Category: Joseph Kosinski

F1

By Marc S. Sanders

Miguel and I are the two unpaid movie critics who find ways to entertain ourselves beyond the IMAX picture on the screen.  By now, I know when Nicole Kidman is arriving and I start her off by saying out loud “We come to this place…”. Mig turns his head down in sarcastic annoyance.  We applaud at the return of Jaws in theaters this August.  There’s a rhythm we chemically thrive on.

Thirty minutes after a series of trailers plus an unwanted Allstate commercial (Thanks a lot AMC), the film begins, and the personal hand gestures begin.  Excuse me a moment.  I must pause for a moment.  (a-hem!) 

GET YOUR MINDS OUT OF THE GUTTERS!!!  

Now, where were we?  

Oh yes…

During the running time of Brad Pitt’s racing movie, F1, there were animated fist pumps (“Yeah!  Alright!!”).  There was rhythmic poking in and out of my right index finger jamming into my left thumb and forefinger (“Brad is about to get it on with Kate, the staple romantic interest, played by Kerrie Condon”).  A palm up facing twirl of the wrist (“Of course.” “Naturally!”). There’s the muted gasp pat on Miguel’s arm (“Is it?” “Could it be?” “Don’t tell me!” “Brad is fully recovered and walking through the steam cloud to pilot his race car?” “Again?”  “For one last time?”).  F1 covers all the expected beats.  

Frankly, I am not aware of too many racing films.  Days Of Thunder with Tom Cruise, of course.  Ron Howard did an engaging piece called Rush.  Ford Vs Ferrari works better as a bio than just a racing movie.  Pixar has its series of cute films. Still, just like the new Jurassic World picture, and I’m sure the latest Superman iteration arriving later this week, F1 is all too familiar like any kind of sports movie or Top Gun on the track Jerry Bruckheimer pic.

Tom Cruise—I mean Brad Pitt—is legendary stock car racer Sonny Hayes, a middle aged, washed up and broke recovering gambler desperately invited by his friend and former teammate Gabriel (Javier Bardem) to rescue his racing team from going belly up and leaving him hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.  Gabriel already has a cocky, promising driver named Joshua enlisted. He is performed very well with a lot of appeal by Damson Idris.  However, the young man does not have focus yet and lives for his social media likes and attention.  It’s up to Sonny to make the Formula One racing squad look like a contender while reigning in Joshua who can’t let go of personal conceit and a jealous animosity.

Kerry Condon is the engineering designer of Sonny and Joshua’s racing vehicles.  With each race, Kate trouble shoots what needs improvement and what can advance the drivers’ rankings.  Too bad she can’t fully invest her expertise as F1 demands she flirts with Sonny.  (Cue my right index finger while Miguel is ready to brush it away.)

The most impressive moments from Joseph Kosinski’s (Top Gun: Maverick) film are the racing scenes.  You are seeing both Pitt and Idris tucked within the snug cockpits of these low to the ground speedster machines.  The editing is superbly matched with the roaring sound and a pulsing soundtrack from another Hans Zimmer masterpiece.  

My one issue is the final cuts of the various races lacked overhead shots.  I would have liked to have seen moments from above where I could follow when the race cars pull in and out of a pit stop for example and stay on pace with unnamed competitors.  Kosinski gives an overabundance of close-up shots of the actors in the cars but not as much outside of the vehicles.  It’s all very exciting though, and when a film opens with revving engines playing in tandem with Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, well you have me hooked.

F1 is like another exciting amusement park ride that you’ve experienced a hundred times before.  In between the races, while there are well drawn characters played by good actors, there’s ho hum filling material that keeps this speedy ride going about a half hour to forty-five minutes too long.  The guys have to argue.  They have to lose the race.  They each have to crash their cars.  They have to be tricked into getting along.  There also has to be a traitor among the ranks.  There has to be sequences of music overplaying a series of different races and the voiceover commentators chiming in with standard fare like “…and here comes Sonny Hayes from behind…” As well, Pitt and Condon have to get it on.  She has to tell him she doesn’t get romantically involved with racers before they hump each other’s brains out (Cue the index finger!).  

Sonny also has to be told he’s finished, before emerging from that humid, sunlit steam cloud where Joshua and the pit crew slowly raise their sunglasses and drop their jaws, upon his return. (Cue the muted gasp, followed by my twentieth fist pump.)

Look, F1 is entertaining.  It’s well made.  It’s got great action with impressive direction and an enthusiastic cast.  Still, I’m tired of this more of the same.  I alluded to my same feelings yesterday with Jurassic World: Rebirth.  It’s all the same flavor and these iterations are not daring enough to take big risks or surprises with what they offer.  Consider Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.  Those films were expected to play by the same beats and yet there were some shocks to come through.  Look at what happened with The Empire Strikes Back.  Anyone see those surprises when first encountered?  The stakes were always surprisingly high, and the heroes were getting personally affected, not just episodically, but permanently.  

Blockbusters need not be so cookie cutter all of the time, but that’s exactly what is happening.  I already know the outcome of the upcoming Fantastic Four movie.  It could not be more apparent and unimaginative.  

I watched Companion which just hit HBO MAX earlier this month and in ninety minutes, that bloody delicious film diverts in so many different directions with a bare minimum setting and a small cast.  It’s as bloody as most thriller movies we’ve seen but an applied script turns on its axis over and over again.

On an IMAX screen, F1 especially delivers. Yet, while I’m absorbing well staged cuts of movie made racing footage, my mind is turning into comatose mush and the only thing that keeps it electrified is to acknowledge the standard beats.  

Declaring “Gentlemen, START YOUR ENGINES!” will not hold my attention for 200 laps.

Do it with me now:

Fist pump!

Finger fuck!

Muted gasp!

The Of Course!

Now you know the drill! Hit the gas!!! Turn up the volume and let Robert Plant remind you that You need coolin’/Baby I’m not foolin’

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

By Marc S. Sanders

Top Gun: Maverick is why we should never, ever give up on movie theaters and only settle for the flat screen TV.  This is a film, a sequel to a very hokey, cheesy 1980s blockbuster, that will top my list of most unexpected surprises.  This picture seemed inconceivable to accept, and yet, barring an unnecessary love story subplot, I relished every second of it.  Finally, a movie delivers more, a lot more, than its trailers ever promised.

One of Tom Cruise’s best films has him return to preppy boy Navy Aviator pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.  He’s a captain now, declining opportunities for promotion over the last near 35 years since we first saw him on screen in 1986.  Like Cruise, Maverick looks like he’s barely aged.  So, with that in mind, I guess we can accept that he can jack up his Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle to unbelievable speeds with no helmet, and can take a super powered jet to Mach 10 speed, crash it and survive with everything on his person still intact.

Maverick is called upon by his old Top Gun classmate and former competitor Iceman (Val Kilmer) to teach a class of the current one percent of elite fighter pilots.  They are about to embark on a mission to take out an enemy weapons depot hidden behind treacherous low altitude mountain terrain with sharp curves and narrow pathways.  The area is also highly secured with machine guns, rockets, advanced radar, and enemy fighter jets.  This film truly convinced me that this mission is actually impossible.  Even Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Mission Force couldn’t survive this. 

The highlight of Top Gun: Maverick is of course the aerial training and combat maneuvers done with actual F-18 jets that Cruise has gone on record insisting that the cast fly in.  The barest minimum of CGI and manufactured effects were used.  As a producer powerhouse in Hollywood, if Tom Cruise demands his action to be as convincing as possible, you are going to get your finished product.  Much of the second act of the film focuses on Maverick outsmarting his students in the skies.  These are the best the country has to offer but they haven’t encountered Maverick yet.  The planes fly at one another and over each other and spiral together like a well synchronized ballet.  I believe the footage that Tony Scott provided in the first Top Gun film still holds up very well.  In this new film, it’s a tremendous enhancement. I know nothing about the laws of physics or computing the trajectories a jet can make at a particular speed, but what this film demonstrates is that what seems inconceivable is downright actual.  You can not help but be impressed.

Still, to satisfy my particular movie requirements cannot hinge on action alone.  I have to care about the characters.  The characters are the stakes at play in dangerous action films like Die Hard or Indiana Jones.  It’s what heightens the suspense.  Fortunately, the script from Peter Craig takes time to invest in an older, more mature Maverick who remains haunted, but wiser following the loss of his best friend and co-pilot Goose.  Now, Goose’s son, code name Rooster (Miles Teller) is one of the stand out students who holds a grudge against Maverick.  It’s not as simple as the guy losing his father at a young age.  There’s more to it to be revealed. 

Teller plays well off of Cruise, as do the other hot shot students made up of Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, and Glen Powell.  They’re all daredevil pilots like the first film offered, but they are written with more believability this time.  These are not the frat house beach bum guys that were so often shown in 1980s pictures.  Powell, known as Hangman, and Teller’s Rooster fill the Iceman/Maverick opposition here.  Only this time, it gets more personal as the characters go after their back stories and history.  Maverick is caught in the middle.  So, the drama is well played here. 

Director Joseph Kosinski makes the mission easy to comprehend.  Graphic maps show the impossible trajectory these pilots are expected to face.  The audience easily understands the challenges of going at impossibly low altitudes followed by fast upward careens into near atmospheric space while still trying to maintain consciousness and not get shot down. 

At the very least, to enjoy this picture, I think I’m thankful that I’m not a Navy pilot.  If I was, perhaps I’d be apt to dismiss the daring stunts that are committed over the course of the film.  I don’t want to know what can and can’t be done.  Let me have my illusion.  What’s especially appreciated is the perspective you’re given from the cockpit of these jets whether they are flying in a straight line, or alongside another plane or when Cruise himself is there in his trademark Maverick helmet taking his aircraft into an inverted and upside-down position with the top of the snowcapped mountains beneath him.  It’s positively mind-blowing. 

Maybe you have an idea of how the film will end up.  I won’t spoil it, but I certainly stopped thinking about it as the movie played along.  This movie had my undivided attention for just over two hours.  Moments occur where characters are in such convincing peril that any outcome would have worked and kept the integrity of the film.

Naturally, there’s a love story.  Most people didn’t care for the romance of the first film.  Not me.  I really liked how Kelly McGillis and Cruise performed together.  It was sweet and sensitive.  It took its time.  (See my review.)  For this picture, McGillis wasn’t welcomed back.  Google her quite frank and very honest response as to why she’s not here.  Instead, Jennifer Connelly romances Cruise as a bartender named Penny Benjamin (yes, the Admiral’s daughter).  Opposite Cruise, they look like a good couple.  However, when their shared scenes come up, honestly if you need a pee break this is when to rush out of the theatre.  The two characters don’t challenge one another like the first time around.  Penny has to just hide Maverick from her teen daughter.  Meh.  That’s sitcom fare.  This is nothing terrible here.  It’s just not overly necessary.  Does Maverick need to have a love interest?  Is it the end all be all?  This movie would have held up just fine without the love story.  Just be glad there’s another shirtless beach scene for the guys to frolic around this time with a couple of footballs. 

Without question, to date as of this writing, Top Gun: Maverick is the best picture I’ve seen this year.  I already declared the inventiveness of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once as one of the reasons why that film is one of the best of the year.  Cruise’s film tops it though.  The craftsmanship on display is like nothing you’ve seen before.  It challenges the technical marvels of James Cameron’s auspicious achievements and raises the bar for anything to come out after it.

If people like Tom Cruise and other daring producers in Hollywood can manufacture films on this level of story, adventure and suspense, then please, please, please do not close up the Cinematic Multiplexes.  Top Gun: Maverick is meant for the big screen; the biggest screen you can find with the best sound system available.  I’ll be sure to see again it while it remains in theatres.  In fact, release this film every summer until something else tops it.  It is a that good a film.