TOP GUN Part One: The Soundtrack

**Over the next few weeks, I will be posting three spoiler-filled reviews of the 1986 blockbuster TOP GUN. Did I mention the spoilers?**

There are a lot of good things that have happened to me at sunset.

I had my first kiss at sunset. Before my grandfather passed away we watched a long orange sunset disappear over the icy Atlantic. Just last year I shared a beer with a beautiful woman and watched the sun go down over the spring leaves of Oregon. But not once, not in all the sunsets I've seen in my entire life, did the Top Gun Anthem fail to start blaring out of my ears like the half dead ghost of Glam-Rock out of the 80's. It's become part of the experience.



If you're like me and suffer from Top Gun Soundtrack Syndrome, I suggest that in lue of downing a bottle of roofinol with a bottle of Jack every morning, you seek professional consultation in the form of a wildly superior John Williams soundtrack.

Every single freakin' time that "nao-nao-nao-na-na-na-na-nao-nao-na-na-NA-na-na-NA-NAAA-NAAA" plays in my head, it's like my inner DJ just OD'd on painkillers after locking the booth and putting in the most annoying record ever made. Okay, so it's not that bad. I just wish I could enjoy the image of a setting sun without thinking of Maverick and Goose attempting a 4G Inverted Dive against a MiG-28 for the express person of giving someone the finger.

Top Gun is a Tony Scott movie produced by the legendary Jerry Bruckheimer, a man so powerful he once took a Technical College of Passidena dropout whose only claim to fame was a few "Got Milk" commercials and an unintelligible Meatloaf video and turned him into Michael Bay, Power Director. Top Gun was Bruckheimer's attempt to captured the essence of the 80s. In fact, I would venture to say that the seminal moment of that whole decade occurs within a single scene of Top Gun. That moment is when pre-Scientology Tom Cruise makes awkward love to an excessively permed Kelly McGillis as blue-tint silk drapes billow in the background and the retarded thumps of Take My Breath Away start... for the sixth time. I dare you to respond with something more essentially 80's than that.

But why do I associate this movie with sunsets, you ask? Because Top Gun is a movie about three things: Fighter Jets, Tom Cruise sex, and the Jeopardy category "Things that Happen at While the Sky is Orange." Every single scene in this movie, from the opening credits to the very last shot, happen with a setting sun in the background. There are even scenes where the opening shot happens at sunset, then the scene is shot during the day, and then the ending shot is at sunset again. Sunsets in the real world last for 8 minutes. Sunsets in the Jerry Bruckheimer world last longer than the breakfast shift and Denny's.

But there is one song, beyond the Top Gun Anthem, that has stuck with me through those many long years. That song is Kenny Loggin's Danger Zone, which is an 80's power ballad whose lyrics appear to have been written on the dare to incorporate every slang term in aviation into one highly repetitive verse.

Danger Zone isn't just a little bit repetitive. It's very repetitive. The refrain goes: "Highway to danger zone. Gonna take it right into the danger zone. Highway to the danger zone. Right into the danger zone." This feeds into the first of the 6 rules to the Top Gun drinking game, which is to drink whenever anyone or anything says the word "dangerous" or any variation thereof. If you played with this rule alone, you could be decently buzzed by the time the (8 minute) opening credits are over, and be unconscious by the time Maverick is going through his aviation crisis.

Nevertheless, for all the invocations of "danger" in this movie, none of the scenes actually make the audience feel any of that danger. A practiced movie viewer will know from the moment the jets streak across the sky and a generic military voice fills us in on the plot exactly how things are going to go down. By the last scene, watching Tom Cruise blow up Russian fighter jets like pinatas filled with bombs is not only tired and unsurprising, but markedly uninspiring as well.

But there is more to this movie. Next Tuesday.

(Cinematic) Armageddon

**Warning. This post may contain explosions. We suggest, for example, that you don't read it while driving a car full of fertilizer or while routinely soaking your last living possessions in gasoline on the grill that was your life. You have been warned.**

Armageddon means a lot of different things. For some people, it involves a rather stupid cult phenomenon about the year 2012. For others, it means the end-times in the bible and a series of even more inane books about those "left behind." But for the rest of us, it means Michael Bay is back in town.



For those of you who just watch movies and don't really know much about them, Michael Bay is the guy who makes shit blow up. He did Transformers, for example. He also did Pearl Harbor. He did Bad Boys II and even a few incomprehensible Meatloaf music videos.

But the movie that really sucked the worst, the one that jump-started his career in the multimillion dollar set, was the 1998 Bruce Willis / Ben Affleck star vehicle Armageddon, a movie so bad it would be flattered if it were only the worst of the two meteor-hits-earth movies that came out that year, and not the worst movie of 1998 or, perhaps, the worst movie not involving giant CGI robots.

Armageddon starts out with a long shot of earth exploding for no reason at all, except to set the mood. You can tell from the moment the credits come hurdling at you like the last of your possessions out of your girlfriend's window that this movie is not going to be a cinematic triumph by any stretch of the imagination. Admittedly, the CGI for this movie is much better than The Core, but Armageddon more than makes up for it by not having any plot whatsoever.

The lack-of-plot rotates around a group of American outlaw oil riggers who get sent to space in order to blow an asteroid to smithereens by burying nukes in it. The main rigger, Bruce Willis, has issues with his daughter dating Ben Affleck, who drills oil wells. This white-trash-romance subplot goes nowhere, and the daughter/girlfriend character is one of the biggest ingenues ever put to film. If a man with a handlebar mustache were to tie her to some train tracks at least she would have something to do except stand there and look like Arwyn while waiting for the men in her life to save her. Those of you with an angry inner feminist will be amused to note that she is the only female character, making this movie one of the biggest sausage fests until Master and Commander took the big bratwurst in '03. To make it worse, the romantic scenes between her and Ben Affleck might compete with the sex scene in Watchmen for the title of Most Awkward Thing Ever Put to Film. Umm. Yeah.

One character did throw me for a loop, however. Steve Buscemi actually plays a rigger with Westley Crusher Syndrome who can calculate distance along the surface of an asteroid in his head and identify the thickness of a vein of rock while in space. Steve Buscemi plays a character who doesn't look like he's three drinks away from the Mos Eisley Cantina? Preposterous!

Michael Bay's directing style is atrocious. There is no shot longer than 4 seconds, women are shot like sex dolls, and even Bruce Willis looks confused and angry. For a brief summery of his style, look at this actual trailer for Armageddon and then watch this video of Michael Bay eating a bowl of cereal. Notice any differences?



In fact, Michael Bay is so notorious for being a bad director that even a fake script for The Dark Knight went around with his name and tags on it. If the same script had Chris Nolan's name on it, nobody would have believed such an outrageous fake. But Mr. Bay? Yeah. He would make the movie this bad. The man made the world's only successful movie about toy robots, for fuck's sake.

But for all the horrible things about this movie, it is a great midnight show. Once you get used to Michael Bay's directing habits, you'll see them everywhere. Beer commercials. Lingerie ads. SyFy channel original movies. Once you know the enemy, you'll be able to avoid it. And do you know what the word for that is?

Awesome?

Bingo.

Inglourious Basterds

**Warning. This review contains spoilers like how Hitler is actually only a cover for his alter-ego, Super-Hitler, who wears a cape while killing Jews.**

When I first saw the intentionally misspelled advertisements for Inglourious Basterds, I thought to myself: “it’s probably better if I don’t know a lot about the movie before I go in.” I had picked up this reflex at some point between Jackie Brown and Death Proof, because at some point I must have subconsciously realized that if I went into a new QT movie expecting it to be as brilliant as the industry-changing Pulp Fiction, I would only be chasing the dragon. Not that T-rad’s films in the interim have been extremely bad, but rather that none have lived up to the expertise he demonstrated in Reservoir Dogs. And at first look, Basterds looked more like Kill Bill than Pulp Fic, so it was easy to believe that this movie would be nothing more than a purile exercise in re-writing World War Two. S I implore you to trust me, right now, when I say: Inglourious Basterds is, possibly, the best movie Quentin Tarantino has ever made.

But there are several quirks you’ll have to sit through in order to get to the glory. Instead spending the next four hundred and fifty words saluting the brilliance of this filmic tour-de-force, I will focus on those quirks that make this film particularly fucked up, anachronistic, pulpy, and otherwise midnight-worthy. And trust me, this movie is all four of those things.

First, this movie is full of fun facts about history. For example, did you know that World War Two ended abruptly in 1945 with Eli Roth machine-gunning Hitler in the face? Or that SS Officers were each issued a pipe the size of Alsace-Lorraine and a drinking boot upon deployment? I can’t believe I missed that in history class.

There are a few great Tarantino-isms, too: T-rad gets such a good performance out of Brad Pitt as a swaggering southern lieutenant, for example, that it almost makes me forget all about Troy, Ocean’s Thirteen, Mr. and Ms. Smith, and all the other crap he’s been in since the turn of the millennium. Also, Tarantino cast Eli Roth as a crazy American Jew who likes smashing people’s heads in with a baseball bat for entertainment, which, if you know anything about Eli Roth, means that he is essentially playing a toned down version of himself. Harvey Keitel makes an appearance as the American general who is only heard over the phone, and there is a moment where Samuel L. Jackson tells the audience in no uncertain terms how to blow up a theater. Honestly, Mr. Jackson, the only time I ever thought about blowing up a movie theater was after watching Lakeview Terrace.

But there is one guy who steals the show. Christoph Waltz pays a Jew hunting SS officer who might just be the biggest douche ever put to film. This character can find Jews with his sense of smell and intimidate people with milk. He’s brilliant, but not just brilliant, Hannibal-Lecter-crossed-with-Sherlock-Holmes-while-making-love-to-Tony-Stark brilliant. Nazi-Spock-on-Methamphetamine brilliant. He is pitch perfect as a villain, and even plays his own comedic relief. Just like McLovin, I could easily stand to watch a two hour movie just about that guy.

But then there is a cameo by Mike Myers.

It is first worth a note that one of the trailers before this movie is Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.

As soon as Mike Myers appears on the screen, even though he’s caked with more prosthetics than Carla Gugino on the set of Watchmen, you will recognize him. I, for one, will never forget the look of that man’s, bushy, Congo-like eyebrows. I kept expecting him to say that the lead actress was “a man baby, yeah!” His scene is mercifully brief and begrudgingly unnecessary, if surprisingly funny for it's incredible... Britishness.

(Austin Powers 4 is in the works, btw.)

For those of you who are counting Tarantino's tricks, there is NO scene shot from the inside of a car's trunk in this movie, but there is a Mexican Standoff. It seems that T-rad has skipped all the phallic imagery and gone straight to the point on this one, for every gun in this Mexican Standoff is pointed directly at various character's testicles. It's a Texican Standoff. I guess QT is making up for Death Proof, which had lots of trunk shots and only one guy getting his balls blown off, which is well below average. Also, this movie has a soundtrack.

When everything is said and done, Inglorious Basterds is well worth your 10 bucks. It's violent, yeah, but it's not Kill Bill and it plays around with the nature of the cinema just enough to rile my inner Andre Bazin. The references will make a film nerd squeal, and the dialogue is perfect, elliptical, comedic and suspenseful all at the same time. The ending is a little hard to swallow, but otherwise this is how theater is supposed to be made. Highly Recommended.

G.I. Joe: Redux

**Warning. This blog is supposed to contain spoilers. Or something. Honestly, I forgot.**

I just woke up about two hours ago, having slept off my adventures into the night, and I realized that the review I wrote at 5 am didn't mention the wonderful, lovable cast of instantly forgettable, two dimensional characters G.I. Joe had in store for me.

First, there is Duke, an all-American military dude who was retcon'd from Vietnam to Iraq. His backstory turns out to be important to the plot, which is why it's so very sad that it's almost impossible to find him interesting. He's every character The Governator ever played-- a personality-free tough guy ultra-Marine who is one step away from getting in a pissing match with Chuck Norris and the testosterone side of the A-Team. Seriously, if this guy ever had a headache he would be required to fervently deny: "It's not a tumor!"

There is Scarlet, a character who is so very interesting and well developed that in order to remember the character's name I had to Google "That redhead chick from G.I. Joe." Girl genius who never lost at anything before, blah-blah, you know the drill. Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots with longer hair and less personality.

There's Marlon Wayans, who is an annoying sidekick. His character undergoes a rather racist "cops always want to arrest the black guy" gag, which would be good social commentary if the characters didn't act like it was perfectly natural for every police officer to cuff a black man on sight.

And finally there is Dennis Quaid, who plays General Hawk. Do you remember that squid guy from Star Wars? Dennis Quaid is That Guy. He basically sits in a control room with his exuberant minions and provides commentary to the audience on the battle sequences. I would pay any amount of money to have Dennis Quaid, in a straight face, tell me to focus all my firepower on that super star destroyer.

How Many Licks Does It Take? The Core

**Warning--This blog post contains EPIC FAIL. If you are pregnant or sensitive to fail, it is recommended that you feast your peepers on this, baby, because it'll feel like the Bush years. Also, Nicole Kidman is a ghost.**

I have gone to see three movies in the last week, and only one could be called a midnight flick. The midnight movie for this week was the 2003 bomber "The Core," a high-budget disaster about a secret government weapon that (somehow) stopped the millions of gallons of molten iron at the center of the earth from spinning. Yeah. Now, scientists have to DIG INTO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH AND RESTART THE PLANET WITH NUKES.

The science is bad. The acting is bad. The story is bad. And, best of all, it stars that guy from Thank You for Smoking alongside the queen of the jackboots, Hillary Swank. Which is bad.

Some of you may not know who Hillary Swank is, but I'm sure you'll recognize her character, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots. Who is Ms. Mary Sue Jackboots? Let me break it down.

First, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Ms. The title "Ms" in Hollywood means a sexless, emotionless, hate-filled morlock who would be the embodiment of feminism if feminism had anything to do with acting like an emotional robot or spewing more mysandry than a spit-take session with that chick who shot Andy Warhol.

Second, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Mary-Sue. She is not just perfect, but annoyingly, obviously, pull-out-your-hair-I-want-to-smack-this-bitch-with-the-blunt-end-of-a-pool-skimmer perfect. Mary-Sues can do anything, at all times, with no training, BETTER THAN YOU.

Finally, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Jackboot. She is a fascist, like the red shirts in Star Trek who are just there to be at the business end of an intergalatic shoop-da-whoop at the appropriate time, except the Jackboot has protagonist powers. These are the people who call you a traitor for singing America, Fuck Yeah! during screenings of Patton. The Jackboot waves more flags than Michael Bay wacking off to glamour shots of The Pentagon between takes.

So, onto the plot. Birds start attacking people in Trafalgar Square, which is apparently in Toronto, and a bunch of guys with pacemakers drop dead in Boston, which is apparently a city where every man, woman and child has one installed at birth. Also, somebody throws a trout.

That Guy from Thank You for Smoking (Who I will just call That Guy), a lonely professor of the textbook-and-tweed variety, figures that all these problems are related. Much hand-waving later, the government finds the earth has stopped and decides to build a ship made of pure Plottanium (a substance that is invincible unless the plot requires it not to be, and can do anything the plot requires it to do unless it dramatically can't) to dig into the center of the earth.

But that's after a space shuttle crashes into Los Angeles.

Randomly. As a form of character development.

They may or may not have flown past the office building Snape and Voldemort were robbing. To borrow a phrase made famous by Cleolinda, this made me facepalm until my palms were bloody and my face was, well, covered by the palms of various people I had co-opted into the task due to it's sheer enormity.

After the whole space shuttle thing, the government finds a guy who can do anything if you provide him enough Xena tapes and Hot Pockets, who promptly does nothing for the rest of the movie except ostensibly sage faggots who talk about the center of the earth on 4chan, while everyone else tries to save the world in a montage. Cause, you know, if you're going to do things that are physically impossible without causing too much nerd rage, you're gonna need a montage.

Twenty agonizing minutes later a crack team of crack-pots on crack are off to the center of the Earth with Mary-Sue Jackboot, Captain Christopher Pike, ye generic Frenchman, That Guy, a pretentious Reedie, and The Black Guy Who Doesn't Die First Because That Would Be Racist in attendance. Here's a hint. Only two people survive, and one of them is not the black guy.

Have I mentioned that the ship is literally piloted with a Logitech Attack 3 game controller? Talk about doing a barrel roll.

Something goes wrong in the core, and therefore the whole mission is scratched because the nukes are no longer powerful enough to restart the core. Nothing, nothing can save the movie! Speaking of, who was the math guy who figured out how to make a perpetual motion machine out of nuke blasts and molten iron? Where's THAT guy?

That Guy and Ms. Jackboots figure it out and survive, riding the nuclear blasts all the way to the surface without drilling. They pop out in the ocean around Hawaii, where they are promptly saved by whales. WHALES. The credits can't roll fast enough.

All in all, this movie is primo, top-rate midnight material. It's entertaining without being good, it's popcorny without being childish, and it's wrong about everything forever without having to apologize for it's wrongness. For example, I didn't even mention the whole scene involving lightning causing the Colosseum to explode as if it were shoop'd by the aliens from ID4. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It's bad, but it's so good.

And, as a farewell gift, I give you this stunning tribute to Jackboots everywhere.

Show all

In other news, my next midnight movie is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Thursday. If you read this blog, you have a universal invitation to come watch movies with The Midnight Movie Guy. 12:01 am Friday morning (Thursday night) at The Regal 6 Pioneer Place in Downtown Portland, Oregon.

M-M-Multibonus Flick: Angels and Demons

*Warning: This blog may contain spoilers, like how Ewan McGregor kills the pope and tries to nuke the Vatican. For Christ. Also, Bruce Willis is a ghost.*

Due to the fact that Harry Potter is thoroughly dominating the theaters until early August like some sort of posturing basketball player, I am left with no midnight movies of any repute to snark mercilessly. Hence, I have to resort to a back log of second release theaters in order to fulfill my bottomless hunger for late-night celluloid without resorting to banging fat chicks at 3am. And when I say there is nothing coming out this week, I really mean it. There is a b-rate children's flick called "G-force" coming out on Friday that involves high-tech guinea pigs saving the world, and a rather creepy b-film called "Orphan," which appears to capitalize on the whole "young girls dressed like 19th century china dolls are EVIL" phenomenon, which is itself such an overused trope that it makes the cop-on-his-last-day-before-retirement thing look positively postmodern. Needless to say, neither will have a midnight release.

So last night I watched Angels and Demons, the sequel to the hit film The DaVinci Code starring Forest Gump as Professor Robert Langdon. Having never read the book, I assumed it would involve some sort of race through a European city in order to save the world, filled with hot chicks and faceless guys in black suits, because my assumption is that only James Bond style stories can happen in Europe. Needless to say, I fuckin' called it.

The film starts out with Forest Gump being flown express to Cita Del Vaticano (not to be confused with Cita Del Taco, the only Vatican City fast food joint), where apparently everyone speaks English, in order to help hunt down a killer scientist with an ancient grudge against the Catholic Church. To help him is a young hot scientist with a PhD in OMNISCIENCE, which, if you didn't already guess, is the study of everything remotely related to the plot. For her, this includes internal medicine, pharmacology, classical languages, particle physics, neoclassical art history, and several other obscure and esoteric disciplines. She suffers heavily from the rare adult version of Wesley Crusher Syndrome, which, as we all no doubt are aware, may result in a high number of Twitter followers and/or a horrible, painful death.

It's particularly awesome when both happen, but don't get your hopes up.

Gump, on the other hand, being a lowly liberal arts professor instead of a grand professor of SCIENCE, seems to have only limited knowledge of what's going on or even where he is. The character can't read Latin or Italian, knows nothing about antimatter, can't fight or hide, and who's professional experience is limited to looking at statues with arrows on them. My guess is that the director didn't want Mr. Gump to look like Indiana Jones, who is annoyingly fluent in every language ever farted out of the ass of an illiterate peasant before the birth of Christ. As a result, Dr. Langdon can't seem to speak anything except "southern" and feels like at any minute he's going to burst into a round of "Symbology is like a box of chocolates."

Speaking of symbology, this I think Williem Dafoe did it better:



But that's just my opinion.

You'll recognize the director, by the way. Angels and Demons is a Ron Howard movie, who is best described as the Michael Bay of the midbudget thriller set. He is an expert at milking horrible performances from fantastic actors, and a big fan of panning over still objects in the foreground as if he were directing some sort of Vatican slasher flick (IN 3D!) in such a way that you expect the boom guy to pop out from the side of the screen and start stabbing somebody with the rusted handle of his sound equipment. Preferably Ron Howard. I'll leave you with a video of Ron Howard at the end, just to show you how pimp this guy really is. Also the video has Samuel L. Jackson, who will get you drunk.

The plot of the film is basically the "get thee to a nunnery" version of 24. There's a ticking bomb somewhere, a bunch of cops with the fighting skills of inept Bond minions, and even though there are only a few hours before nuke-o'clock, everyone is still researching and praying! The story gets tedious after a while, when it becomes clear that all the victims will inevitably die in ways best described as the catholic guilt versions of Hostel, and that the real villains are obviously not Illuminati but rather (yawn) members of the church itself.

Ewan McGregor gives us the most annoying performance, especially because I thought the "they can take our lives, but they can never take our FREEDOM!" school of inspirational speeches had died along with Stanley Kubrick and Windows 98. In the end McGregor's character is ostensibly evil, which is odd because he leads the heroes to some of the best clues. Also, apparently the filmmakers don't realize that a bomb exploding in the air above a target (called an air-burst) is much more deadly than a bomb exploding in a cave under it, and for all intents and purposes antimatter is a scientifically inaccurate version of a nuke and should wipe out everything forever no matter what you do to it.

All in all, Angels and Demons was very pretty and well worth a watch. For all that I might say against it, it DID have a plot, and it DID have strong, believable characters.

And Ron Howard.