The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:
I Saw The TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land.
IF
Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.
Back to Black
Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27.
The Blue Angels
This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.
Flash Gordon
The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.
The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.
The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.
Run, Tom Cruise, run! Run he does in Dead Reckoning Part One.
Last summer, the movie business had been all but pronounced dead. Conventional wisdom said that audiences, locked out of theaters by the Covid pandemic (remember that?), were now permanently captured by streamers. Then Top Gun: Maverick roared into wide release to the tune of $1.5 billion, and by the end of the year, Paramount had reversed course, proclaiming that the studio would only produce films intended for theatrical release.
The rest of 2022 and 2023 have turned out to be fairly average years, box-office-wise. Numbers are down from 2019, which was a banner year thanks to Avengers: Endgame, but nothing like the catastrophe of 2021. Then, there were the twin failures of Ant-Manand The Wasp: Quantumania, which lost Marvel/Disney $120 million, and the $200-million bath Warner Bros. took on The Flash, which may end up being the biggest box office flop of all time.
Then, on May 2nd, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the studios, and last week, the Screen Actors Guild joined them on the picket lines. Now, the doom and gloom is back in Tinseltown. The problem that the last few months has exposed is this: The alleged break-even point for a film like The Flash is $600 million. (I say “alleged” because “Hollywood accounting” is synonymous with “lying.”) This is not a business model; it’s a gambling addiction. And none of it is the fault of the writers who are paid a pittance by the flailing gamblers, or the actors, most of whom don’t earn the $27,000 a year necessary to qualify for SAG’s health insurance.
Enter Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Director Christopher McQuarrie and the returning Impossible Mission Force had their budget and schedule blown by Covid delays, but promised a big on-screen payoff. They delivered on that promise.
The film’s dense, fast-moving cold open harkens back to the franchise’s roots as a Cold War-era spy series. The Sevastopol, a Russian nuclear submarine testing out a new AI-powered stealth system, is discovered and fired upon by an American sub. When they return fire, the American sub is revealed to be a WarGames-style computer mirage, and their own torpedo turns against them. Meanwhile, back in Washington, CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny, returning) is briefing DNI Denlinger (Cary Elwes) on the Entity, a cyberweapon that achieved sentience and escaped into the wilds of the internet after sinking the Sevastopol. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, running) is dispatched to retrieve a key that may be the key to controlling the rogue AI. But Hunt and IMF ops Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames, sitting) have other ideas. Burned by six films’ worth of betrayal and disavowal at the hands of their bosses, they decide that no one can be trusted with the Entity’s power, and vow to destroy it.
MI represents both the good and the bad of Hollywood in 2023. It is a $295-million film in a 25-year-old franchise built around an aging movie star and an intellectual property whose origin few remember. But unlike butt-ugly CGI fests like The Flash and Quantumania, all that money is on the screen. Yes, there’s CGI in MI, but that’s really Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a cliff in the Alps. When the climax pays tribute to The General, they really drive a locomotive off a real bridge, just like Buster Keaton. Yes, it’s too long (geez, this is only part one?), but the story is clear and the editing brisk. Unlike too many big-budget gambles, I never felt bored and ripped off. Plus, Tom Cruise fighting an AI in the middle of a strike triggered by a threat to replace actors and writers with AI is just too perfect. I’m rooting for Cruise.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Now playing Multiple locations
Tom Cruise hangs on in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning pt. 1.
After many pandemic-related delays and a storm of publicity, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are back with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Pt. 1. This time, the Impossible Mission Force is sent to take down The Entity, an advanced AI that has gained sentience and is threatening humanity. How does that lead to Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a frickin’ mountain? We’re about to find out.
John Boyega stars with Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi action comedy which pays homage to/sends up 70s Blackspolitation films. Teyonah Parris, David Alan Grier, and Kiefer Sutherland also star. Expect multiple Tyrones.
Hey, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still in theaters, and it’s still good! Harrison Ford’s victory lap as the beloved archeologist/adventurer delivers the Spielbergian action beats you crave — even if James Mangold is at the helm this time.
While the big studios pour six-digit budgets into tent poles expecting to hit home runs, Blumhouse moneyballs the game with consistent base hits like Insidious: The Red Door, which made its $15 million budget back in two days.
On Wednesday, July 19, at Crosstown Theater, Indie Memphis will present a selection of short films from the Odú Film Festival in Brazil, which is a production of the Black Freedom Fellowship. These shorts include “Ara” (“Time”) a ghost story from director Laryssa Machada imagining a dialogue with her grandfather, whom she posthumously discovered was gay.
“Ara”
Then on Thursday, July 20, Crosstown Arts Film Series presents John Waters’ Female Trouble, the film which introduced viewers to the immortal drag legend Divine.
Tom Cruise was in town. In 1992. He was filming The Firm.
WMC-TV covered the crowds that showed up to see the star.
“No, he was not shopping at the Walmart in Collierville,” said then-reporter Denise DuBois-Taylor. “No, he and Nicole Kidman were not house hunting in Germantown.”
The gem of a clip surfaced recently on YouTube thanks to a Facebook group called “Things That Aren’t in the Memphis Area Anymore.” Long name, but worth the follow if you’re looking for hometown nostalgia.
Memphis Women
On Twitter last week, Big Mek started a “#Memphis Women Thread.” It’s now an endless scroll of photos and videos of women showing their stuff.
Squeak checked in to say, “I didn’t see any other Memphis women posting.” She identified herself as a “Memphis woman.” Then, she showed her credentials.
Posted to Twitter by @mndinmybusiness
Poplar Plaza
Posted to Reddit by etherbeta
Reddit user u/etherbeta shared studies of redesigned Memphis locales last week. Above, a revamped Poplar Plaza would have a movie theater, new restaurants, residences, and an electric vehicle charging lounge that would complement the nearby Exxon.
Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales.
Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.
The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?
The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.
Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.
On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.
On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.
Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise hug it out in Top Gun.
Muck Sticky is a Memphis rap legend. He has traveled the world bringing his party music to the stoned masses, and he shows no signs of letting up. He just released his 16th album, the 22-track Man in Pajamas.
Back before the pandemic delayed the release of Top Gun: Maverick, Muck mentioned to me that he had never seen the original Top Gun. I asked if he would do a “Never Seen It” with me. Now, more than two years later, The Sticky Muck joined me remotely from his new place on the beach in central Florida to watch Tony Scott’s 1986 summer blockbuster. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: Tell me what you know about Top Gun.
Muck Sticky: I don’t know much. I know the “Danger Zone” song is from Top Gun, I did watch Hot Shots! a whole lot when I was growing up. Mostly what I know about Top Gun is what I saw in Hot Shots!, so I’m hoping it lives up to it.
CM: Well, that’s a unique perspective. You’re going to get some jokes that never made sense before. So, why haven’t you seen Top Gun? Is it just one of those things that you missed over the years?
MS: In all honesty, growing up, my cousin liked Top Gun a whole lot, and I didn’t like my cousin. So I just kind of didn’t want to watch it.
CM: Okay, we’ll see if that instinct was right!
110 minutes later…
CM: Muck Sticky, you are now a person who has seen Top Gun. What did you think?
MS: I went to the Danger Zone and took out all the MiGs!
CM: Was it what you thought it was going to be?
MS: I expected a whole lot of flying montages, and there were a lot of those, with music. That was pretty cool. I totally get a lot more of the Hot Shots! references now! It makes a whole lot more sense.
CM: Of course, the flying sequences are just incredible.
MS: Fantastic! Great footage! [Jerry} Bruckheimer, I see why he’s stayed as prominent in the industry as he has.
CM: Bruckheimer is responsible for the most expensive movie ever made. You know what it was?
MS: No.
CM: It’s Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides—$410 million.
MS: Wow.
CM: The director was Tony Scott, who was Ridley Scott’s brother. His movies always looked incredible.
MS: The cinematography is amazing. I found myself really getting into the just the way it looked over all, you know? Especially those epic shots where he’s riding the motorcycle with the sunset behind him. It’s kind of silhouetted. I mean, I’ve seen those images, before but seeing the movie in its complete form is really spectacular. I was thoroughly impressed.
CM: Those motorcycle shots… I probably haven’t seen this movie since the nineties. It’s been a long time. This time, I noticed the motorcycle shots. It’s the same shot, like, three or four times. He’s going around a corner and going down a street with palm trees. He probably spent an afternoon driving around in circles. It was like, “OK, Tom! Go around the block one more time!”
“Drive around the block one more time, Tom!”
MS: Boy, they really got their money’s worth on the licenses for “Take My Breath Away” and “Danger Zone” and “Great Balls of Fire” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” I think I heard those songs a half a dozen times.
CM: Let’s talk about the music, because the soundtrack was a very big deal.
MS: I really liked hearing a lot of Memphis in there—Otis Redding “Sitting on The Dock of the Bay” and, of course, “Great Balls of Fire!”
CM: Harold Faltermeyer was responsible for the synth score. My high school marching band did a medley of “Danger Zone”, “Take My Breath Away”, and the “Top Gun Theme.” What did you think about the synth score?
MS: Yeah, it was cool. I can see where Stranger Things and modern shows that are going back to that stuff came from. There’s even bands that are using that sort of sound, and I can see where that score inspired a lot of stuff.
I love a score that has a feel to it, that gives the movie a feeling. I think he captured it really well. It fits the movie perfectly, you know what I mean? I didn’t ever catch myself noticing, you’re watching a movie. You want to get lost in a movie, and I got lost in it. It’s hard to do that. I’m usually taken out of it, whether it’s from bad acting or music that doesn’t fit. There are several movies where I feel like certain musical elements don’t fit, like Django Unchained — “100 Black Coffins,” the Rick Ross song, just doesn’t fit. It takes me out of the movie.
CM: I totally get it. I’m the same way. The Dune movie that came out last year was great in every respect, except the score. It’s Hans Zimmer, who has done a lot of great stuff. But the score was just like…
MS: I’ve seen the old Dune.
CM: This one is a lot better than the old one. I love you, David Lynch. I’m sorry to say this in a public forum, but yeah, the Dennis Villeneuve Dune a lot better than the old one, except for the score. It was just a puddle of mush, didn’t shape it at all for me. I kept noticing how good the score was in Top Gun, though. You were right — it is all montage. The aerial photography, first of all, is amazing, right? But if you think about it, all they had was planes flying around and doing various maneuvers. They had to put all that together in the editing room to try and make it look like there’s a dogfight going on.
MS: Back in those days, they just sent guys up with cameras like, just shoot a bunch of stuff and we’ll figure out how to make it work.
CM: That’s exactly what happened, and to a certain extent that’s what happened with Top Gun: Maverick too! It’s always been like that, though. Have you ever seen The Aviator? Martin Scorsese?
MS: Yeah, for sure! Leonardo! I love that one.
CM: There’s that bit of where they’re filming Hell’s Angels, waiting all day to fly the combat sequences until the clouds were right. Because if there’s no clouds, you can’t tell if anything’s moving.
MS: You talked about the motorcycle shots being duplicates, but I noticed a few of those “target locking onto the aircraft” shots were duplicates, too.
CM: Or it’ll be the same shot, but it’s flipped left to right? I probably wouldn’t notice as much if I weren’t married to a film editor.
MS: I probably wouldn’t had I not edited a couple of films and so many music videos! But, you know, I love it. I feel you on being connected to editing. For me, that’s the magic of movies. You script something out, then you capture sometimes more and sometimes less than what you were hoping for. When you get home, you have to craft it in a way that makes sense. For them to just send guys up with some cameras saying, ‘Get what you can and we’ll make it work in the story,’ man…It was really pieced together very well, I thought.
Tom Cruise feels positive emotions about his F-14 in Top Gun.
CM: Young Tom Cruise. Now, he’s old Tom Cruise, but he still looks good. In Top Gun, he looks noticeably younger.
MS: Oh, yeah, for sure.
CM: What did you think about Maverick, and Tom Cruise’s performance in general?
MS: To be honest, it didn’t get me right away. I felt like everybody else was doing more acting than he was. But then there was the scene when Goose died — spoiler alert, I guess!
CM: It’s cool. The whole thing about “Never Seen It” is that everybody else has seen it except you.
MS: When Goose died, and he was got emotional about that, I felt like he was more upset about it than Meg Ryan’s character was, and she was his wife. I really bought into it. I did notice his unibrow quite a bit. I didn’t know he sported the unibrow so hard back in the day.
CM: One man, one brow, I say.
MS: I guess it kind of goes with his uni-tooth in the front too.
CM: What!?
MS: So I don’t know if you ever noticed, but his teeth are kind of aligned to one side. Like, there’s one that’s directly in the center.
CM: Oh god. I won’t be able to see anything else but that now.
Don’t look away from Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun.
MS: But he’s Tom Cruise! He’s is the biggest movie star on the planet! I think that’s right. Is he the biggest one? Who’s the biggest movie star on the planet?
CM: It’s got to be him. He’s going to make $100 million off Maverick, Who can compete with that?
MS: I’m going to see Maverick. It’s still in theaters, right?
CM: Yeah.
MS: We have an IMAX here, so I’m going to go check it out this week. I’ve got Hot Shots! pulled up right now!
CM: To me, Top Gun is the most Eighties thing ever made, the distillation of the Reagan eighties. There’s this military worship, but it’s also incredibly individualistic and competitive.
MS: Everybody’s competing with everybody at all times.
CM: It makes being a dick look like virtue. Maverick is a complete dick. If you watch a lot of Eighties movies, you’ll notice the protagonist is usually an asshole. Like Purple Rain — which is one of my favorite movies of all times, but if you think about it, Prince’s arc is, he’s a complete asshole at the beginning, and he’s slightly less of an asshole at the end.
MS: Just slightly.
CM: He’s improving, and I guess it’s the same for Maverick. When he’s a wingman, he abandons his flight leader, and that ends badly. The second time, he’s a good wingman. He learned the lesson when it counted.
MS: That’s kind of like what the Hero’s Journey is about. Any mono-myth is about taking a guy who’s already one way and transforming him into something else. He has to change through the arc of the story. The Eighties, back then everybody was very, very competitive. I don’t know what the right word is for it, is but for me, artistry is about helping us find our softer sides, the better side of ourselves. Working through our pain to find our better selves. I think moviemakers and musicians and artists across the board take what’s going on currently in the world, and try to express how they feel it could be better, you know?
CM: Yep.
MS: Maybe that’s why he learned that lesson and becomes a little bit better of a dude, throughout the course of the movie. He ends up hugging his rival.
CM: Yep.
MS: The end, that’s the artist in the movie maker, wanting people that are rivals and competitors to bond and be friends. We’re on the same side here. That’s what we, as artists, want to do in the world: we take the division, and we want to create unity, you know? That’s what I do in my music — I want to bring people together through music.
CM: You think art should ultimately have a pro-social message.
MS: I guess so. The evidence is there that we’re always going to be competitive. That never goes away. But at the same time, you get that good feeling when he says, ‘You can be my wingman!’ ‘No, you can be mine!’ and they hug.
CM: You just made me think of something. Top Gun is a product of the late Cold War — the Reagan eighties, American capitalism, competition, and individualism. And it was borderline propaganda for the Navy.
MS: Maybe not just borderline!
CM: Right, so have you ever seen Battleship Potemkin? It’s a Russian movie made in 1927 about a mutiny against the Tsar that started on a ship in Odessa harbor. It’s definitely a Soviet propaganda movie. There’s not a central protagonist. There’s not a guy who you focus on and follow his story the whole time. It’s all about the movement of groups of people who decided together to rebel against the Tsar. You can see the values of these two societies — or at least the values these societies thought had propaganda value!
You know, ’86 was still the Cold War, and the Russians were still the big bad guy. That’s who they were training to fight at Miramar. But the Russians are not the bad guys in Top Gun. You would think that they would be, but the bad guys who they actually kill at the end are just sort of “the enemy.”
MS: They never really say who it is. It’s never against any one people. It’s funny you say that, I did notice that I caught myself laughing, wondering who the bad guys were. They were just bad guys.
CM: Is this is one of the most homosexual movies ever made, or is it just me?
MS: The vibe very much made me think of working at Adventure River back in the day, like how big volleyball was back then. I did catch a lot of that. The volleyball scene, that’s the part where it’s the most out there.
CM: If you start like looking for it, it’s everywhere. Like the pilot in the ready room going, “This guy’s giving me a hard-on!”
MS: For sure. I will say, the love scene with Tom and Kelly McGillis, I totally expected there to be some food or something, because of Hot Shots! They break an egg on the girl’s stomach. Where did that come from?
CM: I think they were making fun of 9 1/2 Weeks there.
MS: Oh yeah. That’s one I’ve seen once or twice. Now that you say that, it makes sense.
CM:Top Gun has a classic Eighties love scene, in that there’s a blue light for some reason, and a saxophone playing in the distance.
MS: Everything’s in silhouette. I totally expected there to be some nudity, but there wasn’t.
CM: This is the age of the erotic thriller! There was nudity everywhere! The way he came on to her in the bar was a little weird.
MS: What do you mean?
CM: He followed her into the bathroom. You couldn’t get away with that today. It’s creepy. I mean, back in my dating days, I’ve known guys who have done that. And now that I think about it, there’s one specific instance when somebody followed the girl that I was trying to get with into the bathroom, and it totally worked. She went home with him instead of me.
MS: I remember a time when some girls followed me into a men’s bathroom. So, you know, it happens.
CM: So, bottom line. Would you recommend people watch Top Gun?
MS: Absolutely, especially if you like movies that engage you with just a fantastic display of moviemaking. I have massive respect for the craft of movie, because I know what it takes to make them and how difficult it is. And people often write off movies just because of the content or something, but Top Gun definitely exceeded my expectations.
In February, as Russian forces drove towards Kyiv, the Ukrainian people found their first war hero: A young pilot who shot down six Russian planes on the first day of the invasion, becoming the first European fighter ace in 77 years. The Ghost of Kyiv’s name would live forever alongside Eddie Rickenbacker and Chuck Yeager.
The problem was, as a Ukrainian defense official later told the BBC, The Ghost of Kyiv didn’t exist. He was “a super-hero legend created by Ukrainians.” Yes, the Ukrainian Air Force has fought bravely. They were widely expected to be wiped out in hours, but three months into the invasion, they’re still flying, and the feared Russian air wings have been badly mauled. The Ghost of Kyiv, it turns out, was the first salvo in the information war.
Since the days of The Red Baron, governments have recognized the propaganda value of a brave fighter pilot. In World War II, the greatest air ace in American history, Major Dick Bong, was pulled from combat in the Pacific to sell war bonds. In the last days of the Cold War, Americans gained our own fictional hero: Naval Aviator Lt. Pete Mitchell, callsign “Maverick,” played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun. In the summer of 1986, when Top Gun soared at the box office, while Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” topped the Billboard charts, the Navy saw a 500 percent increase in applications.
Tom Cruise
Top Gun established director Tony Scott’s reputation as a master visual stylist and made Cruise one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Rumors of a sequel circulated for years, but when Scott died in 2012, the project seemed to die with him. But Cruise, who was scouting locations with Scott two days before the director’s suicide, wouldn’t give up the ship. Now, after years of pandemic delays, Top Gun: Maverick is poised to rule Memorial Day weekend.
After a thoroughly ’80s-syle opening credits montage, which gives us doses of both Harold Faltermeyer’s chiming theme and “Danger Zone,” we catch up with Maverick, who has now been in the Navy for 30 years. By this time, he should either be an admiral, like his frenemy “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), now the commander of the entire Pacific fleet, or helming the Memphis to Mumbai milk run for FedEx. Instead, Maverick is a test pilot tasked with taking the experimental Darkstar scramjet to Mach 10. When he hears his commanding officer “Hammer” Cain (Ed Harris) is coming to scrap the program so he can devote the test budget to drones, Maverick sets off on one more flight to prove what this puppy can do. He succeeds, but crashes the plane in the process.
Instead of getting court-martialed, he is summoned back to Top Gun school in San Diego. There’s a top secret mission on tap to destroy a nuclear lab in some never-named “enemy”country, and they need Maverick to train the Navy’s top pilots for the suicidally dangerous mission — which just happens to resemble the trench run from Star Wars: A New Hope, but whatever.
The order of the day for director Joseph Kosinski was to ask himself “What would Tony Scott do?” And the answer is almost always, “training montage set to pop music.” Let’s be honest, that’s what we’re here for, right? Top Gun had some classics, including one of the most homoerotic moments of ’80s cinema, the pilot’s beach volleyball game, set to Kenny Loggins “Playin’ With The Boys.” Maverick puts his charges — including Miles Teller as “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s deceased partner Goose — through a similarly oiled-up team building exercise, but it’s made slightly less homoerotic with the inclusion of “Phoenix” (Monica Barbaro).
This new generation of pilots have the rock-hard abs necessary for success, but Maverick is still the hottest pilot in the sky. Air combat has been a favorite subject filmmakers since Howard Hughes spent a fortune staging dogfights for Hell’s Angels. Scott’s Top Gun aerial combat scenes are rightfully revered to this day. Armed with a squadron of F-18s, compact digital cameras, and a wild disregard for Tom Cruise’s personal safety, Maverick’s aerial sequences are the most spectacular ever filmed.
Despite mustard-smeared corndog dialog and gaping plot holes, Maverick is extremely entertaining. Cruise’s charisma is undeniable, and the whole enterprise never tries to be more than what it is: slick propaganda for the military industrial complex. It’s been a winning formula since 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and if the $801 billion we spend each year on sick toys like aircraft carriers means we can’t have nice things like health care, at least we get to watch the cool jets go vroom.
The Tandem Restaurant Partners — Tony and Stephanie Westmoreland in collaboration with Ryan Marsh — are the new owners of Front St. Deli, the iconic restaurant at 77 South Front and Union.
The eatery, which was featured in the 1993 film, The Firm, is slated to re-open by November. “Hopefully, in three months we’ll get her back open if not sooner,” Westmoreland says.
Tandem Restaurant Partners operates several Memphis restaurants, including Carolina Watershed, Side Car Cafe, and Ben Yay’s. “You’ll see us partnering with other restaurateurs to open up new concepts.”
Marsh, Westmoreland adds, will be involved with “what we do as a whole and getting this [Front St. Deli] up and going for us.”
Marsh, 31, the newest member of Tandem Partners, moved from Pennsylvania to Memphis when he was 14. He previously was operations manager for MOXY Memphis Downtown hotel across from Court Square.
Why did he want to get involved with Front St. Deli? “It’s the oldest deli in Memphis — over 45 years old,” he says.
And, he adds, “I’m a big fan of Memphis, a big believer in Downtown and the history we have down here.”
It’s important for him to help bring the Front St. Deli project to life and “bring it back to its former glories.”
Tom Cruise plays Harvard educated tax lawyer Mitch McDeere in the movie, which was filmed in Memphis. All the sandwiches were named after Cruise movies.
Those sandwiches will remain, Marsh says. “Tony and I put our heads together,” Marsh says. “Number one, I want to keep the Deli as close to what it was before. And Tony had a great idea to include some hot food, too. And we want to start bringing in gourmet hot dogs.”
Marsh also has a side goal: “I would like to bring authentic Philly cheesesteaks as well, But that’s still in limbo.”
And maybe open later using “third party delivery service like Uber for sandwiches and hot dogs for the Downtown community,”
And, Westmoreland says, “We have all the recipes. All the intellectual property came with the business.”
They will be “tweaking the menu, perfecting it, and making sure what we’re doing makes sense,” Marsh says. “The way the menu was structured before, it was all over the place. We want to simplify everything and eventually turn it over to where we’ll have a few cooks and I’ll be heading the day-to-day.”
Look for more room at Front St. Deli. “We’ll be going through negotiations over the next two and a half months to do an update,” Westmoreland says. “Not only update the building itself, but the outside facade.”
They’re working with the building owner to add two garage doors in front. “So, you can open up Front St. Deli to the public on the street side and enjoy Front Street not just from the inside, but outside as well,” Westmoreland says. “We’ll be reorganizing the inside to facilitate more people so you’ll have more seating. The goal is to have 10 to 15 people fit inside as well as outside.”
They want to “keep it as authentic as possible. Not change much. Keep the history of it. Keep it as close to the original as possible with just size changes and some rearrangement to get the capacity as full as we can.”
Front St. Deli “falls in tandem” with some of the other properties they have partnered with, including Hernando’s Hide-a-way, “one of the oldest music venues,” and Growlers, “being one of the nostalgic music venues in Memphis,” Westmoreland says. “Trying to preserve that nostalgia. And I think Front St. Deli is the same motive. Trying to keep Memphis the Memphis we remember growing up.”
Usually, Memphis in May honors a country like Chile or Sweden, in the spirit of cultural exchange. But this year marks 200 years since the founding of Memphis, so Memphis in May has officially decided to honor Memphis. Every year, Indie Memphis brings films from the honored country to town, and this year, in concert with the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission, they’re presenting a retrospective of films shot in the Bluff City.
Last week, Craig Brewer’s hip-hop classic Hustle & Flow screened to a big crowd at the Paradiso. It was most of the world’s first look at how Memphis sees ourselves in the 21st century. This Wednesday, Indie Memphis brings The Firm to the Paradiso — the first look a mass audience got of the city since Elvis.
The story of the film begins with a legal thriller by John Grisham, a Memphis lawyer turned Mississippi legislator who pursued an unlikely dream of being a novelist. His first book, A Time To Kill, was a minor hit, but nothing compared to The Firm, a bestseller which earned him a huge movie deal. Directed by Sydney Pollack, the film adaptation starred Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere, a Harvard Law graduate who gets a job offer from a prestigious law firm in Memphis. After convincing his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) to move to the city they know nothing about, he is taken under the wing of Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), a partner at the firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. What happens next is like Training Day, only with lawyers instead of cops.
Producer Michael Hausman, who helped shepherd Amadeus and Silkwood in the 1980s, was instrumental in getting this film in Memphis in 1992, and would go on to bring The People vs. Larry Flynt production here a few years later. He would later go on to work with Ang Lee on Brokeback Mountain.
The Firm‘s plotting is solid, and if it feels a little cliched now, it’s mostly because the hugely successful film been copied by TV shows for years. But for Memphis audiences, it’s not a series of unfortunate haircuts and just the origin of the “Tom Cruise Running” trope that’s interesting about the film. It’s now a scrapbook of what the city looked like in the 1990s. For many, it was the first time anyone knew we had a monorail here. (You did know we had a monorail here, right?)
One of the great things about movies is that you get to have your cake and eat it, too. This is also one of the bad things about movies.
Take gun violence, for example. Everybody loves a good gunfight. Without them, you couldn’t make a good western. The “shoot ’em up” is actually a genre unto itself. Our good guys must be good with a gun, and they need only the thinnest of legal sanction or moral motivation to get us to accept images of them killing lots of people for our entertainment while still feeling good about ourselves. But in real life, we all agree gun violence is horrible. At the movies, we get to have our cake and eat it, too.
Gangster movies are another example. They take the conventional heroic structure, but plug in a bad guy instead of a good guy. We get that we’re not supposed to really be rooting for this guy doing all this horrible stuff, but he’s got the most close-ups, and that gangster really loved his mama, so we kind of root for him anyway. And if that objectively evil guy with the most close-ups is Tom Cruise, you bet we’re going to root for him.
In American Made, Cruise plays Barry Seal. When we first meet him, it’s 1978, and he’s an airline pilot for TWA with a sideline smuggling Cuban cigars into the United States in his carry-on. Always with a good eye for talent, the CIA, in the person of Monty “Schafer” (Domhnall Gleeson), recruits him to start flying covert spying missions in Central America. He quits TWA to start working for himself as an Independent Aviation Consultant (IAC) for the CIA. Pretty soon, he’s graduated from the Toronto-Baton Rouge milk run to dodging Sandinista ack-ack in Nicaragua. Then, budding businessman Pablo Escobar (Mauicio Mejía) discerns that a man with Seal’s aviation talents who enjoys the protection of the United States government would probably be good at smuggling cocaine, too. From 1977 to 1985, Seal was living the freelancer’s dream: a top-notch reputation that enabled him to command top dollar ($2,000 a kilo) from multiple clients with deep pockets.
But complications cropped up, as they always do. In Seal’s case, it was getting in the middle of a raid by Colombian paramilitaries and tossed in jail. “Schafer” springs him, but he must move his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) and two kids from Baton Rouge to Mena, Arkansas, just before the DEA executes a search warrant on his house. Fortunately, his buddies in the CIA set him up good, and in no time flat, he’s back in business and rolling in the dough.
American Made is directed by Doug Liman, who got his start in the indie ’90s with Swingers, a Hollywood hangout movie that launched the careers of Vince Vaughn and Iron Man director Jon Favreau, and Go, a Tarantino-flavored minor classic. Liman has not been fortunate with names lately, as his excellent, sci-fi Groundhog Day riff Edge of Tomorrow tanked after having its title changed from the more evocative Live, Die, Repeat. American Made is also a bland title hiding a tight, entertaining film. Screenwriter Gary Spinelli ties together the loose, anecdotal story with Seal’s videotaped confession. Like the seminal documentary Cocaine Cowboys, American Made is at its most fun when it’s exploring the mechanics of the drug trade. Liman puts cameras in the cockpits of tiny planes to give the audience the POV experience of dropping down onto a dirt runway, surrounded by jungle. When he gets laughs, it’s from the gleeful amorality of both the spies and the cartels, two groups who surely deserved each other.
Cruise turns up the douche flow to maximum and — despite a fluid, faux-Louisiana accent — it works like a charm. Seal knows how to do two things: fly any aircraft onto any dirt runway in the world, and glad hand good ole’ boys. But that’s all he needs to know to make more money than he knows what to do with. He’s the perfect subject for Liman, because he was caught between the Reagan administration’s two greatest foreign policy priorities: stopping (often illusionary) international communist conspiracies and the War on Drugs. First, he was getting paid handsomely by both sides; then he became a scapegoat for both sides’ failure. Such is the life of the freelancer.
