Top Gun: Maverick

TOP GUN: MAVERICK   **

Joseph Kosinski

2022

IDEA:  Sent back to the Top Gun program as an instructor, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell prepares his young protégés for a deadly mission while confronting past demons.

BLURB:  Vanity projects rarely come as extravagantly pompous as Top Gun: Maverick, in which Tom Cruise summons the budget and aircraft arsenal of the United States military to prove to us (and himself) that not only has he still got It, but that he’s more virile and capable than ever. Whether screaming through the sky in a supersonic jet or being fawned over by the obligatory supportive girlfriend, the actor advances an earnestly grandiose, uncomplicated image of masculine inviolability. The distance between Cruise’s character and his public persona has been all but completely collapsed; to watch Top Gun: Maverick is thus to enter into a documentary consciousness, a heightened awareness of the extra-diegetic elements that are inextricable from the film’s fiction, and vice versa. The use of real military jets - and their employment in admittedly breathtaking aerial action sequences - attests to the material, logistical, and financial magnitude of the production, while also providing a literal vehicle for indulging Cruise’s penchant for death-taunting peacocking. It’s ironic that Top Gun: Maverick goes to such lengths to feel “real” in the physical sense when its narrative, characterizations, and ideology are so consistently cartoonish. Yes, American jingoism is baked into this franchise, but did the big enemy of a 2022 sequel need to be so risibly, literally faceless? Couldn’t the new Top Gun team have used even a modicum of color or nuance or anything resembling a compelling human character trait? Of course, the absence of realism and introspection is wholly intentional, serving the film’s simple-minded purpose of lionizing Maverick and American military might, and by extension Cruise’s insatiable mid-life appetite for public displays of body-pushing self-mythologizing. “Don’t think, just do,” indeed.

La Piscine

LA PISCINE   **1/2

Jacques Deray

1969

IDEA:  A couple's summer idyll in the south of France is disrupted by the arrival of the girlfriend's former flame and his 18-year-old daughter.

BLURB:  A decadent coastal villa with too much space for its inhabitants; bodies idling in estival torpor; copious pregnant silences and numbed gazes from behind glass; indeed, we’re in the self-consciously modernist territory of bourgeois ennui in La Piscine. Specifically, the bourgeois ennui of two supernaturally attractive French people played by Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, whose starched, iconized figures serve as synecdoches of the film’s sumptuous but largely vacuous visual allure. Positioned within Deray’s manicured, late-60s chic aesthetic, they’re more objects of sensual contemplation than multidimensional characters, at once embodying an ad-mass image of epicurean beauty and luxury and a banal idea of a vain, myopic social elite. La Piscine builds its drama from the interpersonal trouble that inevitably surfaces within their paradise, with Deray showing a special predilection for the unspoken tensions that thrum under placid stretches of summery repose. Yet the film’s languors are often more moribund than scintillating, the suspense falling slack within a rote schema of sexual jealousy, narcissism, and becalmed amorality. La Piscine is consistently snazzy in its lensing, costuming, and production design, but it’s never quite as formally entrancing or as interesting as it fancies itself. Perhaps that’s just another way in which it reflects its charmed but charmless protagonists.

I Am Cuba

I AM CUBA   ***1/2

Mikhail Kalatozov

1964

IDEA:  Four long vignettes illustrate a picture of pre-Revolutionary Cuba.

BLURB:  I Am Cuba is a curious object; a maximalist piece of pro-Castro Soviet propaganda made in partnership between the USSR and Cuba and roundly rejected by the publics of both upon its release, the film is simultaneously preposterous and exhilarating. Preposterous because its sociopolitical rhetoric - crude and unsubtle in a kind of Grand Guignol way – rarely feels grounded in the actual lived experiences of the Cuban people for whom it breathlessly advocates. As a predominantly Soviet production, the film rests on the often touristic and exoticizing gaze of Kalatozov. In particular, he shows little interest in the country’s darker-skinned inhabitants, who mostly appear as signifiers of poverty or sensational Otherness. The characters that emerge as protagonists – a farmer, a student revolutionary, a rural family man –  are generic archetypes that could easily be transposed from any of the 1920s Soviet films from which I Am Cuba derives its spirit, although Kalatozov’s narrative and visual privileging of these figures pointedly departs from the emphasis on a non-individuated collective in something like Eisenstein’s Strike. While the social messaging is at once watery and ham-handed, I Am Cuba nevertheless endures for a reason: it’s a truly astonishing feat of formal ingenuity and immersive sensory spectacle. The film is a swollen sizzle reel of kinetic cinematographic technique, from its raucously expressionistic camera movements to, most famously, the elaborate sequence shots that crane, dive, and soar through space with acrobatic agility. Unshackled from the strictures of habitual human subjectivity, Sergey Urusevsky’s camera acts as its own enchanted, free-floating consciousness. It may not assert the identity of Cuba itself, as the title implies, but it does declare itself as pure cinema. 

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD   ***

Richard Linklater

2022

IDEA:  A young boy in Houston, Texas circa 1968-69 dreams of himself being recruited by NASA to fly to the moon.

BLURB:  For much of its runtime, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood tends to play like your garden-variety Baby Boomer nostalgia trip. Linklater wastes precious little time getting to (and through) the requisite hits of late-60s American culture, with major sociopolitical events and pop-cultural artifacts alike condensed into rapid-cut montages. Attended by the ubiquitous narration of Jack Black as the adult version of our prepubescent protagonist, these parts of the film evoke the digestible, somewhat didactic historical summarizing of The Wonder Years, including that show’s distinctly white, middle-class perspective. And yet, without completely dispelling the sense of banality, Linklater makes Apollo 10 ½ into a uniquely affecting, often startlingly tactile memory piece, overflowing with a reverence for the physical details and sensations of a time and place long gone. While his cultural reference points are contemporaneous television shows, movies, songs, and sites - all conjured with the awestruck thrill of rediscovery - other elements resurrect more timeless childhood pleasures, such as the infantile contentedness of being carried to bed after falling asleep in the backseat of the car. As in Linklater’s Boyhood, these moments accumulate into a bittersweet portrait of youth as a fleeting dream, an idealized mirage that never quite existed the way it does in memory. The rotoscoped animation enhances the quality of vague unreality, real life literally embellished in retrospect. Linklater may view the past with a certain measure of melancholy, but he doesn’t fall prey to reactionary eulogizing. His emphasis on the promise of the once-thriving American space program reveals his thesis: that the seemingly lost excitement of the past is merely dormant, waiting to be reignited in new forms.

Slacker

SLACKER   ***1/2

Richard Linklater

1991

IDEA:  In Austin, Texas near the UT campus, a succession of variously eccentric individuals discuss politics, philosophy, history, popular culture, relationships, and much more.

BLURB:  The characters of Slacker are trapped in discourse. Just as the camera roves digressively from place to place, failing to sustain narrative momentum, the assortment of bored, garrulous misfits who populate those places amble through conversations and speeches before hitting rhetorical dead-ends. A large portion of them simply pontificate to the nearest set of ears, hardly expecting a response; their thoughts and ideas, although often expressed with enthusiasm and eloquence, are discharged into space with nowhere in particular to go. For Linklater, this is the burden of a certain breed of intellect, the putatively indolent but really over-qualified and restless who struggle to find productive outlets for their passions and knowledges within the labor economies of late capitalism. The young adults of Slacker seem to have internalized the deflated countercultural dreams of their Boomer parents; the Boomers, too, run on the fumes of hoary government conspiracies and unrealized revolutions, uniting Linklater’s various layabouts in a trans-generational, ideologically Leftist condition of disillusionment and anomie. At the same time, Slacker palpably marks a series of inflection points for its specific era, at once capturing a fading way of bohemian living in Austin, Texas; embodying, by example, the efflorescing American independent film scene; and auguring the forthcoming explosion of the Internet, seen most presciently in the film’s proto-hyperlink-cinema structure. For all of Slacker’s foreboding - and for all the past and present historical traumas that lurk around its margins - Linklater ends the film on an invigorating note of optimism in the form of a kinetic 8mm film shot by a group of amateur media-makers. As the camera is tossed over a cliff, the image dissolving into an abstract whirl of light and color, the discursive inertia of Slacker is supplanted by an ecstatic release into an unwritten future of possibility.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE   ***1/2

Daniels

2022

IDEA:  Disillusioned with her life and family, a Chinese-American woman begins experiencing a multitude of alternate-universe versions of herself while she fights to stop an omnipotent figure from destroying everything.

BLURB:  Truth in advertising: at its most anarchic, which is most of the time, Everything Everywhere All at Once truly does approximate something like an experience of spatiotemporal simultaneity, its brain-frying pileup of signs and sensory stimuli like a hypertrophic version of our digital-era information overload. Seemingly intent to make their debut film, Swiss Army Man, look like a modest chamber piece by comparison, Daniels have produced an unrelenting cataract of bonkers invention that tests and confounds our credulity - did that really happen? - with systematic precision. One would not typically associate a word such as “precise” with a film of such flagrant excess, but then Daniels are not exactly artists who like to observe boundaries. Everything Everywhere All at Once floods the spectator with a riot of destabilizing juxtapositions; an unclassifiable crazy quilt of tones and stylistic idioms, it’s Hong Kong martial arts film, absurdist farce, gamified sci-fi fantasy, Freudian psychodrama, existentialist horror, and family soap opera, all at once. That this wantonly chaotic film should ultimately coalesce into, of all things, a Zen exhortation for mindfulness and equanimity, is an improbable development of which the deeply irreverent filmmakers seem to relish the irony. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so ironic. Everything Everywhere All at Once weaponizes its surplus almost as a warning; its howling cornucopia of mayhem is fun, but it’s also exhausting, unsettling, too much. As such, the film - in keeping with its copious anal imagery - is like the waste before the flush, the abjection that must be expelled to shore up the ego. This process is mirrored in Evelyn’s journey toward self-unity, and given disarming poignancy by Michelle Yeoh, the human center to the madness. In their audacious, sui generis way, Daniels argue that maybe a certain kind of madness is just what a path toward enlightenment could use.

Miracle in Milan

MIRACLE IN MILAN   ***

Vittorio De Sica

1951

IDEA:  Influenced by the resilient spirit of his late adoptive mother, an orphan in postwar Italy rallies a colony of displaced people against the greedy businessmen trying to seize their land.

BLURB:  If fantasy entails, on a primal level, the imagining of desired circumstances unsupportable by reality - as well as an attendant willful disavowal of their impossible realization - then Miracle in Milan is fantasy of the highest order. Taking cues from Chaplin, magical realism, and Hollywood escapism, De Sica and Zavattini craft their film as a fable of brazen wish fulfillment constantly teetering on the edge of collapse. In the first, less overtly quixotic half of its bifurcated structure, the film offers up images that cannily braid optimism and despair, as in the sight of vagrants huddled together under a lone ray of sunshine. While the predominant mode of jocular, even lavish tragicomedy departs quite sharply from the neorealism for which De Sica is best known, he and Zavattini remain attuned to the social realities of postwar Italy, particularly the ways in which the economic “miracle” and its proliferating structures of capitalism militated against the underclasses. The rollicking, at times cartoonish blitheness of much of Miracle in Milan is ultimately inseparable from the gravity of the material poverties with which it concerns itself. As the film charges through its second act, an escalating parade of whimsical interventions and outlandish escapes, the hyperbolic fantasy has the pointed effect of underscoring the direness of the conditions that prompted it. By the time the film’s dispossessed community is blowing away police grenade smoke with its collective breath - and certainly by the flight-by-broomstick denouement - one is struck by an ambivalent mixture of elevation and melancholy, a vacillating attitude toward a world that often warrants our most stubborn illusions.