movie stardom | the m0vie blog

287. Top Gun: Maverick – This Just In (#50)

Posted on June 4, 2022 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Luke Dunne and Joe Griffin, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

So this week, Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick.

More than thirty years after graduating, top naval figther pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell is summoned back to Top Gun. His assignment is to train a new generation of hotshot fighter pilots for a seemingly impossible mission. However, Maverick quickly discovers that what is past isn’t ever truly past.

At time of recording, it was ranked 50th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: box office, cinema, glen powell, joe griffin, luke dunne, Miles Teller, movie stardom, movie stars, podcast, Scientology, spectacle, The 250, This Just In, tom cruise, top gun | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On Tom Cruise as a Movie Star Defying Gravity…

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine this evening. Given that he just announced plans to shoot a movie in outer space, it seemed like a good time to discuss Tom Cruise.

Cruise is a fascinating movie star. He’s one of the rare movie stars who has managed to remain a movie star for over three decades, at a time when movie stardom increasingly seems like an outdated concept. It’s interesting to look at how Cruise has navigated this shift, by essentially exerting enough gravity to bend established intellectual property towards him. There is no boundary between Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise, whether Hunt is dangling out of an airplane in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation or atoning for a failed marriage in Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: celebrity, fallout, mission: impossible, movie stardom, rogue nation, tom cruise | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Computer-Generated James Dean and the Collapse of Movie Stardom into Intellectual Property…

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine yesterday evening. This one covered the news that a computer-generated James Dean would be starring in a significant secondary role in the upcoming Finding Jack.

It’s an interesting precedent, the resurrection of a dead star to appear in a work completely unrelated to their previous commitments or roles. In some senses, although this particular case is very odd, it feels like a trial balloon for a larger shift happening behind the scenes. Over the past couple of decades, Hollywood has been moving closer and closer to intellectual property as a driving force behind its movie-making. The idea that movies could be populated with computer facsimiles of recognisable stars represents an attempt to collapse movie stardom into that intellectual propertisation.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.