How deranged is The Current Year? How much time do you have? But here’s what the kids call a “leading indicator”: The truest, realest movie made for young men in perhaps two decades was created by a pint-sized monomaniacal freak of nature who genuinely believes that aliens crashed a bunch of DC-8s into a mountain 75 million years ago. This long-awaited sequel to Top Gun is better at every level than its predecessor. Supposedly Tom Cruise turned down a nine-figure sum to take it directly to a “streaming service”. You have to see this one in a theater, for now.
When you do, there will be a short interlude between the avalanche of advertorials/trailers (27 minutes at my local theater) and the film itself, in which Tom Cruise will thank you for coming to see him. “We have real F-18s, real flying,” he says. And he smiles as if it was no big deal to do this film largely for real, like people just get up in the morning and fly F-18s at 500mph a Honda Accord’s length away from the ocean with million-dollar cameras hanging off their noses. And then we’re off to the races.
“The only problem with the film,” one reviewer noted, “is that it is not 7 hours longer.” It’s hard not to agree with him. Top Gun: Maverick is utterly brilliant. Both for what it is, and for what it is not.
It is not capeshit.
Mild spoilers for the first half of Top Gun:Maverick follow.
Your humble author has railed against capeshit before, in a series of posts that I have had to temporarily vanish during however long I work in the insurance business, but here’s a dialed-down precis of my objections to the superhero films that have dominated theaters for years now:
Superhero shows are despicable. Not because they’re boring, not because they’re childish, and not even because the MCU has become a self-parody where identity politics matter more than the Silver Surfer’s difficulties with Galactus. Rather, it’s the underlying message that you start life with all your “powers” that makes Capeshit so morally stultifying. Superheroes are born super. They don’t earn it. Their parents rigged the game for them. This is even true of Batman and Iron Man; their superpower is being a combination of rich and amoral, said superpower being inherited from their parents.
To watch capeshit is to be dragged through hours of greenscreen CGI slush where people make weird hand gestures and scrunch up their faces while various lightning bolts and outrageous things happen thanks to their “powers”. The outcome of every contest is determined in advance by the relative merit of their “powers” and whatever gyrations the screenwriters of their film think should occur along the way. It should be noted that for a significant percentage of Capeshitters their “powers” are activated simply by getting really angry or agitated about something, and their powers become more, er, powerful the angrier they get. Children see this, they take notes, and it affects their behavior. Can’t you just see the superpowers waiting to get out of the person below?
If life were a movie, that is the precise moment when the beams would come out of her eyes, she would fly up into the sky, Hillary Clinton would be installed as President, and we could have had $7 gas plus a war with Russia all the way back in 2017. This woman thinks being angry and full of rage is a superpower, when in fact being powerlessly filled with rage is sort of an anti-superpower; it destroys your ability to affect the situation in a positive fashion.
By contrast, Top Gun: Maverick is a nonstop affirmation of real-life humanity and its power to improve. There’s nothing superhuman about Maverick himself; he is a great test pilot but hopelessly challenged in daily life, still kicking around the Navy solely because his old friend “Iceman” is the Admiral Of The Pacific Fleet and therefore able to get him out of whatever trouble comes up. A situation comes up that will require some hero-style flying. Might be a suicide mission. Is Maverick up for the challenge? Not the challenge of flying the mission, mind you. The challenge of teaching a new generation of Top Guns to take on the mission, and survive it.
The unnamed-but-obviously-Iran enemy has better tech, better missiles, and better planes. This one can’t be won by robots or lasers, and it especially can’t be won by kids who have never been challenged by real adversity in their lives. There’s a great scene where the admiral in charge tells Maverick,
“These are the best pilots in the world,” to which Maverick spits,
“And they’ve been told that their whole careers.” It’s quickly obvious that these “best pilots” aren’t ready for the mission. It’s going to take a miracle to get them there in time.
My older readers are not doubt confused right now. Isn’t that the plot of pretty much every war movie ever, up to and including the fine Heartbreak Ridge, made when Clint Eastwood was the same age (57) as Tom Cruise in this one, but minus the anti-aging properties of Scientology? Well, of course it is — but if you’re a Millennial or younger, you’ve never seen any of that stuff. The past fifteen years have been nothing but capeshit and various takes on The Hunger Games, sprinkled liberally with endless Star Wars trash.
(Digression Zero: Is Star Wars capeshit? I’m afraid so. Worse yet, it’s capeshit mixed with aristocratic fantasies, as David Brin points out. When George Lucas decided to retcon Luke into being Vader’s son, something that happened after Alan Dean Foster wrote Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, the whole story collapsed into “man kills his father to take power”, a tale as old as time. And of course you can only really rule in the Star Wars Universe if you are genetically predisposed to use the Force, another Lucas addition-after-the-fact. None of this will keep me from enjoying the original three films, but it’s a damned shame.)
(Digression One: Is Matrix capeshit? No but mostly yes. Anybody can learn to be superhuman in the Matrix, but the highest level is reserved for the person born into it, “the One”, and without them the victory condition for humanity can’t take place.)
There’s been some discussion as to whether TG:M is a “right-wing” film. I’m not sure there’s been an actual right-wing film in my lifetime. TG:M feels a little right-wing nowadays just because it pays only lip service to the worst of modern cultural requirements. The new group of pilots is exactly as diverse as it needs to be, but it’s pretty obvious that when the chips are down it’s going to be the handsome white dudes who make it happen. This is largely a story of self-assured white men doing brave stuff, most notably with a star turn for newcomer Glen Powell doing a wonderful job of somehow embodying both a young Tom Cruise and a young Val Kilmer. Well, eighty-six percent of combat-facing pilots are white men. So it’s accurate. If you made a movie about the NBA, you wouldn’t have most of the characters be white or Hispanic, would you? This is not necessarily political, but people are going to make it political.
I’d say the only “right-wing” aspect of the movie is the idea that human beings can train and improve to do exceptional things without recourse to superpowers or other external authorities. As noted previously, this used to be the central idea behind the majority of movies made for young men, whether we are talking about “The Karate Kid” or “Rad” or “Rocky IV”. This idea is now considered to be dangerous. It could lead to young men getting off their couches, closing their laptops, and participating in the real world. Our Uniparty would really rather you sat back and
CONSOOMED
all the capeshit, all the junk food, all the pornography, all the weed, everything that keeps young men from going outside and being exceptional(ly dangerous to the regime). I cannot possibly emphasize enough the difference between capeshit and real movies here. Watching capeshit leaves you feeling entertained at best. Watching “Rocky IV” makes you want to go punch someone, or maybe learn to punch someone. There’s a big difference. Kids emulate what they see. If they see that anyone can become a hero pilot, they’ll behave accordingly. If they are confronted on a daily basis with a fictional world where only the chosen-at-birth have a say in what’s going on, they’re going to take their cues from that, as well. That’s the danger of Capeshit Land.
I’m sure that a few of my more “seen-it-all” readers will be quick to pop in with stories about how they read a few comics as kids and didn’t turn out homeless, but there is a big difference between reading the occasional comic and existing in a world that is absolutely immersed in capeshit. The stories we tell to young men make a big difference in their lives. A significant percentage of them have no effective parenting. They will be parented by the things they read and watch.
It was just lovely to see Kawasaki back on board. The first “Top Gun” film made the GPZ900R, called “Ninja” on these shores, a star. It’s joined here by the Ninja H2, which is no faster than my ZX-14R but looks more proportional with a five-foot-seven rider. A few of my military pals have noted that the most unrealistic thing about the movie is Maverick being permitted to ride without all the military-required safety gear. Even with all of our Uniparty Forever Wars (that we eventually lose to a bunch of goat farmers with bolt-action rifles, thus giving the lie to the leftie trope that “you can’t hold off a tank with an AR-15”) the Armed Forces often lose more soldiers to sportbike crashes in a year than to actual combat, as many as 194 in a single twelve-month period. So the military takes sportbike safety seriously.
There’s really only one change I would have made to the film: I would have had less Maverick and more of the new kids. It’s their time to shine. Tom Cruise is just on the front end of Generation X, so I know that like me he has experienced a lifetime of Boomers doggedly holding on to everything from leadership positions to control of what gets played on the radio. I hope that he and I can avoid the temptation to do the same ourselves. Any movie about jet pilots, or race car drivers, or any other heroic activity should focus on the young people who are actually in a place to do the thing. A world where Jeff Bridges, Samuel L. Jackson, and Liam Neeson are still doing “action hero” stuff is just embarrassing. At least we got Daniel Craig out of the Bond role at the age of 53, a bit older than Sean Connery was when he did the one-off “Never Say Never Again” largely for charity. This notion that people can be “eternally youthful” is worse than narcissistic; it’s openly mocking God.
Tom Cruise is almost an exception, but not quite. He’s still ultra-fit, still ultra-handsome, but at some point we all have to be honest with, and about, ourselves. If you ever see me with a head full of grey hair, aging-folk-singer style, you’ll know I’ve reached that point of honesty myself. At least I had about two hours the other day where I could be a kid again, watching a super-cool movie about super-cool planes and pilots. Maybe my son can do it; I was thoroughly myopic by his age but he can call a one-inch target at 75 yards without glasses. Could he be a pilot of the oft-speculated SR-72? Probably not — but don’t confuse that with definitely not. He is definitely not going to shoot laser beams from his eyes or have “strange doctor” powers. Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Well, yes, it’s going to have to be a plane.
For Hagerty, I wrote about a make-believe Porsh and a trip back to 1978.
I read a lot by Robert Heinlein as a kid growing up. In his stories, the heroes could do damn near anything, and by anything, I mean anything that the average human, or even above average, could teach themselves to do. And they did it by learning how to do it. By getting educated. By training and practicing.
This had a pretty big effect on my life. I went to college, got an engineering degree. I have worked in the trades during the slow times when I couldn’t get an engineering job.
So I’ve always been able to provide for me and mine. I have learned that there is nothing I can’t do, if I take the time to learn how to do it. Hence, I have done a LOT in my life. I guess you could say I’ve taken that old car commercial to heart as well: Life’s a journey, enjoy the ride!
And the ride is so much more fun if you know how to drive.
I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress last month, for the first time. It’s like a sci-fi Ecclesiastes. Nothing will make government suck less, Mr. Van Stry. It is futile to attempt libertarianism when broken humans are involved.
Check out Starship Troopers, that’s a fun one. Stranger in a Strange Land is another fun one.
The entire “Future History” collection is fantastic, and “The Man Who Sold The Moon” is probably my favorite. The current privatized space race reminds me of that story.
If I ever finish “On The Good Life”, a collection of works by Roman statesman Cisero that I’ve been picking away at since December (I don’t have…or make…much time to read anymore) I’ll be unashamedly jumping back into the last of the “Expanded Universe” Star Wars novels (Fate of the Jedi series) to be published before Disney bought the rights and started waterboarding us all with the new canon.
Once I finish the CS Lewis my mom lent me I’m thinking to read Heinlein. I’m logging all these titles for my lunchtime reading.
Can you grok that Valentine Michael Smith was an icon to the hippie movement? I don’t know if Heinleiin ever commented on that side of SIASL.
Leon Russell’s song of the same title is also pretty good:
The moon is a harsh mistress is excellent.
Samuel Edward Konklin figured out applied libertarianism pretty well, but at some level, I think Heinlein intuitively got it. You can’t fix government, just work around it.
Our youngins have been going through a capeshit/ starshit phase. Neither my life partner nor I have encouraged it, but we’ve been reluctant to squelch it, either, at a risk of them rebelling and liking it just because it pisses off their folks. They’re still single-digit ages, and they don’t watch any movies or TV shows about it, just read some comic books and listen to some stories on CD. We’re also making sure their lives are full of other, more gratifying fare, like gardening and wrenching and building stuff. So hopefully the capeshit/ starshit phase will be just that- a phase.
I work with some young adults into that crap, all of whom have pitiable personal lives and generally pretty left-lurching politics.
Regarding Hagerty: Whoever had the idea to get Chris Theodore to chronicle his time at DMC deserves a raise. Chris’ stories on Allpar were always some of my favorites.
I’d love to hear more from him if the parties involved can make it happen.
The unnamed-but-obviously-Iran enemy has better tech, better missiles, and better planes.
A bit of Hollywood storytelling. Other than the prototypes, of which the first one crashed while testing, the Russians have produced only a half dozen SU-57s that are operational, so I doubt they’ve supplied any to Iran yet. Also, the Russian air force has apparently been reluctant to use the few they have in the Ukrainian theater of operations because they’ve been unable to achieve air superiority due to Ukrainian access to MANPADs. It says something when you are afraid of using advanced weaponry for fear of losing it.
That’s putting aside well documented issues with the way the Russians (don’t) maintain their equipment stocks and systemic corruption in their armed forces. When it comes to war perhaps it’s better when corruption benefits defense contractors rather than generals.
The Russian air problem isn’t the MANPADs, it’s the AWACS coverage we’ve been sharing with Ukraine from neutral airspace over Poland (early in the war), Romania and the Black Sea. Air superiority is SEAD and that’s virtually impossible when ROE forbids engaging hostile radars. The hohol S-300s are fair game on paper but know where the Russians are coming from and don’t need to power up until it’s already time to shoot. What little UKAF there is has had clairvoyant fighter direction. In that environment better Russian airplanes - which I agree it’s questionable that the SU-57 is - would just be more expensive Russian targets.
One of my best friends worked AWACS for twenty years, I was in the Civil Air Patrol, and I have a deep affinity for every airman in the service.
That being said, if Russia decided to knock the AWACS out of the sky I couldn’t blame them. Mr. Biden has entered us into a war with a nuclear power utterly unfettered by any of our national neuroses and mental illnesses. It’s an immensely stupid thing to do.
By some accounts, Putin-Hitler is the moderate voice over there. Most of his contemporaries in the RF government, let alone its military, would have dropped them from the sky by now, particularly after the Moskva. Our behavior is an order of magnitude dumber than shipping munitions on the Lusitania or turning off Japan’s oil spigot. Lol at not even coming up with a better name than ‘Lend-lease’.
I’m sure that a few of my more “seen-it-all” readers will be quick to pop in with stories about how they read a few comics as kids and didn’t turn out homeless, but there is a big difference between reading the occasional comic and existing in a world that is absolutely immersed in capeshit.
I’ve participated in a number of the so-called Comicsgate crowdfunding campaigns, including Ethan Van Sciver’s fabulously successful Cyberfrog series about a frog given superpowers by a cybernetic alien spacecraft. Those are customer friendly efforts by creators that were blacklisted and driven from the mainstream comics industry because they wouldn’t hew to the current woke mentality. That being said, I admit to being a bit dismayed when I see adults seriously discussing comics books, video games, and superhero movies. I’m sure there are those who would argue that discussing comic books is no different than analyzing Opdyke and that video games are no different than chess, but I’m still left with the feeling that there are more productive and generally beneficial things that adults could do rather than devoting their lives to genuinely juvenile things.
When was the last time Hollywood made a movie with a good story? Maybe one of David Mamet’s films. I like Heist.
Speaking of which, if you’d like to read some good, heartfelt, writing, here’s Mamet’s eulogy for his friend, character actor and card magic master Ricky Jay: https://archive.ph/RMnmZ
I’m still waiting for EVS to ship Reignbow the Brute. I also bought Tucci’s Shi sequels (I’m not sure he’s actually Comicsgate but he’s definitely no SJW) and RJ’s (The Fourth Age) Thomas Valiant.
EVS just finished the art for Rekt Planet (aka CyberFrog #2) the other day. He has to write the script for that book and deal with production (colors are almost done, lettering needs the script). My guess is he’ll start drawing RtB when Rekt Planet goes to print. You can always drop him a SuperChat and ask.
Agreed, Heist was a great, underrated film. Of course, it had Gene Hackman in it.
Recently saw “Going in Style” on a flight. It was a pretty decent caper flick, too, I thought. Didn’t realize it was a remake until just now.
Thank you for linking that Mamet piece.
Reminds me of a line I read somewhere, something like
“Adult books? Those aren’t adult books, those are dirty books. Adult books are things like Anna Karenina.”
Speaking of books for adults, I recently decided take a swing at Don Quixote….wish me luck.
I couldn’t finish it in high school, but then again I couldn’t finish anything by Hemingway but 10 years after graduating I couldn’t get enough of him. I hope you make it through!
Hemingway only makes sense when the reader has spent sufficient time with an elevated Blood Alcohol Content to speak his language. Sufficient time living life to build up a level of cynicism I couldn’t pull off in high school also helped. As a sportsman and as a younger man, I made the comment that the “Nick Adams Stories” and the story about the Marlin were the only Hemingway a person ever need read. I may have been wrong (I still highly recommend Nick’s complete works as there is more to it than “Two Hearted River”).
“The Sun Also Rises” is worth reading as you age; it’s written with the heart of a 50-year-old man though Hemingway was in his thirties when he penned it, I believe.
For a long time, I honestly thought that picture was Patton Oswalt, not a woman screaming.
Isn’t that what Patton Oswalt is, though?
the last movie that i saw in a theater that i thought was worth the price of admission was christopher nolan’s “interstellar” (2014). i’m not sure if that qualifies as capeshit, but i saw it in 70mm imax so it’s very good capeshit. story and characters were ok but the visuals were great. the real world scenes of driving through cornfields were as compelling as the digital outer space stuff.
i think after reading this i’ll venture back into the theater to see some real fighter jet footage. who knows when or if i’ll get another chance.
p.s. as much as tom and i would like to be leading gen x, i think we are officially lagging boomers.
There is zero capeshit in Interstellar, because the people are only distinguished by capacity or luck. There is something supernatural in it, in the sense that the aliens are beyond human understanding, but at no point does someone put on a weird outfit and save the day.
Great film. I also saw it in the theatre and thought it was phenomenal. My wife cried because she saw a reflection of myself in the mission-oriented protagonist who misses out on the lives of his family to save humanity.
Side story: Not long after that film came out, I was calling on a dealer and we were chatting in his office. I noticed a picture of a black Ram dually on the wall with a signature on it. The dealer principal, Terry, saw it had caught my eye and said, “That’s my Interstellar truck.”
Seeing my confusion, he took the picture off the wall and handed it to me.
“That movie Interstellar, they shot most of it down in Taber (Southern Alberta) and wanted a manual transmission truck. I always keep one in stock because when someone wants one, they will come whatever distance to get it and pay asking price.”
I examined the picture of the truck and noted Matt McConaughey’s signature.
“That’s pretty neat, Terry. You really found your niche.”
Terry ran his dealer in a small farming town in middle of nowhere Alberta whose only claim to fame was being the Home of Nickelback, so I especially appreciated his anecdote.
Hold on…
*turns on “Photograph” by Nickelback*
Tell your story again, I’m ready now.
LOOK AT THIS GRAAAPH
I have a picture of myself and my brothers standing next to the sign heading into town where it says “Proud to be the home of Nickelback” on it. Every time I look at it it makes me laugh.
It is interesting that the new Top Gun movie decided to use the fairly old, entering service in 1982, F-18. The more modern models like the F-35 revert to models like the F-102, F-104 century series fighters and the F-4s that did so badly over Vietnam as they relied on iffy tech and missles but were unready and ill equiped for a dog fight. It is fun to think an old F-18 could prove it’s worth today the way the Navy’s old at the time F-8 Crusaders did over Vietnam.
To be precise, these are Super Hornets, which are about 20 years old, not 40, and which are both larger and more capable than the original airframe.
But the real reason the F-35 isn’t in the movie is simple: I doubt the Navy wanted to let Tom Cruise fly one, nor did they want to idle a dozen of them for half a year so they could be used in a film.
While I have never flown anything more deadly than a T-41, I cannot find any reputable sources that come to any conclusion other than: the F-35 is faster than the F-18 when actually loaded for combat, has vastly superior combat abilities, and has far more range.
It is my understanding that other than looks, there is basically zero commonality between the Hornet and the Super Hornet. It was a smokescreen to avoid the requisition process. Which reminds me of a book I think you liked, Ben Rich’s Skunk Works. I think the most striking thing about his story wasn’t his time with Kelly or bringing the 117 into existence basically on spec. It was the shocking waste of make-work jobs resulting from adding “controls” in the name of fighting corruption.
That was a great book. They designed the F117 so long ago, just imagine what they have now that we don’t know about.
One hopes, but I am not so sure. The overt corruption of the requisition process, where the smallest purchase needs to be spread across a minimum of 10 states and 40 congressional districts and the contract has to go to
the wife of a South Asian multimillionaire who just stepped off the planea SWM business would seem to preclude innovation.I don’t mean literal part sharing. Given though the Boeing Super Hornet is based on the McDonnel F-18, itself based on the Northrop YF-17, It even goes back further to the Northrop F-5 Tiger, Mig-28 in Top Gun I speak. Then again, the F-5 was a scale up of the Northrop T-38 trainer, still in use despite being 60 years old. What did all this Christmas treeing of features cost. Well, the Super Hornet weighs as much as 3 F-5/Mig 28s. Wonder how that works in a dog fight?
Apparently the story line of the new Top Gun is mentoring the young pilots in the hope that they could measure up to their great grandfathers. Too bad there was no mentoring for aircraft designers, because they today clearly don’t measure up.
If an aircraft designer is solely (or even primarily) concerned with a fighter jet’s ability to dogfight that pilot will be dead long before they see any enemy aircraft with their own Mk-1 eyeballs. Trust me on that.
Ah Sir…. I see a dot on my F-35 radar,…. should I fire a (multimillion dollar) AMRAAM from 60 miles?
No dumb ass, vector toward it and tell us what it is
Ah Sir… am now in a dogfight with with a MIG 29 and his four friends that were waiting under radar. My wingperson skipped Top Gun, so didn’t know to stick with me. Watching the HUD, but shouldn’t I be checking my six. We never did this in simulations.
Captain, Fire off your full load as an unguided salvo to distract and go to full power to escape with your $100 million plane. Lets all cross our fingers that Lockheed was not full of it when they said the top speed of Mach 1.6 was conservative, because that isn’t enough to get away. At least F4s could run fast from the Mig 17s and blind him with all the black smoke.
The person to whom you’re replying is a current combat fighter pilot, I think he has at least some idea how all of this works. 🙂
I hope he enjoyed it!
Part of me wants to see it, I’ve always been a fan of the first movie and my friends can quote it verbatim…..but part of me feels that this is just another nostalgic cash grab.
It’s not. You’re cleared for flyby. Seriously. It’s about as far from a cash grab as you can get. Every aspect of it is done with sincerity and care.
I think we might have to buzz the tower then……
It was well done. Leaned into nostalgia without being a rehash. It showed growth in Maverick’s character both in the interstitial years and in the two hours of movie itself.
The plane footage itself is worth the ticket. There’s minimal CG and what is there isn’t painfully obtrusive like in so many movies these days. My ex-private light aircraft pilot father has seen the movie at least thrice (I took him the first time) and he’s absolutely loving it.
What’s POing the left about this movie is the fact that Taiwan and Japan got put back on the leather jacket after Tencent bowed out with funding. The jacket without those countries’ flags showed up in still photos a couple of years ago. China only lets a few foreign films in a year. To some degree, that a was “F U” to China putting the flags back on the jacket. China isn’t happy anyways that the movie is US centric. Neither is the left. That jacket alone may be accounting for 10s of millions in ticket sales by people who know the flags were left off and now put back.
I find it amusing that AMC theaters is showing the movie. Wanda owns/controls AMC. Wanda is Chinese.
A good review of the movie is by Youtuber “The Critical Drinker”. He also has a new video about CGI. I don’t remember if he mentioned capeshit or not, but that’s what the whole video is about.
Yeah I watched it last night, and seeing the (in)famous jacket made me smile. Then I listened to about an hour of interviews with the director and the director of photography about the lengths they went to just to have every detail as perfect as possible. The SR-72 that in reality will be a drone? Yeah they got real Lockheed Martin engineers to design a cockpit for it for the pilot to sit in. The cameras in the F-18s were modular so they could be hidden in nooks and crannies, and almost no “action cameras” were used. Most of the footage is from 6K Sony cameras. Which had to clear the ejection paths of the plane and use none of the plane’s power, which meant using battery packs. The actors had to stop and start the cameras themselves while flying 60-90min stints. Jennifer Connelly’s ride is an unmodified ’73 Type S 911 that an enthusiast loaned to the production. The P-51 Mustang they fly at the end is Cruise’s personal plane.
This whole movie made me comfortable, like the events of the last 10 years hadn’t happened… no woke bs in this.
I’m not sure what’s more impressive and unlikely, the longevity of Maverick as a fighter pilot or his jacket as a wearable item of clothing.
Considering that director Joseph Kosinski is known for his CGI work (Tron) it’s nice to see he went for realism. I think it all goes back to John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, where he didn’t just mount cameras on race cars, he used race cars at speed as camera cars.
Rad! My buddies and I in middle school watched that movie over and over and over again. We thought we were hot shit once we got rid of our broken down huffy’s and western flyers and upgraded to redlines and mongooses. In hind sight we were definitely not.
“This notion that people can be “eternally youthful” is worse than narcissistic; it’s openly mocking God.”
Doubly so for public figures, actors, rock musicians. I find Robert Wyatt’s “there is a pride in stopping” respect-instilling.
A non-woke movie setting box office records and getting rave reviews by the public? Will those in charge finally learn there is still a huge and profitable market for patriotic and white/male dominated entertainment or will they continue on their go woke, get broke path? My guess is that we will soon see some TG clones featuring strong female leads battling evil white supremacists driving diesel pickups and wearing MAGA hats.
Well thanks for this review. Me being the skeptic I am, I figured it would be a generic Hollywood movie glorifying Maverick’s glory days. Congratulations to Tom Cruise, if he did something worth watching! I will check it out.
An ex-girlfriend made me watch the old Top Gun when we were teenagers two decades ago and I don’t remember much about it. My son (12 years old) is apparently listening to the theme song while he does his chores so maybe we will watch it together.
I still love comic books, but it comes with a caveat: I haven’t bought anything new in over a decade (besides the comcisgate stuff I commented about above) and my library features titles from the 70s through the 90s when everything started going downhill. I think there’s a lot of good heroism in some of those old tales, and the best of them are great scifi stories. Unfortunately not all of them reach such heights, but there’s room in my heart for schlock, too. So far as the movies go, I enjoyed some of them as they came out but with each subsequent viewing I find myself wishing I was doing something else when I’m not thinking about how they’re betraying the source material. I haven’t watched anything since the Thanos thing wrapped up but it is a lot of fun to watch people on youtube complain about them.
My kids don’t care at all about Star Wars and instead they enjoy old Star Trek with us. So they have that going for them.
There was similar buzz about ‘The Northman’, but it shares a bit of the same capeshit arc. Pretty scenery, though, except perhaps for Kidman’s Botoxxed uncanny valley self .
I found old John Ford/John Wayne stuff much more satisfying.
There was little hope for ‘rockstar emeritus’ to ever be a thing. As long as the cash register still dings, Mick and Keef will be out there.
The botox is becoming a bit much. The latest horror show comes from Madonna, who has puffed the cheeks 1 PSI too much, to the point her head is actually bigger like Helena Bonham Carter in Alice In Wonderland. What happens after that skin wrinkles after years of being pulled tight when she’s 70? I think we are losing sight of what made “MILF’s” popular in the first place.
Most of the blues guys played till they died. Sometimes they died young like Robert Johnson but Buddy Guy is still touring in his mid 80s and B.B. King toured until he was 88. Classical musicians too. Heifitz played in public in his 70s and Horowitz’s last concert was at 84. He continued to record until his death at 86.
I’m surprised by this review. My 19 year old son just saw it with his girlfriend. He and I watched the original together when he was ten or eleven. He talked me into letting him quit the Boy Scouts and join the Civil Air Patrol as soon as he was old enough.
Through the CAP, and with a lot of hard work on his part, he received his pilot certificate at age 17. He picked up a tailwheel endorsement and is starting on his instrument rating now. He just finished his first year of engineering school.
He didn’t think too highly of the movie. He liked the planes and the flying, of course, but thought the plot was ludicrous.
I had therefore written it off. I’ll likely see it now, based on Jack’s review. Maybe there’s something in it for us old men.
Your son sounds like me. I saw the original around the same age and thought the same thing. The flying was awesome but the love story was meh. Probably explains why I was 40 before my oldest was born.
Based on word of mouth in general and Jack’s review in particular, I took my 10 yo nephew this weekend. Having recently seen the first on cable he was not too keen. He thought it was “too orange and boring.” The pacing of TG:M was vastly improved, the story was better and the romantic subplot was kept to a minimum and more played for laughs, and the cinematography was excellent. Among other things the carrier launches look exactly like the ones in the documentary Speed & Angels. He, and I, liked it so much we are going to try to catch it on IMAX.
Sounds like its only flaw is the lack of Berlin and Kenny Loggins.
I hate the moral inversion of superhero movies. Capeshit is a perfect term for it. They are not even capable of heroic self sacrifice in a permanent death.
Maverick absolutely rules. It’s just a good movie, full stop, and Tom Cruise really might be the last action hero. The Missions Impossible are equally well done. His commitment to practical effects and actual stunt work instead of blindly CGI-ing anything into something else is truly commendable.
The MCU-ification of cinema has been a major drag. Funding for medium-budget movies effectively doesn’t exist anymore, meaning a movie is either some underfunded indie flick or some massive budget epic designed to appeal to every single person ever. It’s sucks.
All that said, there are at least two superhero shows worth exploring — The Boys and Peacemaker. Maybe not for the people on this particular website given their left leanings, but they do a great job of humanizing the characters and frankly satirizing they genre itself.
I’ve written about The Boys before, although I had to vanish it.
I wonder sometimes exactly how left-leaning The Boys is. They’re endlessly satirizing the Christ-centric power structure of Vought — but in real life Vought is Disney and Disney’s religion is rainbow. And the latest episode with “Queen Maeve’s Diversity Park” was so incisive I’m surprised it made it past the censors.
It’s definitely tee’d up some straw targets (evangelical Christianity and Nazis/Racists) but overall I’ve enjoyed it. Haven’t started Season 3 yet.
Sounds like it’s time to go back to a movie theater for the first time in about a decade (aside from taking my family to a kids animated movie this spring). We’ll see what GPZ900Rs start going for on BaT now (they were already getting to be collectible).
I’m looking for a solid black-and-red Ninja 600R, like the one I started riding on; I suspect the rising tide will also lift THOSE boats.
Sportbikes are afflicted with an attrition rate beaten perhaps only by dirtbikes: they are ridden incredibly hard, crashed, rebuilt, ridden, crashed, until they are destroyed at the molecular level it seems. Clean survivors seem to be exceedingly rare as a result, versus something like a touring motorcycle. There was a decent original CBR1000F Hurricane here locally that popped up for $2500, I almost grabbed it simply for the novelty of finding a sportbike of that era still intact with original paint and plastics.
I’m bidding on this one right now:
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1993-honda-cbr1000/
I like the sleepy post-Hurricane Cibbers. My business partner had a grey 1990 for years, we called it “the bus”, it could drop my YZF600R like I was towing a horse trailer.
Oh damn, I’ll be following that one to see where it lands. Since selling a few bikes a few weeks ago (down to four, two of which are fix-and-flips), the combination of a) not yet depositing cash from the sale of one of them b) now owning my own utility trailer that is ready at a moment’s notice and c) having space in the garage is driving me damn near crazy with all the different bikes I’ve been eyeballing. Clean low mile “naked” Bandit 1200? Yes please. Purple Yamaha Vmax for $3500? Sign me up. Original V65 Magna for $2200? Tempting. Yamaha Seca 920R for $1500? Cool oddball. Moto Guzzi 850 T3 for $1350? Sound investment. I really need to take this cash to the bank and focus on buttoning my ’81 1100E up (fresh tires, Galfer stainless brake lines, fresh fork seals)
That’s very pretty, Last year I bought and rebuilt its standard brother, a 1993 CB1000. The one you linked to looks like it is in great shape but for God’s sake treat every piece on it like it is made of unobtanium. There is a good chance it might be. I conducted a world-wide search for a new petcock after I got careless with my old one thinking I could just replace it. Stupid me. I was only able to get one because I bought an entire gas tank on ebay for $450.
Hope you get this one. It’s a beauty.
That’s interesting to hear Tom, I’d always thought of Honda as supporting their old stuff pretty well. I’ve been floored by how well Suzuki supports old bikes, stuff like carb manifold boots, various gaskets, turn signal lenses, etc ,etc for my ’79 GS750E that I just sold, all my early 80s GS bikes, no problem. Makes working on them much easier. Now, fuel petcocks? That I think is discontinued. But the options are either a K&L rebuild kit for about $30-40 (with diaphgram), or a new Chinesium one for $30 that seem to work well enough.
I had always heard that Honda had great parts support as well, gtem. I was pretty surprised when so many parts started showing as discontinued.
To be fair, the CB1000 was only sold in the US for two years and it was pretty expensive for what it was. They did not sell in huge numbers so it isn’t entirely reasonable for me to expect every Honda shop to have the parts on the shelf. The “Big One” was, however, sold in Europe and a version of it is still being sold in Japan as the “Super Four” so I thought I would be able to find some parts there. Turns out, however, that they changed some design elements and my bike is more or less an orphan at this point.
To make matters worse, a lot of places won’t even work on it. Even the classic bike shop down the road from me told me they wouldn’t touch it, mostly because they wouldn’t be able to replace anything they might accidentally break. It’s OK for some things, I can do quite a bit myself, but on other things, like a carb synch or a valve adjustment, I’d rather pay to have it done right. I also hear that tires are a PITA to find.
Maybe I am showing my age, but 1993 doesn’t seem “old” to me. Not sure why this is an issue. At least there are some active facebook groups where guys help one another and can source at least some used parts.
On the GS Suzukis, I think you benefit from a model that was built over a long period of time that sold in huge numbers. I owned a GS850G for almost a decade and had my eye out for a GS1000 but nothing decent ever popped up in my region. I’d love to see yours, they are the Cadillac of motorcycles.
I don’t know why it won’t let me reply directly to gtem, must be something with WordPress…
Anyway, I’ve noticed over the past few years that parts availability for old Hondas isn’t what it used to be. 10 years ago I could find almost anything short of plastic for my 84 XL200 (a 2 year only bike, at least in the US).
Nowadays, guys are having a hard time finding parts for mid-00s CR125s/250s. Complete ignition systems are selling for what you could find a decent bike for not too long ago.
I’ve lucked out finding some NOS stuff for the KDX, but I believe the heyday of jumping on RMATV or BikeBandit to buy OE parts for your 90s bike is pretty much over.
If you want a 2-stroke dirt bike these days, you’re pretty much stuck buying something European or a Yamaha. I don’t know if I’d roll the dice trying to put together a nice KX/RM/CR at this point if I planned to actually ride it.
Tom I’ve sort of “accidentally” become a bit of a collector of old GSes: back in 2010 in college I snagged a totally immaculate ’78 GS1000C for $950. 45k miles on it but in incredible well loved shape, full service records. Rode it a bit and then very foolishly sold it. It was an incredible bike, very much a “Cadillac” in terms of the smooth polished power delivery, super cushy seat, nice styling etc. Very roomy saddle, the ladies loved it. Owned some other newer bikes and now have come back full circle: last March I purchased my ’81 1100E and ’79 750E as a pair of good shape but non-runners (someone had just started to take the 750 down the “cafe” path, I rescued it just in time). Started to bring them back to life, then this past February another pair of GSes fell into my lap: 5k mile ’81 GS650G, 11k mile ’82 GS1100G, complete bikes that sat since the late 80s, $300 a pop with titles. Just a quick wash and these things are cleaning up incredibly well. Have been going through the carbs on both, they’ll need brakes gone through, tires, fork seals, the usual. While doing the other two GSes I acquired some very handy carb tuning tools: a Carbtune Pro4 manometer set ($95) and a Gunson ColorTune (another $100 or so). Both have more than proven their worth. I sold the ’79 750E for some good money a few weeks ago, the plan is to do the same with the 1100G/650G, the 1100E is going to be the “keeper.” I’m also going to be picking up a clean low mile “naked” 2002 Bandit 1200 next weekend, to round out my Big Bore Suzuki stable, very similar bike to your CB1000 aesthetically speaking
Gtem, sounds liek you are well set for tools.
As much as I love the G models for their shaft drive, I think you are spot on. The E is the one you want to keep.
When I was a kid I had a KZ550 and worked with a guy who had a GS1000E. One night after we closed the store, we wound up next to one another at the stoplight at the freeway onramp. When the light turned green I hammered it and put the KZ on the inside of the turn and down the ramp well ahead.
By the time we hit the merge the GS was right on my ass and 1/2 mile later he was a dot on the horizon. He got that thing up to speed and just motored away. The GSs were so nice to ride, so very stable, and they could flat haul ass. Good times.
They’ll see the same price bump as the Marlin 1895 SBL following its appearance in Jurassic World.
Wind River helped as well, that’s another good movie with no capes. I need to scam work into sending me out to the mountains for a while, but I can’t put 45-70 on the company card.
I have a nice nickel matte finish Ithaca Model 87 Featherweight 12 gauge that the Marlin SBL would look mighty purdy next to in the gun safe. And now that I have a few acres with room to shoot, they might come out of the safe once in a while.
Unfortunately I did not anticipate the increased popularity of that gun. I saw a used one in good shape on the wall of my LGS stickered at $860 or so a few weeks after I saw the movie, made a mental note to call on it, and went about my day. A week later it was gone and prices were routinely over $1000, which from an absolute price delta isn’t much but something inside me becomes emotionally opposed to purchases once they hit four figures.
Not everything that Taylor Sheridan does resonates with me — I could do without noted shitbird Tim McGraw, so I’m not watching 1883 — but you could argue he is the premier American storyteller of the moment. Wind River is an expertly judged film despite having some of the lightest-weight actors and actresses around. I’m not sure why he has to keep bringing in this Chinese girl who pretends to be Native American, even if she is kinda gorgeous.
And the climax of Wind River is anti-capeshit for sure. It’s simply a case of a dedicated Country Mouse turning the situation to his advantage against the depraved City Mice.
Jack, you have a credibility that spans so many subjects… you sometimes wander into my area of expertise/experience and you are so often spot-on, I think I owe it to you and anyone reading to affirm that credibility:
“Well, eighty-six percent of combat-facing pilots are white men. So it’s accurate”
Everytime I see some nauseating military advertisement or TV/movie depiction of military veterans as though the entire burden of military service is on America’s females and minorities, I think about a picture I have of my unit awards ceremony at COB Speicher, outside Tikrit, towards the end of the deployment. Approximately 20 soldiers in the picture, standing in formation, all white males. Many on their second deployment, and a few - including myself - on a third deployment. I’m not saying minorities and women didn’t contribute, because they most certainly did. But the reality is the vast majority - I would estimate 80-90% - of the soldiers serving in combat were white men, something I assume today’s military would be ashamed of if it were ever forced to acknowledge… Sorry?
“…but there is a big difference between reading the occasional comic and existing in a world that is absolutely immersed in capeshit”
Right again. I was an X-Men fan as a kid… I cherished a collection of “Wolverine” comic books… the difference was, comics were almost counter-culture, limited to one store in my entire (fairly large) town. The artwork was fantastic, the storylines riveting. Comics were fantasy… a personal escape… a guilty pleasure.
And it was too good for mass consumption… the plots were too involved, often spanning years of issues. The average kid or young adult wouldn’t have the dedication or attention span to get it… so I think ‘selling out” comics with progressive themes and Wokeness was simply a business decision. The genre was dumbed down and packaged so the masses of idiots would get it, go see the movie, and go see the sequels…
Let me get this tinfoil hat adjusted correctly… I bet the brass has been working overtime to “fix” that situation for a long time now, albeit without success. The dearest wish of the people who run Biden’s teleprompter, even closer to their hearts than a live shooting war against Russia, is a live shooting war against Americans in the South and Midwest. You’ll know they’re really gearing up for it when they return to assembling units by hometown. Right now it’s going to be hard to execute military force against the Midwest, South, or Texas:
https://www.ida.org/-/media/feature/publications/g/ge/geographic-diversity-in-military-recruiting/d-9079.ashx
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/costs/social/Troop%20Numbers%20By%20State_Costs%20of%20War_FINAL.pdf
Your credibility is evident again… look up the “Department of Defense Equity Action Plan”. A lot of discussion about this between myself and my friends who are current and former Army officers. It’s an April 2022 document, and yes, it’s as bad as it sounds…
…”we” are either doing this because of a master plan to make the US military a progressive partisan force, or it simply mirrors our recent trend of elevating and promoting the most incompetent officers to the highest levels of military leadership, to the point that Army 3-star generals can’t even identify US soldiers (https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/09/05/general-in-woke-us-army-posts-thank-you-pic-to-troops-leaving-afghanistan-but-theyre-british-not-americans-1129774/)… Either way, today’s US military is not your dad’s US military. It was getting ridiculous when I separated over ten years ago, and that Army is unrecognizable from today’s Army. The US military is, at best, not your ally… and at worst… well, Jack made that point.
Jack, my favorite thing about your commentary is that you find words to things I only have vague feelings about.
After watching TG:M, I immediately had to watch the first TG after 25+ years, and I loved it as much as I did when I was a kid who would “dogfight” with my friends on our BMX stand-ins for jet fighters. To your point, there is a sense of wonder and personal inspiration a superhero movie just can’t manage.