Top Gun is on the History Channel?!

it was just a tangent actually, not meant as a direct reply... perhaps a little Food Network is in order...

except for the iron chef america crap.

-- tokyo rosemary (rosemarygilber...), May 16th, 2004.

right, or docs about the luftwaffe. everytime i turn this channel on it's something about the luftwaffe.

"top gun" IS history, though: tony scott's relentless soft-focus has become THE mode for blockbusters today. i'm sure that following the film they had a long discussion of film aesthetcs with audience call-ins.

http://www.jeje.nu/rambo/3+.jpg

Saw this on the big screen at the Laurelhurst here in Portland. This film is so, SO gay.

And what the fuck, Tim Robbins is in it!

loving this thread

top gun = documentary on fags in the air force

lmao

fuck that this is a navy movie

30 years old!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAopLTK4qVs

the meisterwerke of cinematic giant thomas cruise mapother iv

how did it get so gay?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/how-did-top-gun-become-so-gay/

Manly men, being men.

Funny thing: when the movie came out, my dad had just served a short stint on an aircraft carrier as part of that year's RIMPAC exercise (thus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_RIMPAC ) involving contact with the submarines, which would lead to him being chief of staff for an admiral in a carrier group shortly thereafter (keep in mind his career was mostly submarines, so this was somewhat atypical, but given both subs and carriers are based out of San Diego, it was an easy temporary shift since he'd long since built up his career cred -- would have been an officer for almost 25 years at this point -- and after that he was the exec to the admiral in charge of the entire sub base at Point Loma). Anyway: we all went to see it as a family, and since we were Navy, living in San Diego etc., we were mostly watching it for the locations and the verisimilitude as much as would be allowed. Dad essentially became our own private narrator about a lot of the flight sequences, the crew and procedures involved on deck and so forth and that was totally fine, I think we were mostly bored with the story! Our conclusion was that Anthony Edwards was the one who actually acted most like a real Navy guy down to the mustache.

But as for it being gay as hell -- nah, no conscious thought about that at ALL, not that I think we would have even talked about it to begin with. I remember being amused by the volleyball sequence but mostly because I thought it just dragged on a bit and the song was goofy as hell.

a service that doesn't think twice about calling an exercise 'rimpac' may have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to homoerotic overtones tbf

Submarines, as is well known, are long, hard, and full of seamen, so.

Chinese fighter flies inverted over US Air Force jet

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/politics/china-us-jets-intercept/index.html

they've been studying the classics i see

Whole movie? Nothing but a strip volleyball match.

Val Kilmer is indeed reprising his role as Iceman in 'Top Gun 2'. https://t.co/dODdP3hyzY

— Collider (@Collider) June 6, 2018

Cruise’s Oblivion filmmaker Joseph Kosinski is in the director’s chair.

He's no Tony Scott, and I mean that sincerely.

otm

KERSPLODE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSqVVswa420

glad to see they have a scene were they're on the beach oiled up like turkish wrestlers

i will definitely watch this

Can we get a Broken Arrow sequel next? Christian Slater isn't doing much these days.

oh hell yes, when you've got movies like Val Kilmer in them, you can't lose!

I plan on setting aside a weekend next summer to watch this, the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and my VHS copy of Prefontaine, and call it my weekend of speed.

probably don't need to explicitly mention it, but I will also be consuming a vigorous quantity of methamphetamine while watching the movies

I had to look it up, but apparently there is no maximum age to be a military pilot. Would have been awesome, though, if this was about Maverick as a commercial pilot.

(Unrelated, just watched Easy Rider last night, and a lot of young Nicholson's smily mannerisms reminded me of Cruise's!)

weird to think Tom Cruise is now three years older than Jack Nicholson was when A Few Good Men was released.

Oh my god !!!
Beach volley, flight jacket and... F14 (how’s that even possible !? CGI, eh?) !!!
I’m a 10 yo boy again...

i was unenthused for about a nanosecond and rhen i saw Maverick and jets and :D

also Jennifer Connelly!

Ed Harris looks like a dusty old sphinx in that opening shot, it looks like he’s made of sand! Bad makeup/lighting job there :(

Yeah J. Connelly is a great surprise !

Harris is only 11 years older than Cruise!

man tom cruise is really dead-set on dying during a stunt on a movie shoot isn’t he

five the people what they want

My main issue with this is that F/A18s are nowhere near F14s in the cool/badass aspect.
Since they CGIed ONE F14 apparently, they should have gone all the way !

didn't know we had fans of Reaganaut Propaganda Shit here

will this one go full Trumpist? ie the big final bombing of [Whatever]istan will be recalled at he last minute.

rmde

Tom Skerritt is still around, why isn't he in this thing? Or Kelly McGillis? Or Anthony Edwards as Cruise's ghost friend who gives him advice?

On the other hand, Manny Jacinto is in it, which is good. On the other other hand, Miles Goddamned Teller is in it.

Maybe the twist is that in this one Tom Cruise is a Russian agent.

america, russia, whatever. maverick's only in it for the jazz

the original top gun is a fairly apolitical movie considering. sure, the impetus for the movie is the sort of fashy enthusiasm for gleaming new technological wonders of warfare sort of à la the italian futurists, but the actual meat of the piece is essentially a sports movie - with simpson/bruckheimer and scott's days of thunder being essentially a poor redo of top gun with the action transposed to the world of nascar.

the whole competitive, locker-room grab-assing aspect of top gun is pure fiction - irl the "top gun" course has no winner and is not a competition. the technical advisor on the picture pointed out that they didn't have their classes take place in air-hangars and there wasn't a culture of broing down in the locker room after training but simpson and bruckheimer wanted more excuses to show the planes and more excuses to see tom and val in their underwear.

there's something very high school about the whole thing. there's also nary a mention of ideology or even any half-baked geopolitical rationale for the skirmishes that take place in the movie. the enemy are clearly of the state socialist kind, with their MIGs with a star painted on them. it's also extremely homoerotic and kitschy

Maybe the twist is that in this one Tom Cruise is a Russian agent.

Nah, Chinese:

There’s a new Top Gun movie coming out. And Maverick is wearing the same leather jacket - only this time it’s Communist Party of China-approved, so the Japanese and Taiwanese flag patches are gone (screenshot on right is from the new trailer)... pic.twitter.com/gUxFNFNUKX

— Mark MacKinnon (@markmackinnon) July 19, 2019

in which miles teller sports a moustache in tribute to his dead dad, anthony edwards

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLZQfnFyelTBOQ15kmHSgEbdjzLMWzZpL7&time_continue=25&v=g4U4BQW9OEk&feature=emb_title

The notion that Banshees is unduly praised on here does not remotely match with the reality of the thread. That thread is always accepting haters!

I wouldn't know, I unbookmarked it pretty much the day after I saw it

Eric, you've got to stop thinking of yourself as one of the hundred neediest cases.

During a break in the filming of the hangar scene a group of Navy officers being used as extras approached Tony Scott and complained about the unrealistic collection of patches on the flight suits of the actors. He replied, paraphrasing, "We're not making this movie for Navy fighter pilots, we're making it for Kansas wheat farmers who don't know the difference."

fwiw i was once acquainted with a navy pilot who was an extra on top gun and can absolutely see him doing this. he also said that kelly mcgillis was a huge bitch, which made me like her a little bit better

lol, yeah that all tracks

I'm gonna talk about why I think they suck. You're gonna talk about why you think they don't. That's all fine!

yeah that’s not how a conversation works. if you don’t like something, you can say your bit about why you didn’t think it worked, etc.
if you stick around, then either: a.) you’re willing to see someone else’s point of view and be convinced that you like it or b.) you really think other people are wrong and they should come around to your point of view

let me assure you: I read what you wrote, forks, and you have definitely been heard. I don’t get what the end game is here — we’re all swayed and we think Top Gun and the sequel suck? it’s wild to me that you made the point you carved out a significant amount of time in your life to watch both movies. like, dude, there’s like four hours of movie if I’m doing my math right. are you factoring in the number of minutes you spent torrenting them and the time spent arguing on a message board?

imo top gun: maverick doesn’t subvert or refute the tom cruise successful hero formula in that he always saves the day, but unlike some other AAA action stars, he’s willing to have his characters wear their flaws on their sleeves (in the first act, he’s always triumphant and redeemed in the final act)

tg: maverick is, if anything else, about a middle-aged man who has failed to progress beyond his greatest loss and triumph, which were always sides of the same coin. the ending of the first movie leads us to believe he’s redeemed himself, that he’s no longer going to carry the death of his friend. he can grow up, move on, and progress through life.

this seems to be the case on the surface when the sequel begins, but then you realize — he’s a test pilot because his self-image hasn’t progressed one bit. he’s got no wife, he’s avoiding his peers, people repeatedly question why he’s still a low-ranking pilot instead of an admiral or mentor. it was bizarre to me when they showed him repeatedly posting on a message board about how he knows all kinds of things about all kinds of planes, has flown more types of planes than anyone else, and definitely isn’t posting his way through a mid-life crisis before he managed to be the first guy to hit mach ten in that new prototype but this might have just flown over my head, much like the fifth generation fighters in the movie’s conclusion

tl;dr sometimes you have to recognize there’s more to life than getting the girl, being the fastest pilot, and owning a cool motorcycle. but at the end it looks like maybe this time he keeps the girl, becomes a mentor/father figure, reconciles with his best friend/rival, and finally figures out how to age with dignity. pretty decent plot imo

Tom Cruise is 60 years old. He's been in approximately 53 movies.

So.

If this is his "midlife crisis" he's going to die when he's 120, and he'll probably be in at least another 50 or so movies.

Strap in, it's gonna b e a bumpy ride.

tom cruise plays a man of indeterminate age in most things these days

Apologies if I've said this before but: in the year 1983, my (Unitarian Universalist) Sunday school class got to vote on what movie we would see as our end-of-year treat. There were nine (9) votes for "Risky Business" and one (1) vote for "Terms of Endearment."

So yes, I first viewed the breasts of Rebecca de Mornay in the company of my church youth group. This was a formative experience and nothing before or since will ever rise to those heights of absurdity.

One of these days I am going to find out who voted for "Terms of Endearment." It has become my life's mission.

Eric, you've got to stop thinking of yourself as one of the hundred neediest cases

There isn't enough to keep me as busy as I should be, really

This absolutely belongs in a different thread but something I've been thinking about while flipping through the "how old is ILX" thread and writing in two dozen others: i'm eying middle age with a fairly well-rounded life to show for it. Most of you don't actually know me but I am, by literally anyone's standards, a remarkably well-culturally travelled, overeducated, curious, thoughtful guy. That's not to toot my own horn or act like I'm any better than whoever you are; those are just statements of fact. Yay me!

this is the funniest thing that has been posted on ilx in years

otm

if anyone thinks I’m a dolt (a word no one uses imo!) they’re keeping it from me. but I don’t think the reaction here was without precedent when people were talking about how a tv show hit them in personal, close to home ways and forks bombed in to shit on it without reading the recent posts (Bad Sisters iirc) without context gives that precedent. forks, you have maybe inadvertently been threadshitting for a while

I feel like things are pretty honest these days in these parts and internet communication is still messy but has a lot of prior work to contemplate.

the initial premise here was weirdly flawed. I was too young to watch Top Gun as a kid, but it was culturally omnipresent. I held myself as above the Bruckheimer school and perceived imperialist war machine crap for years, and also only watched the original in full a week before watching the sequel. I guess I’m a unicorn! But I seldom am, so it’s probably millions of us.

if anything, the past couple years have taught me you can do things guilt-free outside of the perception of imaginary cultural arbitrators. you can watch a dumb thing that makes you feel nice before bed. you can realize having the perfect playlist is dogshit compared to just sitting in a park or quietly making pottery.

there are no points to be traded in when you die, no one is going to squeak out their last gasp saying they wish they’d watched that obscure but acclaimed in small circles movie

This disagreement over the 2022 Top Gun Sequel has striking parallels with another disagreement over an Anglo-Irish Treaty

is there significant space between forks being wrong about a movie and "threadshitting"

yes

is engaging with him strongly on the former good

yes

is just flinging out the latter ok

no

is the point of the whole exercise to be able to disagree and entertain ourselves- id have said so

perhaps im wrong

honestly I think I could have diffused this situation had I pointed out "furtermore" soon as I read it but was too in my cups/beside myself at the time, anyways thank you for that

have not seen either top guns but I suspect everyone is otm in their own special way, I do think it is bullshit that kelly mcgillis wasn't involved on account of the crime of...being an old lady, we can't all look like jennifer connolly, or tom cruise who is older than my dad yet looks younger than me, somehow

He eats placenta for breakfast.

is just flinging out the latter ok

no

Watch that much TV

if you dont care about the hot dog sequel you are wrong

I had a hot dog the other day for the first time in about 16 years, it was fine

Aren't we finally over shit stirring and ad hominem and snark and unfocused aggression and derision and bad faith readings of one another's jotted off texts?

to clarify, I don't think there was any threadshitting in this thread

you have to stay very continent while in the Top Gun thread or things get real bad when you do that 180 degree inversion after bombing the undisclosed enemy country

it seemed weird to me that they were bombing Norway in that film

i hope you'll stay, forks. i hope i didn't add to the bad feelings with what i said upthread - i was just trying to be funny.

i don't understand pop culture or really criticism in general, even after 20 years on this board, so i try to stay out of the serious discussions about it. if i were the millionth person to talk shit on something like the MCU (the massive popularity of which alienates me as a human being) it would be a complete train wreck. similarly, i am completely incapable of talking about something like top gun. i enjoy reading everyone else's takes though

(and even then, now i re-read what i posted and am afraid that it will be misunderstood and people will hate me for it. i am not sitting on a throne judging MCU and pop culture; i am a bird that just flew into a window, again)

The Oscar for Best Sound goes to...'Top Gun: Maverick' #Oscars #Oscars95 pic.twitter.com/zog6ZAvNjf

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) March 13, 2023

Finally watched Maverick last nite... it was seriously one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen!! If I were a screenwriter, I feel like I would have been embarrassed to even pitch most of the plot points; let alone write them down; let alone put them in the actual movie!

FWIW, I don't even like the first Top Gun that much (re-watched that one recently, as well) – but this made it look like The f'in Godfather!

Even the best aspects (IMO) of the first movie – terrific aerial photography; making air combat feel "exciting" – weren't really present here, because it felt so totally unrealistic (I don't know how "realistic" Top Gun actually was, but it at least feels that way). Once the actual dogfighting finally happens in Maverick, the movie has long since entered the realm of pure fantasy. (Also, with regard to the actual mission itself – do they think no one remembers Star Wars??)

Anyway, kind of shocked this was so widely loved – I feel like I have a good tolerance for "dumb fun," but this wasn't really "fun" (beyond laughing at it)!

I can't stand the first one, even the flying sequences.

the empire lost in star wars

which was also, come to think of it, pure fantasy!

Yeah, it was good fantasy!

well i wont be disagreeing with a word of that pan obv

obv