Tag: 2022 movies

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REVIEW – Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise flying a jet in TOP GUN: MAVERICK.

First off, let me admit that, unlike nearly everyone else in my age group, I’ve never seen the original TOP GUN; for some reason, our household in the ’80s & ’90s just was not a Tom Cruise-filmgoing household, and I somehow managed to miss it on HBO and every other cable channel as well. My filmgoing has lots of weird gaps like that; like, I’d never seen JAWS until it came out on Blu-Ray. And yet, through the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films I’ve come around to the Church of Cruise, Patron Saint of Cinema who continues to cheat death for our entertainment — at this point, it would feel wrong not to bear witness to his latest half-mad feat of filmmaking. Thing is, despite not actually having seen the original ’80s film, a lot felt familiar here just through cultural osmosis — ah yes, there’s “Highway to the Danger Zone,” there’s Harold Faltermeyer’s extremely ’80s synth theme, there’s Tom Cruise on a motorcycle racing a jet at the golden hour, and so on.

Mercifully, Joseph Kosinski’s film (his second sequel to a beloved ’80s flick in about a decade; his directorial debut was 2010’s TRON: LEGACY) gives you everything you need to know to understand what’s going on. Tom Cruise is Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a perpetual loose cannon Naval aviator who has deliberately avoided promotion in order to keep flying planes well into his fifties. Having danced between the lines of regulations yet again, before he can be reprimanded his former wingman, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazanski (Val Kilmer), orders him back to TOPGUN as an instructor to prepare the current best of the best for an incredibly dangerous mission that — let’s face it — is basically the trench run from the original STAR WARS.

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REVIEW – Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, and Benedict Cumberbatch in DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS.

Director Sam Raimi (the EVIL DEAD movies, the first SPIDER-MAN trilogy, and DARKMAN, to name his most relevant credits here) makes his first new film in just shy of a decade, and it’s a simultaneously convoluted yet simple quest adventure sequel to not just Scott Derrickson’s first DOCTOR STRANGE from 2016 but also a laundry list of other Marvel-branded entertainment. And somehow it largely works! It’s not as uniquely its director’s baby as, say, THOR RAGNAROK or the GUARDIANS flicks — but as with Shane Black and IRON MAN 3, you can definitely see Raimi’s fingerprints all over it. The whole thing is soaked in Raimi’s particular visual language — from the tense edits, jump scares, and creatures that recall his early horror work to inventive scene transitions and overlaps that remind me of some of his more unique visual touches from DARKMAN all those decades back.

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REVIEW – The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent / The Northman

Well THERE’S a tonally disparate double-feature — a comedic action riff on a beloved actor’s eccentric public persona followed by a meticulously researched and exceedingly UN-comedic riff on the story underlying one of the most famous tragic plays of all time.

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REVIEW – Ambulance

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhall in AMBULANCE.

A preposterous pile-up of explosions, jargon, snark, and dizzying flipping & swooping drone shots that you just know director Michael Bay wishes he’d had access to for the entire duration of his career. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is Will, a decorated soldier and all-around good guy in a bad situation. His wife needs surgery, and his insurance ain’t gonna cover it. Enter his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhall), a fast-talking bank robber who invites him onto a major score alongside a real rogues gallery of weird assholes you won’t have to remember — because the whole thing goes sideways, and in desperation the two brothers wind up hijacking the titular vehicle, with super-awesome EMT Cam (Eiza Gonzales) and a poor rookie cop they shot along the way along for the ride. It’s a hostage situation, a long car chase, AND an ongoing medical emergency all rolled into one. Cop cars crash and flip and occasionally explode, additional weird characters keep wandering in on both sides, and things just keep escalating for most of the two hour-plus running time. It does continue the Michael Bay trademark I recall from the TRANSFORMERS flicks of the occasional interjection of strange character beats; the musical moment Will and Danny share with a pair of Airpods as they’re trying to calm down on the road jumps to mind. Gyllenhall mixes up sleazy charm with bouts of furious shouting as the situation deteriorates, while most everyone else is given a single note to play — though it’s not like anyone puts in a BAD performance. It’s actually nice to see Gonzales given not just a straightforwardly heroic role — she’s THE unambiguous “good guy” in this story — but also one where the audience isn’t invited to leer at her. That’s not the kind of thing that’s on this movie’s mind in the least bit; it’s all about the limits of trust and the consequences of violence (though it does take pains to assure you there’s not any REAL consequences for most of these flipped & crashed cars, which I found amusing and ironic). Glad I made the time for it on this last day it was showing locally; don’t think those head-spinning drone shots would’ve had quite the same effect on TV.

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REVIEW – Everything Everywhere All At Once

Michelle Yeoh in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.

Thank the heavens this was playing in Joplin this weekend; I was gonna have a small-scale fit if I had to wait for disc or streaming. Michelle Yeoh stars as prickly, stressed-out and very ordinary laundromat owner Evelyn Wang. Her relationships with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Qwan, who you probably remember from TEMPLE OF DOOM and THE GOONIES) and daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) are strained, her estranged father (James Hong) is flying in for Chinese New Year, and she’s being audited by the IRS. In the elevator on the way to meet the IRS inspector (an amusingly dowdy and cross Jamie Lee Curtis), Waymond’s body is briefly possessed by an alternate universe counterpart who tells Evelyn that she is the key to stopping the multiverse-threatening nihilist Jobu Tupaki; using tech to access the skills she needs from other potential lifetimes, she finds that she also gets to behold and even inhabit those what-could-have-beens. What follows is an exhilarating, inventive action spectacle filled with bizarre gags, sights you’ve surely never seen before, and a warm, thoughtful core message that I think uses the big ol’ web of branching timelines idea really well. Honestly, at this point I’m just happy to see a multiverse story that isn’t trying to sell me something else or play on my nostalgia, but I’m thrilled to report that it’s also brilliant and bonkers and full of heart, with Qwan in particular being the incredibly charming key to the film’s most emotionally moving moments. Yeoh of course is also terrific throughout; it’s a long road of growth and change she’s given to play, and no step on it is not believable. My dad did offer the fair criticism that it feels long — between widely spaced act titles, digressions that are in-the-moment puzzling, one major fake-out, and a story structure that gives the viewer no familiar landmarks to orient their sense of time through most of the middle stretch, I can definitely see where he’s coming from; I do expect it to play differently in this respect on rewatch. And therein lies the big issue I have with this being in Joplin as opposed to li’l ol’ P-burg — I do rather wish I could go straight back out to give this another go. Highly, highly recommended if it’s in your neck of the woods.