top gun | 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 “Top Gun” as a Monument to Reagan’s Eighties…

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist over the weekend. With the release of Top Gun: Maverick at the weekend, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the original Top Gun.

It is debatable whether Top Gun is a good movie. However, it is a defining movie. There are few movies that so profoundly and so effectively capture a time and place on film. Top Gun is a movie that is very much in step with the era around it, the story of a nation still recovering from the trauma of Vietnam and embracing a rugged individualist fantasy as a way of working through the lingering after-effects. At its core, Top Gun is a movie about the necessity of letting go of one’s guilt or responsibility towards others in order to be the best that one can be.

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

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: america, escapist magazine, individualism, mythmaking, Ronald Reagan, the escapist, tom cruise, top gun | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “Top Gun: Maverick” as a Tom Cruise Movie About Tom Cruise Saving Movies…

Posted on May 30, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Top Gun: Maverick, it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about the blockbuster sequel. In particular the way that it is a movie that is very consciously and very deliberately built around its star.

Tom Cruise has been described as one of the last movie stars, and that means that the actor exerts a certain gravity on his projects. Most Tom Cruise movies wind up being about Tom Cruise in one way or another. This is particularly true as Cruise has entered the later years of his career, as Hollywood has changed around him and as he has found himself having to constantly fight to assert his own relevance in a rapidly-shifting market place. Most recent Tom Cruise movies are about this, in one way or another, and Maverick is no different.

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

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: in the frame, the escapist, tom cruise, top gun, top gun: maverick | Leave a comment »

Tony Scott, R.I.P.

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Darren

One of the downsides to running a blog the way that I run a blog is that I don’t always have the opportunity to respond to news as it breaks. As such, in writing about the passing of director Tony Scott, pretty much everything that I would say has been said by the time I can publish this, and far more eloquently than I could ever hope to say it. Obviously, I never knew Tony Scott personally, so I won’t comment on the man himself – although the tributes from those who did know him are deeply moving. I knew Tony Scott as countless film fans knew the director, through his work. And that work meant a lot to me.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Beverly Hills Cop II, brad pitt, Crimson Tide, denzel washington, michael bay, quentin tarantino, ridley scott, San Pedro Los Angeles, Scott, tony scott, top gun, true romance | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Scream II

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Darren

Today, we’re reviewing the entire Scream trilogy. Sadly, I’ll have to wait to get a look at the latest instalment, but reviews of the first three will be going on-line throughout the day.

I actually like Scream 2 a great deal – perhaps as much as I enjoyed the original Scream. Which, to be honest, takes me by surprise because it’s a much weaker movie in a lot of ways, the most obvious being the fact that it sort of fizzles out in the third act. Still, there’s just something about the cheeky and energy of the sequel that grabs my attention and keeps it, as if moving the series from a stereotypical high school and into a college film class. Of course, as Randy the resident film buff points out, the only thing more stereotypical than high school slasher movies are college slasher movies, but there’s just something cool about the fact that most of the cast (rather than just Randy) are relatively genre savvy this time around.

Film Buff-y?

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Drew Barrymore, Horror film, Jamie Kennedy, Joshua Jackson, liev schreiber, List of Scream characters, Omar Epps, Red Right Hand, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Scream, Scream 2, Slasher film, Timothy Olyphant, tom cruise, top gun, wes craven | Leave a comment »

Meme of the Moment: Desert Island CD’s

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Darren

This blog post is part of “Desert Island CD’s”, a blogging event being hosted by those gents over at Anomalous Material as a sort of a spiritual successor to last year’s “Desert Island DVD’s”. Check out the link above for everybody else’s list.

Movie soundtracks are a strange beast. They say that memory is most strongly associated with the sense of smell, but – since I guess we can’t smell movies outside of Hans Laube’s somewhat misguided “Smell-O-Vision” – I am never less than amazed at the capacity of a piece of music to take me back to a film. Whether it’s a piece of an orchestra score, a pop song featured in the background, an original composition for the film or even a piece linked to a particular trailer, film music has a strong tie to my memory. To show you that I am not kidding, thanks to the following truly corny international trailer, I can’t hear The Sun Always Shines on TV without thinking of Slumdog Millionaire. You may think I’m bluffing, but skip to about a minute into it.