Knee-jerk review: "Top Gun Maverick"

1. With the fade in comes that one familiar chime (you know the one) over a percolating drum machine and it's like getting enveloped in a warm 80s cocoon.
2. This is what popcorn Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking looks like, people.  Big stunts, big emotions, big drama.  It cooks.
3. The core of the movie explores the lingering grief surroundings Goose's unexpected death in the original movie, which may be uninspired (we also get the expected insults to Maverick that he's, like, a dinosaur) but it certainly seems appropriate.
4. Ms. Fry rightly pointed out that the mission our heroes undertake here - an air strike in a foreign country - would likely be considered an act of war. 
5. This is surely the most likable that Miles Teller has even been on screen.  To us, his performances usually default to smarmy creep.
6. We don't want to spoil it and say "Danger Zone" appears on the soundtrack... but "Danger Zone" appears on the soundtrack.  Revvin' up your engine, listen to her howlin' roar.
7. Poor Val Kilmer.
8. We did the online game where you're given a Top Gun-style call sign.  Ours was Hatchet.  How lame is that?
9. It's one of those movies where you can't help but wonder how the heck did they film this?  Some of the camera angles seem utterly impossible.
10. Jennifer Connelly is as luminous as ever.  Sigh.
11. That football game on the beach makes no sense.
12. We're getting rusty.  That pitch perfect climax should have been so totally obvious, yet we didn't see it coming.
13. There's dramatic license and then there's the necessary plot point here that asks audiences to believe that American fighter jets are suddenly technologically inferior to this unnamed foreign country.  We ain't buying it.
14. "Talk to me, Goose."
15. There really is a bar where you have to buy everyone a round if you have your cell phone on the bar.  The mugs hanging from the ceiling belong to active aviators - you get the mug when you get your call sign.
16. All this, plus Ed Harris and Jon Hamm glowering in Navy uniforms.
17. We're not crying, you're crying.

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Eight quick notes on HBO's "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty"

1. Many pundits - including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - complained loud and long about the ridiculous, exaggerated vibe of the show.  To us, that was a feature, not a bug.  The show works as a fable, a larger-than-life fictionalized spin on true events that were already a little ridiculous.  HBO and the producers just gave the whole thing a little nudge into crazy.  It's practically satire in some ways.  No reasonable person should ever consider this thing a documentary.  At this point, in fact, we have Google or Wikipedia open on our phone anytime we watch a movie or TV show that's supposedly based on a true story.  An instant fact check is often essential.
2. That said, it is curious that the show made Jerry West such a wild-eyed maniac.
3. John C. Reilly was born to play Jerry Buss.  Phenomenal.  We always remember Buss as the old-timer covered in locker room champagne with Shaq and Kobe during the 2000-2002 three-peat title run.  The depiction of him here as a creepy ladies man horndog - which, apparently, does have truth to it - was rather shocking.
4. On paper, a shaggy, montage visual style seeking to create a late 70s/early 80s vibe would seem like a pretty obvious choice.  Lots of movies use different film stocks and styles and jump cuts to create a period mood.  Yadda yadda yadda.  But there was something different about this.  The grainy film stock with 8mm-style sprocket holes, the glitchy TV video images, it all came together beautifully.  Along with the wardrobe and the set design, "Winning Time" may not be 1980 accurate, but it feels 1980 accurate.
5. Was Larry Bird really that surly and angry?  Dude.  Bonus points for using a beer car to catch the tobacco spit.
6. Fun fact: so it turns out HBO didn't want to call the show "Showtime" - which was what the Lakers of the 80s called themselves and what the book was titled on which the show is based - because of the competing Showtime pay-TV service.  HBO's Showtime.  Sort of be like Showtime's HBO, we suppose.
7. Aside from Reilly, the actors who played Magic Johnson and Kareem (Quincy Isaiah and Solomon Hughes) walk that line between perfectly evoking the real person without ever lapsing into an cringey impersonation.  Like much of the show, they feel exactly right.
8. All of that tedious business with the Buss family and the dying matriarch Sally Field seemed very important to the producers, but for us it paled in comparison to the layered drama and intrigue of the players and coaches trying to make this whole thing work.

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Knee-jerk review: "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"

1. For us, the Marvel fanfare is becoming just about as exciting as the 20th Century Fox fanfare.  Builds genuine anticipation.

2. The emotional core of these Marvel superhero movies always works pretty well.  Here it's all about that nagging wonder about "what could have been."  Would you be happier in another timeline where things turned out a little different?  You married the one that got away, you avoided some terrible tragedy.  It would be different, yes, but would it better?

3. There's also fascinating elements of nature versus nurture - how much of your personality traits are innate and shared with your counterparts across endless universes and how much is uniquely yours and yours alone?

4. That said, it's still a superhero movie which means there are endless, exhausting CGI-driven scenes with characters firing colored laser beams at each other and giant buildings and rooms crashing and crumbling to the ground. 

5. These movies have come a long, long way from the relatively small-scale, tech-driven movie that was Iron Man.  Now audiences are completely okay with witches and magic and monsters and inter-dimensional travel and aliens.  Imagine showing this wacked-out movie to someone in 2008.

6. The much-discussed Illuminati scene is pretty awesome, as is the way the sequence is used to demonstrate the power of the villain.  At that point, it genuinely seems impossible for our heroes to prevail, which is exactly what you want in a movie.

7. We didn't know Rachel McAdams played this big a part in the movie.  Pleasant surprise.

8. Is it a coincidence that two mystical books play a big role in a movie directed by Sam Raimi whose Evil Dead movies centered on a supernatural book?

9. We think people would buy Pizza Poppa T-shirts.

10. Almost all of the combat sorcerer sequences go on too long.

11. You may have heard this is the darkest Marvel movie.  And that's 100% correct.  Things get really weird and really creepy at the end - there's one third act turn that we had to laugh at it's just so insane and audacious.  But it's very much in Raimi's wheelhouse.

12. We don't know much about these Marvel characters, but Benedict Cumberbatch certainly seems perfectly cast.

13. Bonus points for resolving the central conflict through emotion rather than brute force.

14. Not sure how to feel about that third eye business.

15. It's the kind of movie where the villain works so very hard to try and catch and kill someone, but then the minute they have the victim in their grasp... the villain chooses to then drag their feet, inexplicably savoring the moment rather than just going in for the kill, thus allowing the heroes time to regroup and fight back. 

16. We suspect that you're going to be way ahead of the characters more than once, seeing where this is all going but still having to sit impatiently waiting for the narrative to catch up.

17. It's definitely... decent.

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