Jon Hamm – CaptainJLS.com

REVIEW – Transformers One

Oh, like I *wasn’t* going to see this — and given how the trailers didn’t really impress me, and the early buzz left me skeptical (yes, even the strong praise from fellow Transformers fans), I was pleasantly surprised. The first domestically-released animated TRANSFORMERS movie since the original 1986 film, Josh Cooley’s TRANSFORMERS ONE winds the clock all the way back to the days before the Autobot-Decepticon war, where young Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) are non-transforming miner-bots extracting Energon from the depths of Cybertron. Pax is an eager dreamer, and D-16 the “oh boy, what are we getting ourselves into THIS time” best bud who always gets dragged along for the ride. A series of hare-brained plans going wrong, right, and then wrong again get the pair, along with a slightly loopy little yellow bot named B-127 (Keegan Michael Key) and their former mining crew chief Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), stranded on the dangerous surface of Cybertron, in search of the lost Matrix of Leadership that will restore their world — scarred by a long war with the alien Quintessons — to its former glory. The quest leads them, however, to uncomfortable truths: about the war, about current Cybertronian leadership in the person of Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), and about what has been stolen from their entire generation. The two friends’ very different ways of processing and reacting to these truths will reshape the planet’s future — and turn Pax into the legendary inspiring beacon of hope Optimus Prime, and D-16 into the cruel, malevolent Emperor of Destruction Megatron.

REVIEW – 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.