Harold and Maude (1971)

It’s Best Not to be Too Moral.

My roommate, Richurd, recently returned from his vacation, and that could only mean one thing: I’m going to start reviewing movies much older than me again!  He decided to ease me into the process by picking a movie from as early as 1971 (the most recent movie Richurd has ever liked).  Previously, the only thing I knew about today’s movie was its title, and I assumed from that title that it was probably a love story.  But when I saw the cover, I knew that my assumption had to be incorrect.  That looks like an 18-year-old and an 80-year-old.  So what’s this thing about then?  Find out today in my review of Harold and Maude, written by Colin Higgins, directed by Hal Ashby, and starring Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles, Charles Tyner, Eric Christmas, G. Wood, Cyril Cusack, Judy Engles, Shari Summers, Ellen Geer, and Tom Skerritt.

Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) is a troubled young man.  He occupies himself by being really depressing and faking elaborate suicides to get the attention of his mother (Vivian Pickles), who has gotten used to it and ignores them for the most part.  After one particularly disturbing and blood-soaked fakery, she takes him to a psychiatrist (G. Wood), and also sets about setting him up on blind dates so that he can marry and fuck off.  In the meantime, as Harold is attending a random persons funeral (as one does), he meets a 79-year-old woman who exemplifies the life to the death and sadness that is Harold; a woman named Maude (Ruth Gordon).  And thus the gross love begins.

There were parts of this movie I found interesting, but I can’t say that I liked it overall.  It was a little too weird for my taste, and a little too short on the comedy.  I think the weirdness is pretty evident; this is really a movie about an 80-year-old woman eventually banging a 20-year-old dude.  Icky!  That is not cool, movie!  But that happens near the end of the movie, so it wasn’t what hindered my enjoyment of the rest of the movie.  That was probably its failed attempt at comedy.  It had a moment or two – such as the army guy and his no-arm salute – but these moments were few and far between.  It was mostly just morbid, dark comedy, and that’s never really worked for me.  And love stories have only rarely worked for me, and never worked with age differences over 20 years.  I don’t usually catch hidden meanings in movies, but this one felt pretty obvious.  Or maybe my genius is amplifying.  Who knows?  Either way, I caught onto the fact that Harold was supposed to represent death because he was mopey all the time and obsessed with death, and Maude was life, and always trying to live it to its fullest.  But this was pretty obvious and then I just got bored.  Granted, my … interest? … renewed when Harold banged Maude, but it was not a happy interest.  Also worth pointing out is the music.  The soundtrack is definitely good, but also SUPER 70’s.

I had no issues with the performances in this movie.  They all performed well enough, even if what they were performing was sometimes boring and at least one time icky.  Bud Cort was a sad, morbid little kid, but that’s what he was going for.  Also, he banged that old lady in the movie, and I couldn’t do that, so big props to him for that.  And terrible punishments as well.  Don’t do that, man.  Speaking of which, Ruth Gordon was also good as Maude.  I only really had a few thoughts about the three prospective wives for Harold, played by Judy Engles, Shari Summers, and Ellen Geer.  I was disappointed by them because the only one that wanted to play along with Harold’s suicide gimmick (Geer) was not the hottest one.  Why couldn’t it have been Shari Summers?  He might have thought twice about charity banging that geriatric if she had played along!

I can’t say that I was won over by Harold and Maude, but I didn’t hate it.  I only hated that he sexed up that old lady.  That was just gross.  But the story was fairly compelling in its kookiness, although the attempts at comedy mostly fell short and it got boring pretty quickly.  I would say, though the movie is interesting and watchable, you can probably skip it.  It’s past the time when normal people would still find it all that innovative and funny in my opinion.  Harold and Maude gets “I would not say ‘benefit’” out of “Eeeeewwwwwwwwwww!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Ted (2012)

I Hear the Fat Kid Running.  I Bet It’s Hilarious.

Though I wasn’t able to get the triple feature I was hoping to when I went to see Spider-Man, a double feature was within my abilities.  It required that I first wait outside in the scorching Las Vegas summer temperatures for an hour, but it had the potential to be worth it.  If nothing else, it would make for a review.  And a request, as this movie was requested by my cousin Jeremy.  This movie caused many strange feelings for me, mainly because I didn’t feel like I wanted to see it.  This was strange because I love the guy that wrote and directed it and I’ve been a fan of his TV show for quite some time.  Yet, when he brought out a movie, I looked at the trailer and turned my nose up at it.  When it came out, I had been told by numerous people that it was worth seeing, but I could not be swayed.  Apparently, they all forgot that I review movies and take requests, and that requesting it might actually make me go see it.  Well my cousin didn’t forget as stupidity does not run in our bloodline … at least not on the male side.  And so I bring my review of Ted, written, directed by, and starring Seth MacFarlane, and also starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Giovanni Ribisi, Aedin Mincks, Patrick Stewart, Joel McHale, Matt Walsh, Patrick Warburton, Ralph Garman, Alex Borstein, Jessica Barth, Norah Jones, Sam J. Jones, Ryan Reynolds, and Tom Skerritt.

Young John Bennett has no friends.  For Christmas, he gets a large teddy bear that he cleverly names Ted.  But its limited vocabulary is not enough for John, so he wishes that Ted would learn how to talk.  Miraculously, his wish comes true and Ted comes to life.  After his parents (Alex Borstein and Ralph Garman) get over their initial shock, they take part in making Ted a brief celebrity.  In 2012, Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) has lost his celebrity and now lives with John (Mark Wahlberg) and his girlfriend of four years, Lori (Mila Kunis).  Over their anniversary dinner, John comes to realize that Lori was hoping he would propose, but doesn’t want to marry a 35-year-old who hangs out and smokes weed with his teddy bear.  Lori doesn’t want to lay down a him-or-me ultimatum, but it may come to that anyway.  Also in the mix is Lori’s boss, Rex (Joel McHale), who really wants to bang her and a crazed stalker named Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) and his son Robert (Aedin Mincks) who want to kidnap Ted.

I still can’t really put into words why I didn’t find myself interested in this movie, but I’m very happy that I finally relented to seeing it.  It’s not the greatest comedy ever (but it does reference the greatest comedy ever, in my opinion), but it’s a solid movie with lots of laughs throughout.  I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, being such a fan of the Family Guy and American Dad as I am, but it’s always nice to be surprised.  A lot of the humor is not far removed from what you’d see in a typical episode of Family Guy or American Dad, but they never do any of the flashback or cutaway jokes that people have complained about in Family Guy.  It’s just straight up funniness.  And a lot of it is nerdy jokes, which I always appreciate.  They recreate the dance scene from Airplane! for crying out loud!  Any movie that does that is alright in my book.  I got confused by one nerdy joke in the movie though, when it was revealed that Lori’s ringtone on John’s phone was the Imperial Death March.  What’s wrong with that?  That’s the ringtone I use for my mom on my phone.  (That is not a joke).  There’s also a scene where Ted and John do coke at a party, and that scene is all the way hilarious.  How does that count as a nerdy joke?  ‘Cause fuckin’ Flash Gordon (the real one!) is in that whole scene.  There may have been jokes that were lost on me in this scene as I have never seen Flash Gordon, but I think I got the gist of it.  I didn’t understand how this party was the straw that broke the camels back for Lori in their relationship though.  How are you going to get mad at your guy for going to that party?  Does he often get to hang out with his childhood heroes?  I understand you were reaching the end of your rope with the guy, but you have to let that one go.  There were some pretty sweet fights in the movie as well.  There was one near the end of the movie that reminded me of the fight from the third Bourne movie, but slightly different because one half of it was a teddy bear and not a big black guy.  There’s also a point where a kid gets punched in the face, and that’s just delicious.

The performances in this movie are all alright by me.  I’ve never really been too big of a fan of Mark Wahlberg, but I liked him in this movie.  He was funny in the movie, and there were even parts where he was downright cute, like when he was cowering in the kitchen yelling at Lori as she tried to clean up hooker poop.  Mila Kunis was very cute in the movie, and you felt for her very frequently in the movie.  But she’s always cute.  She probably can’t help it.  And at least she wasn’t Meg, am I right?  Seth MacFarlane brought a great deal of the comedy to the movie as Ted, and he brought even more to it as the writer of the movie.  You could expect that when looking at the trailers for the movie, but MacFarlane does share the funny pretty evenly with the rest of the cast.  I had gotten myself all smug and self-satisfied to say that Ted’s voice occasionally goes into Peter Griffin territory, but then they made the joke and made me look like a real dick-hole.  One of my favorite parts for Ted was a smaller moment in the movie, but it was when he was interviewing for his job, or pretty much all of his interactions with his boss.  Giovanni Ribisi was also in this movie, and he was as creepy as he was funny.  Norah Jones is also in the movie, but all I can say about her is that a Norah Jones concert looks like a boring time.  Not because of the music, but because the audience just seems to stand there and sway back and forth.  Where’s the mosh pit?  I had also heard that Ryan Reynolds was in this movie in a small part, but even that feels like an understatement.  He might as well have just wondered by in the background and waved.

I had inexplicably low expectations for Ted going in, but it blew them out of the water.  Turns out Seth MacFarlane can make funny in various different scenarios.  The movie is often laugh out loud funny, amusing the rest of the time, and even manages a good deal of emotional scenes.  Though I’d say the ending was not unexpected, it was the enjoyable way to end the movie.  The performances all help the movie along to their inevitable goal of being a fun and enjoyable movie.  This movie is definitely worth a watch in the theaters, so go do it.  Ted gets “Look what Jesus did!” out of “Somewhere out there are four terrible fathers I wish I could thank for this great night.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Alien (1979)

I Can’t Lie to You About Your Chances, But … You Have My Sympathies.

When I reviewed Prometheus, I was a little bummed out that I was not able to review the movies that made that movie possible.  I always review the movies in order!  But, Prometheus was so spur of the moment that I didn’t have the time to review 4 – and possibly up to 9, if you count the Predator series that later became intertwined – movies.  Though I can’t fix that problem anymore, I can still review the movies now.  Most people are entirely familiar with these movies, and I would probably consider at least two of these movies to be in my favorite science fiction films of all time.  In fact, I probably would’ve called the second movie my favorite if I wasn’t holding off the review until I could review Prometheus.  But reviewing these movies after Prometheus has a hidden benefit in that I can now go into today’s movie with an eye towards what happened in the prequel.  So let’s get into it with my review of Alien, written by Dan O’Bannon, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, Bolaji Badejo, and Helen Horton.

The commercial towing spaceship called the Nostromo has been rerouted from their trip back to Earth by their ship’s computer that they call Mother (voice of Helen Horton).  They’re told by Mother that their orders are to investigate a transmission from a nearby planetoid (later known as LV-426).  They land on the planet and 3 of the crew members – Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt), and Navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) – go to investigate, with Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) monitoring from the ship and Engineers Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto) making repairs to the ship.  It’s not long before Dallas, Kane, and Lambert come across a derelict alien aircraft.  On further inspection, Kane comes across a room full of eggs, one of which opens up when he gets too close.  Back at the ship, the three crew members return because Kane got some alien creature making sweet love to his face.  Ripley refuses to let them in because of quarantine procedures, but Ash lets them in anyway.

Though it’s true that this movie has aged somewhat, it still completely holds up.  The story is fairly simple in that it’s not a whole lot beyond a horror movie with an alien in it.  The story points are also simple: land, get infected, hunt alien, all die.  Even had it underlined.  No one gets that but me…  What elevates those pretty basic story points is the imaginative ways they happen, and the fact that they’re vaguely sexual.  I had never thought about it before, but something on the bottom of the Wikipedia page shows that sometimes people read way too much into these movies.  They talk about how the facehugger represents male rape because it forces itself onto something’s face, jams it’s alien penis down the throat, lays a baby in the belly, and then it pops out as another phallic looking creature.  I never read this much into the movie, and I recommend you don’t either.  I’m sure the people making the movie weren’t intending to make a commentary on rape as much as they were trying to make an alien movie.

After having seen Prometheus, I did take notice of the fact that the derelict ship did look the same as the one in this movie, but it also can’t really be the same one as best I can guess.  The pilot of the derelict ship definitely looks as it did in Prometheus, but it had a pilot that was in the pilot’s chair and had one of the creatures burst out of its chest, unlike in Prometheus, so it must’ve been a different one.  The look of this movie, though it can’t possibly live up to Prometheus, still holds up.  It’s still designed by H.R. Giger, so it still looks really creepy and gothic.  The movie had to make up for its limitations by making the movie really dark, but it also helped for the creepiness that comes with not knowing where this thing was coming from.  The darkness also helps hide the fact that the Xenomorph itself does not usually look very good.  It’s pretty obviously just a guy in a suit, but they keep that from becoming a problem by having it be hidden most of the time.  I really liked the part where it was hidden in the ship because of how well it blended in before it was time for it to come out.  In contrast, the facehugger still definitely works.  That little bastard makes my skin crawl every time, whether it’s still alive and clinging to a guy’s face or when it’s dead and splayed out.  It’s part spider, part snake, and part deep-throating penis; three of the things I’m most afraid of in life.

The thing I respect most about this movie is the fact that the woman character is not the typical damsel in distress character.  Sigourney Weaver isn’t quite playing Ripley up to her badass potential yet in this movie, but she’s on her way, especially near the end.  At first the biggest badass move is making the very unpopular decision to not let the infected guy onto the ship.  Sure, he got in anyway and Ripley got slapped in the face for it, but she could’ve had loads of “told you so” time that she didn’t take advantage of.  And sure, it was pretty fuckin’ stupid to make such an effort to save a stupid cat.  I love my cats just fine, but if there’s a Xenomorph between me and my cats then I’m about to save some money on cat food.  Even though she saves the cat, she gets to be fairly badass near the end of the movie, and that’s very respectable since it was not that common at the time for women to be anything other than distressed damsels and sex symbols.  …Okay, they do get her into her underwear for no particular reason but it’s a step in the right direction.  I never really liked Ian Holm in this role, but I suppose that’s what he was going for.  I think I just thought he made some odd decisions.  For instance, don’t you think there are better ways to kill someone than trying to stuff a magazine into their mouth?  I mean, you can still breathe through a rolled up magazine, so you really weren’t doing much other than mouth raping her with a copy of Seventeen.  Damned Wikipedia page got me mentally fixated on mouth rape!  Also, I’m not sure why the choice was made to defend himself against Yaphet Kotto by grabbing a handful of his man tittie.

Though I would say there were things that could’ve been done better, Alien is still a great movie that entirely holds up.  The story is arguably basic, but it’s still told in a fairly creative and imaginative way, and the look is still very gothic and the facehuggers still make my skin crawl.  And they know that no creature could be scarier than the audience’s imagination, so they don’t show it very much and let us get used to it.  And though she’s not quite there yet, a certain character in this movie is well on her way to going down in history as one of movie’s biggest badasses.  There’s no logical reason that everyone in this world hasn’t already seen this movie, so fix the problem if you haven’t yet.  Alien gets “Mouth rape!” out of “We Ain’t Outta Here in Ten Minutes, We Won’t Need No Rocket to Fly Through Space.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Contact (1997)

If It Is Just Us, Seems Like an Awful Waste of Space.

When I was looking through my DVD collection to pick out my favorite science fiction movie, I found it fairly difficult.  I had already done a lot of the bigger and more popular movies in the science fiction genre, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and Back to the Future.  But then I saw this movie and decided, “Okay, so people are probably going to piss all over this being my favorite science fiction movie, but I’m gonna do it anyway.”  But look here, people.  This movie has space travel and aliens in it.  That definitely makes it a science fiction movie.  And it’s based on a book written by Carl Sagan.  So fuck your faces.  This movie is Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan, written by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, James Woods, William Fichtner, David Morse, Jena Malone, Angela Bassett, Jake Busey, and Rob Lowe.

Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway (Jodie Foster as older Ellie, Jena Malone as younger Ellie) is a promising scientist that spends all of her time working on the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence); having been inspired to do so by her late father (David Morse).  She works for a while at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico until Government scientist David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) pulls the funding because he believes she’s wasting her talents.  Ellie is undeterred and takes her team, including her blind friend Kent Clark (William Fichtner), to find other funding, leaving behind the guy she met that she was getting too involved with, Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey).  After months of searching, she finally finds funding in the eccentric billionaire S. R. Hadden (John Hurt), giving her the ability to use the Very Large Array in Socorro County, New Mexico.  Years later, Drumlin pokes his head in again to screw things up for her.  On their last day with the array, Ellie finds a signal coming from the star Vega of repeating prime numbers.  The government gets involved, bringing Drumlin and National Security Advisor Michael Kitz (James Woods) into the picture.  On further analysis, they find that there are plans in the signal to build a transport device, but who will be the one to go?

I really like this movie.  Yes, it’s arguably not the most sci-fi movie ever, but it still definitely counts in my opinion.  It’s got a whole bunch of science in the movie, and it never happened so it’s also fiction.  Add in the travel through space and time and a brief appearance by aliens and I say it totally counts.  Deep down, I feel that I like this movie so much because of its religious undertones.  Or overtones, in some parts.  Personally, I believe in God, but I’m also big into science.  I’d equate myself with the Palmer Joss character.  I have my religious beliefs, but I don’t usually argue with people about theirs and I consider myself more fond of the search for truth.  This movie doesn’t take a strong stance in either the direction of belief or science, it more takes a stance that the over the top crazies in both directions are the jerk faces.  Jake Busey’s character, for instance, is a big jerkface.  But, on the other side, Ellie could kind of be a jerkface as well.  It’s a fairly accurate characterization from many atheists I’ve met that they seem to think they’re so superior to those stupid people that believe in a big man in the sky.  When Ellie and Palmer were in bed talking about it and she started saying things like, “Did you ever think that might not have been God,” he tolerated it.  I would’ve said, “Look, I didn’t criticize you for all your ‘I love stars and little green men’ bullshit!”  I liked it when later in the movie she says that she’d need proof to believe in God and he comes back with, “Did you love your father?  Prove it.”  Booyah, bitch!  I did feel bad for Ellie when she didn’t get taken on the transport at first because she doesn’t believe in God, but it also made sense.  If they’re supposed to be sending someone to represent Earth and 95% of Earth believes in a god of some sort, then they probably shouldn’t send someone that thinks the other 95% is stupid.  At the end of the movie, it all gets thrown back in her face in a really cool way, when no one believes what she’s saying about the transport because she has no proof and all her Occam’s Razor stuff is thrown back in her face, it’s very satisfying.  And just as satisfying that all the people who don’t believe her are basically criticizing something she believes, even though that’s what got her kept off the transport in the first place.  They don’t point it out, but the audience is well aware of what’s going on.  The movie doesn’t answer any questions when it comes to religion, but it doesn’t really try to.  It just poses a lot of questions that I found really thought-provoking and made me appreciate the movie.  The rest of the story was also very good to me.  I liked the science in the movie and it all seemed very sound as far as I could tell.  The drama aspects of the movie also succeeded with me.  The part of young Ellie calling into the Ham radio to try to talk to her recently deceased father broke my heart.  And you feel pretty shitty for Ellie in the other parts of the movie, especially when Drumlin keeps getting control and credit for her historic find.

The look of the movie holds up pretty damned well.  It’s not that old of a movie, but the graphics are mostly sound in the movie.  The opening of the movie was both a cool idea and a really good look.  They started out looking at Earth, listening to radio transmissions.  Then they backed up through the galaxy, playing older and older transmissions until silence.  They also put Bill Clinton into a bunch of scenes.  Adding his face to the scenes was convincing, but it obviously dates the movie a little bit.  The older and older this movie gets, the more likely it will be that people wouldn’t know who that was supposed to be.  Also, the graphics of travelling through the wormhole were really cool looking.

I really liked all of the performances in this movie.  For the most part, they stuck to some really good actors, so it wasn’t really a shock.  I think the world knows that Jodie Foster is a good actress, or at least was twice when she got her two Academy Awards.  But she was very good in this movie as well.  Foster is really believable and cute in her role, being able to convey her character’s excitement when she talks about the stars and the planets, and it’s very endearing.  This movie is probably the only occasion that I can think of that I was not annoyed by Matthew McConaughey.  His character in this movie was the one I identified with the most, and he did a good job doing the acting that was required.  The best example for me was the part where he had to ask the question that he knew would get Ellie disqualified.  The conflict is very evident on his face.  John Hurt was another character I liked.  He was definitely eccentric, and I liked the fact that he always seemed to know more than he was letting on.  Tom Skerritt was a very unlikeable character throughout the movie, but he did a good job at it.  He was always trying to steal Ellie’s thunder, but he did get me to start warming up to him near the end, which made what happen slightly after more effective.

All things being equal, the simplest answer is that this movie is really good.  The slightly more complicated answer is that I really liked the story, the look, and the bulk of the performances in the movie and it made for an interesting and thought-provoking movie.  I really recommend the movie, even though the inevitable outcome is the bulk of you saying that I can’t consider it a science fiction movie, let alone my favorite one.  Well to hell with you too.  Contact gets “I think it’s worth a human life” out of “You could call me a man of the cloth, without the cloth.”

Congratulations goes to Loni, who won the long battle to try and figure out this controversial choice for my favorite non-reviewed science fiction movie.  And more congratulations goes to her for being wise enough to say it was a good movie.  To hell with the rest of you!

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Top Gun (1986)

This review is when I set myself apart from all other movie reviewers by being the only reviewer I know that will use “Gay Balls” in the review of a movie.  There may well be other movie reviewers willing to do this, and I’m pretty sure I’ve used this term as well, but few movies have ever deserved it more.  More than To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, I ask you to hop in your car and join me on the highway to the danger zone with my review … of Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards, Meg Ryan, Val Kilmer, Tom Skerritt, and Michael Ironside.

Top Gun follows Maverick (Tom Cruise) and his copilot Goose (Anthony Edwards).  To go off on a tangent real quick: how pissed is Goose?  He hangs out with people whose handles are Maverick, Iceman, Cougar, Merlin, Jester, Hollywood, and Viper, and he somehow lands the moniker of “Goose”.  Lame.  Anyway, Maverick is a fantastic, but dangerous, Naval pilot who goes to the Top Gun academy when the number 1 pilot steps down because of a near death experience.  When they arrive at the academy, they meet their rivals, Iceman (Val Kilmer) and … whoever the Hell his copilot was.  Iceman got his name by flying cool as ice, never making mistakes and wearing his opponents down.  But this is the time of rebels; we know how this quarrel will eventually end up.  The two are in constant competition in the Top Gun rankings until one day when Iceman wants so badly to take down an enemy that he refuses to get out of the way for Maverick, who has the shot.  When he eventually does, the jet wash from his engine causes a flameout on Maverick’s plane, sending him into a flat spin.  Maverick and Goose eject, but Goose slams his head into the canopy on the way out.  Well his Goose is cooked.  Yeah, I went there.  So he dead, and Maverick blames himself even though Goose’s wife (Meg Ryan) and Maverick’s own girlfriend (Kelly McGillis) tell him it wasn’t his fault.  His remorse makes him suck at flying.  Can Maverick overcome and be the best again?  Yeah, probably.  Not a surprising movie, here.

This movie has caused me much grief in my time.  I did not see this movie when it came out … and I was 3 … so I have no reminiscences to make me like it.  I probably saw this movie when I was 25 and I had a higher standard for movie.  And, since I saw it, I have had 2 women tell me this movie is the best thing since sliced bread.  One such girl said she had no interest in seeing Rocky (you know, the 1976 Academy Award winner for Best Picture and Director?), but called this movie “her favorite movie ever”.  The other girl said this movie was better than Schindler’s List, and this girl requested I review this movie (CHRISTIAN!).  Feel free to tell her how wrong she is in the comments section.  But be nice, she apparently just loves really gay movies.

As I hinted at before, this movie is uber gay.  So many scenes of hot body mens doing homoerotic things together.  The volleyball scene alone is probably the reason all gays and women like this movie at all.  Most of the exposition of this movie takes place with the dudes wearing nothing but a towel in the showers.  If it were me, I’d say “Hey, Maverick!  I haveta yell at you.  Put your clothes on and meet me outside”.  And did the captain really have to come and have a heartfelt conversation about recently deceased Goose while Maverick was wearing only tighty-whiteys?  Again, a simple “Oh, I can wait” could fix all of my pain.  And I’m pretty sure the whole “You can be my wingman” exchange was Iceman and Maverick asking each other out on a date.

As for the rest of the movie, it’s serviceable at best.  I highly doubt this movie ever tried to get itself nominated for an Academy Award (DANIELLE!!), so it was only trying to be some good times for about 2 hours.  It kind of manages that.  The story is equal parts cliched and annoying, though I find it difficult to wonder how cliched something from 1986 was.  Maybe this type of story started with Top Gun, but probably not.  The acting is fine, but not spectacular.  And almost every song besides “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” seems to be Kenny Loggins 80’s gayness.

By far the best part of this movie is the aerial battles.  I don’t think these were miniatures, so they must’ve gone to the Navy and said “Look, we’re making a movie that is basically a giant hand job to the Navy, wanna let us film you doing things?” and thus it was born. I could have totally watched these aerial battles on YouTube.  Although I’m sure that the inverted bird-flipping that Maverick gave a pilot from an unnamed enemy country would not have been safe to attempt in real life.

If all this movie showed was the aerial battles, this movie would be great.  Since they had to have conversations, it wasn’t.  As it is, the movie is watchable, and should probably be watched at least once so you can get the homage’s made in other movies, but the next time someone tells me this movie it’s their favorite movie without qualifying it with favorite guilty pleasure movie or favorite jet fighting drama from 1986, I will spit.  I also say you should watch this so that you can enjoy Hot Shots more.  I give this movie a “GAY BALLS” out of 96.

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others.  It may help me get better.