s) have probably seen this already but here it is:

Welcome to Top Gun Week at William Stroock dot Blogspot dot com.

No surprises here. This is exactly the trailer we expected to see, lots of call backs to Top Gun, Maverick is er - a maverick. Looks like we'll have some chicks flying jets, which is fine. We have women fighter pilots today. If we had thought long enough about it we would've guessed Ed Harris would be in a Top Gun sequel. Harris is actually a nice casting choice. We hear Val Kilmer is coming back too.

In 1986 Top Gun was huge, which we'll get into later in the week. In this day and age Top Gun: Maverick probably cannot be huge. But it can be good, or at least decent, which we expect, for reasons we'll also get into later in the week.

Brett Kavanaugh: 80's Teenager

Did anyone else catch Judge Kavanaugh's movie references during Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's (Idiot, Idiotastan) cross examination on his 1983 yearbook?

Kavanaugh called the yearbook a disaster and said the editors were trying to imitate popular movies. Before he made the movie references we knew exactly what he was going to say: Animal House, Caddy Shack, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Do you think he wanted to say Porky's? We think he wanted to say Porky's.

Ahhh….the 1980's teenaged sex comedy. Younger reader(s) this was actually a thing in the 1980's.

The best, Risky Business, made Tom Cruise famous. He was actually in another TSC  (Loosing it?) with Shelly Long, believe it or not. This was a vehicle for older woman to fantasize about deflowering Tom Cruise, as was Risky Business.

Come to think of it, the young Brett Kavanaugh reminds us a lot of Tom Cruise's Joel Goodson. Smart, focused, serious. He had the same hair, too.

It's good to see the senate get down to important issues like popular Gen-X movies.