Movie Nation

With the “Top Gun” sequel firmly (Hah!) set for release on May 27, it occurred to me that I should at least re-familiarize myself with this icon of ’80s “High Concept” cinema. And then it occurred to me that I’ve never actually seen it, start to finish.

I was reviewing films for a newspaper when it came out, and I’m guessing the fellow I shared those duties with drew this assignment. It’s not like I didn’t try to watch it, once or thrice. I’d get 5-20 minutes in while channel surfing, mutter “Why people ever liked this is beyond me” and move on.

“Top Gun” is Reagan Era American jingoism at its glossiest, something worth remembering when watching it. A common criticism of this film of-its-time/at-that-time was that it was a “recruiting film.”

Reagan’s gone, the Navy moved on from the ruinously expensive to maintain,/Achilles Heeled F-14 Tomcat, and Hollywood moved on from high concept.

In the ensuing years, I developed a fondness for Tony Scott’s films and interviewed him a couple of times, even chatted-up producers Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson, the Kings of High Concept (a movie or TV show you can adequately describe in a seriously-short sentence fragment — “MTV-Cops” (“Miami Vice”), “MTV dogfights” (“Top Gun”).

I interviewed Val Kilmer, later read his autobiography and reviewed his documentary, which touched on the experience of making “Top Gun,” and even tried to dine at a Key West eatery Kelly McGillis opened with her husband some years back. I’d still be waiting for service if we hadn’t walked out after an hour and a half.

The Tom Cruise movie they all made is beloved, one of those pictures that at decades of public appearances, fans have asked, “When are you making a sequel?” of cast and crew. Why is that?

This film was the first “Tom Cruise” movie that shaped his big screen action persona — a swagger built on a determination to do as many of his own stunts as possible (motorcycles, jet fly-alongs). You can tell he’s in the thick of things, even if you can also tell they’re doing things to make him look tall enough to fly jets for the U.S. Navy and not look short next to his leading lady.

He even sings in this picture, not something we’ve heard him often attempt. With cause.

The aerial sequences, stunningly-shot by Jeffrey Kimball in sunbaked tones and breathlessly edited into fighter-bomber porn by Chris Lebenzon and Billy Weber, are still impressive — XCUs of jet exhaust ports, carrier landing crew protocols, wing-mounted/cockpit-mounted camera shots galore, and long before GoPro-sized gear made that easy.

The training simulations are adorably quaint, stick-outline aircraft graphics like the old “Battle Zone” video game.

The cast is packed with great character players, a future Oscar winner (Tim Robbins), and icons-to-be like Kilmer, Meg Ryan, McGillis and “E.R.” mainstay Anthony Edwards.

But. This. Story. It isn’t just the militaria that the military-minded have torn to shreds for its inaccuracy in the days, weeks and decades since the film’s release. The film’s repeated use of “bogeys” for hostile aircraft, which are “bandits” if you know they’re hostile, the strict rules that Maverick flouts with his “$30 million airplane,” which would have washed him out in an instant, etc. are eyeroll friendly.

There’s little attempt to wholly identify the “enemy” here, just an America against the World ethos

The stars have zero chemistry. There is no logical reason McGillis’s smart, connected civilian contractor would have been attracted to this callow pilot who seems younger and dumber, if exciting. As she’s been around a lot of these guys, his close-encounter with a Russian-made MiG would hardly justify her willingness to flirt and accept his childish come-ons. A “You’ve lost that Loving Feeling” duet with Edwards & Ensemble as a pick-up attempt?

 “Listen,” Charlie (McGillis) says, “can I ask you a personal question?”

“That depends.”

“Are you a good pilot?”

“I can hold my own.”

“Great, then I won’t have to worry about you making your living as a singer.“

Scott went on to greater glory, and even made a fine comeback picture (“Unstoppable”) before taking his own life in 2012. But here’s a reason these screenwriters graduated from “Top Gun” to write “Dick Tracy” and “Anaconda” and “Turner & Hooch.” Contrived situations, contorted insertions of drama, inane dialogue was kind of their thing.

Which is not to say that when this pre-digital celluloid film came out, it didn’t practically pop off the screen. But there’s very little to this PG-rated war-and-sex picture, and even less that suggests “sequel,” especially over 30 years later.

Rating: PG

Cast: Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Tom Skerritt, Michael Ironside, Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins and James Tolkan.

Credits: Directed by Tony Scott, scripted by Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr., Ehud Yonay. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:50

Yeah, that happened. A “GI Jane: II” joke from Chris Rock earns a mutter and eyeroll from Jada Pinkett Smith, and a HARD smack from Will Smith, storming the stage, and some pretty serious cussing from his seat, too. Not a good look on his part.

What the hell? Not the “nice guy” after all? Lots of people have taken direct hits from Chris Rock and grinned it off. I guess that Friar’s Club Roast is off the table?

The Oscars just got a blast of MTV Music Awards Kanye Krazy. The joke was TAME, whatever its inuendo. Jada has shared far worse about herself and them as a couple than anything Chris Rock said. Did Smith feel he had license for payback because of her condition?

What is the source of this bad blood? Maybe this?

Got to say, it casts a pall over the night that may last a bit longer than two commercial breaks. Only one presenter mentions it afterward, so far. But we’ll see.

Back in the ’70s, Vanessa Redgrave made a pro PLO acceptance speech that the Jewish screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky felt compelled to respond to later. Somebody will almost certainly bring it up.

Wanda Sykes? Paging Wanda Sykes? Will everybody shy away from it because Smith is expected to win best actor? Will WILL address it?

Amy Schumer, “Did I MISS anything? There’s like a different VIBE in here?”

Muted applause when Smith’s name as Best Actor winner comes up. Actors acting…

“In character” is his defense/explanation? Tears and lashing out at “people disrespecting you.” “Denzel just told me, ‘At your highest moment, that’s when the Devil comes for you.'” The show’s director is at a loss.

“I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to my fellow nominees.” Good. But uh, no apology to Chris Rock?

Wandering around, groping, finding a reconnection with the audience. “Art imitates life. I look like the ‘crazy father.'” Yeah, you did.

They don’t “play him off,” which is fine. Humility. “I’m hoping the Academy invites me back.” Invokes God a few times for good measure.

The director cuts away — because one Williams sister’s breast was hanging out of her dress (allegedly). Jesus, what a Smithshow.

Cannot WAIT for the psychoanalysis and columnizing on this. Joe Rogan/Faux are going to have a field day.

Aside from that, this was a very sweet, touching, representational awards show. Lovely speeches, deserving winners, “CODA” as best picture.

But all we’ll remember is Will Smith acting out.

An eyewitness/EARwitness account below. And below that, the Japanese feed of the event, uncensored.

You hear his name in films and on TV as a sort of inside British joke about pedophilia, but if you didn’t grow up with him on British radio and TV, you can’t really appreciate the scale of this public betrayal.

But it turns out he was a pedophile without peer, a platinum-white blond haired monster right under everyone’s noses.

Jimmy Savile was a Star personality of the ’60s and ’70s who became a lionized public figure thanks to great success as a charity fundraiser.

Here’s the film to tell us how on Earth that happened.

April 6, only Netflix.

Well, we’ve been hearing “King Richard” might be the Oscar sleeper. Why not start the show with a genuine show stopper?

The Williams Sisters and Queen Bey, a legion of singers, dancers and instrumentalists and everybody wearing the color of a Wilson tennis ball.

Performing to a track, lip-synced? Not the Queen, tho.

And here comes DJ Time-to-Tune-Out. I think I’ve got a movie to watch.

This April 27 release (HBO Max) has a lot of star power — Foster, Danny DeVito, John Leguizamo and Peter Sarsgaard.

And it was directed by Barry Levinson, Oscar winner for “Rain Man” and not working nearly as much as he did in the ’90s.

Based on a true story, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor fights Marciano? Never heard tell.

The morning after watching Andrea Arnold’s wordless, moving and sometimes unsettling documentary “Cow,” I found myself crossing the vast Deseret Ranches, the Mormon church’s beef cattle country that dominates the flat plains between the coasts of south central Florida.

And as I saw the free-roaming herds of Brahman/”Cracker” hybrids, hunting for shade, caring for their calves and grazing on the wide open and buggy spaces, I couldn’t help but think “You lucky bastards.”

Arnold’s film, which follows a mother and one of her calves through their short, sheltered lives on a British dairy farm, paints the portrait of a much glummer and limited existence. Looking the mother and calf in the eyes and seeing their circumscribed world through those eyes, we get a glimpse of what could pass for a soul in animals that most of us merely consider unthinking beasts raised for our nourishment, aka “what’s for dinner.”

There is no abuse of these Holsteins, raised and milked on a modest but industrialized dairy farm in Kent, England. From the human assistance with the mother’s calving to the attention paid to diet, the calm vocalizations that move them to corrals, pens and milking stations and the care given to trimming their hooves and ensuring the calves are well-fed and their pens mucked out, Park Farm passes Humane Society muster.

There’s no coddling, no “naming” of the animals that we hear. We know, of course, that they aren’t pets but “livestock,” an investment to be protected, used and even harvested.

But the unmistakable message of Arnold’s film — she did the downbeat hustler’s romance “American Honey” — is that this is no life, that any living thing, no matter how we “use it,” deserves better than this.

We see the calf separated from its mother quite early. They need most of her milk for their own purposes. She complains, and in extreme closeup, you sense the heartbreak, how shattering this must be for the animal. That it happens repeatedly over the course of the years shortens their lives, and not just in a physical sense.

The calf is kept penned-up inside for some stretch of time before ever glimpsing daylight and green fields. And then it’s penned-up again, in a tiny hut with a fenced-in space that would have the neighbors calling the cops if it was all that a medium-sized dog experienced of the world.

She’s seen her mother for the last time.

The calves kick up and try out the idea of play and cavorting, but there’s no room. It’s months before they’re allowed in a pasture, gorging themselves on real grass, glimpsing seasonal fireworks over the confining roof of a barn.

Arnold keeps her camera tight — on the cows’ shoulders or following them, always giving us a dose of the world as they’re seeing it. It’s a butt’s-eye-view take on “Escape to the Country.”

You have to take the filmmaker at her word on a movie like this. The editing, which conveys the sense that the cattle spend little time out of doors and are warehoused in soulless, rusty sheet-metal prisons for too much of their lives, has got to be honest for this message to be trusted.

I do trust Arnold, and can only shudder at the thought of conditions she might have captured on a larger American industrial dairy farm.

As mother or calf glances up and gazes at a passing jet, or into the night sky seemingly pondering the stars that form Ursa Minor, we absorb a “Charlotte’s Web/Babe” epiphany. Maybe artificial meat and plant-based milk is the future, and we’ll look back on our age and values with a sort of cannibalistic horror. Think of our evolving view of what goes on at zoos or Sea World and “parks” of that ilk.

And if we don’t, we’ll half to admit it’s only because we just don’t want to think about it.

Rating: violence, graphic calving scenes

Credits: Directed by Andrea Arnold. A BBC Films/IFC release.

Running time: 1:38

Here’s a cinematic resume you don’t run across every day.

Levan Tediashvili is an Olympic and world champion wrestler from Georgia — the one that used to be in the Soviet Union — turned actor and now film director.

So it’s no wonder that he’s instantly credible in his first big screen star vehicle, playing an aged Georgian wrestler trying to tidy up an untidy family in “Brighton 4th,” a most engaging tale set in Tbilsi, Georgia, and amongst the (mostly illegal) ex-pats struggling to get by in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Latvian screenwriter Boris Frumin (“Viva Castro!,” “Black and White”) conjures up a meandering 90 minute journey through the life of Kakhi, a working class guy still well-known in wrestling circles in Tblisi, a man whose late life quest is helping his struggling family with the little money and skill-set he possesses.

The difficulties in this are set up in a beautifully roundabout way. We don’t meet Kakhi (Koguashvili) straight off. Let’s begin in a Tbilisi sports pub where the locals sit and smoke, utterly absorbed in a soccer match between Liverpool and Manchester United.

Why they’re so caught up becomes obvious when one viewer starts raging around the place, spilling drinks and carrying on until quietly confronted by another punter who also bet on the game, a gambler who happens to be Kakhi’s brother (Temur Gvalia).

It’s only after that dust-up that Kakhi learns that brother has blown the cash he was supposed to use to pay bills and fix up his apartment, money earned by his sister-in-law, working and sending cash home from America. Plainly, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. And this time he’s lost the family apartment.

Kakhi knows a lost cause when he sees one. He takes the brother to his old gym, gets them to take him on as live-in custodian, and moves on. He’s going to America.

Kakhi and his bedbound wife (Laura Rekhviashvili) worry about their son, Soso (Giorgi Tabidze) in Brooklyn. That’s why he’s flying to to New York.

He finds himself picked up by Soso in a hearse and taken home to the crowded brownstone hostel his sister-in-law Natela (Tsutsa Kapanadze) runs, a boarding house bubble stuffed with Georgians where English is never spoken and everybody — young and old — is struggling, working multiple jobs and trying to get by, get a green card and live the American dream.

Soso would love to marry Lena (Nadezhda Mikhalkova), even if he considers it a “fake marriage.” It’ll solve his green card problem and allow him to take the tests to work in medicine, which was his training at home. But that costs a lot of money and his primary work is manual labor, moving. And then there’s the $14,000 gambling debt he owes to the hulking local poker room entrepreneur Amir (Yuri Zur).

Kahki lies to his wife back home, lies to Natela about her husband and their apartment, sighs to his son about “straightening out” and tries to find work through Natela so that he can tidy up this other mess on the other side of the world.

As a director, Koguashvili slides us into “Brighton 4th” like an old man slipping into a slightly-too-hot bathtub. We visit the Tblisi pub and the fresh market, with its open air butchers and cheese merchants (the son wants him to smuggle local cheese into America). We hang out in the off-the-books hostel, where colorful men from different ex-Soviet cultures mix and mingle, bond and drink. Kakhi’s attempt to take on one of Natela’s jobs, caring for an elderly couple, becomes a bizarre sidebar. We duck into the poker room where Amir and his Georgian and Russian patrons gamble, and we see Kakhi enlisted in the problems of other Georgian “illegals,” cleaning hotel rooms for a Kazakh owner who is refusing to pay them.

Eveybody’s broke. Everybody’s got problems. And nobody wants to involve the police, authorities or whoever in solving them. A little muscle, a little talk, a little wine, doled out in equal measure, and maybe we can come to an agreement.

The linchpin of it all is 70something Kakhi, still fit, still running his 40ish son through calisthenics in their hostel bunks or wrestling him in good-natured greeting.

“Brighton 4th” is the kind of ambling, immersive movie that you check out for the chance to visit a different culture and see the world through others’ eyes, but that you remember for its warmth, the connection that binds people who never let themselves be simply resigned to their family obligations.

It begins with fascinating curiosity and finishes with a flourish so touching — so distinctly Georgian — that it brings tears.

And Koguashvili, an unhurried filmmaker and passive, aged yet still muscular presence on camera, becomes a movie star in a role only he could play.

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Levan Koguashvili, Giorgi Tabidze, Nadezhda Mikhalkova, Tsutsa Kapanadze, Laura Rekhviashvili, Yuri Zur and Kakhi Kavsadze

Credits: Directed by Levan Koguashvili, scripted by Boris Frumin. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:30

“Schemers” is an autobiographical slice of Scottish whimsy about a 20ish lad who becomes a concert promoter just to impress a college girl in the Dundee, Scotland of the 1980s.

As Davie McLean (Conor Berry) tells his tale — with ample examples from “real life” and a heavy dose of voice-over narration — he was always a seat-of-the-pants hustler, a hard-drinking, hard-living “degenerate gambler” with a “bit of a love affair with th’horses” long before he met the fair bottle-blonde Shona (Tara Lee) with the Brooke Shields/Lily Collins eyebrows.

How’d he meet her? He got caught crawling into bed with some goon’s fiance. Whatever dreams of soccer glory he held (we never see him play), that ends with the busted ankle that puts him in the hospital, where his morphine-addled vision of a nurse’s aid (Shona) fires his attempts to get her attention once he’s out and on crutches.

As she’s stunning, looking a lot like the future film star Imogen Poots, he invites her and her guardian-friends to “a disco at the uni (versity) I’m organizing.” That’s thinking on your feet.

“She called my bluff. Cheeky that.”

That sets a whole life path in motion for Davie. He doesn’t ditch his dream of studying under the writer-producer of the documentary, “Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia.” Not entirely. The real Dave McLean co-wrote and directed “Schemers,” after all. But it did send him on the steep learning curve of concert promoting, an unsavory corner of the performing arts that set him up for another — filmmaking.

Davie, still on crutches, must entice a married soccer player/dance DJ (Grant Robert Keelan) to do the show and partner with him on it. He enlists his drug-dealing mate Scot (Sean Conner) as well. And they literally leap from a sell-out dance to putting on live shows. This new band, Simple Minds, recommended by Shone and “getting some airplay on (radio host) John Peel?” Try them. XTC, Thin Lizzy, Ultravox and others follow.

This new band. “outta Dublin, they’re gonna be HUGE” is offered. “Never HAIRD of’em.”

The “12 Bridges (of Dundee) Promotions” team finances shows with gambling winnings or drug money, and fakes a death to get out of another.

Much of this meteoric rise happens before Davie even gets his cast off, before he’s convinced Shona that he’s not just a “chancer” but a lad on the move. But when most of the clubs and concert venues he needs to make these shows come off are owned by Fergie (Alastair Thomson Mills), “the chief potato of Dundee’s McMafia,” there’s trouble on the horizon.

And that “next big thing” metal band that Davie wants to score? That’s where the serious money, the serious gamble and most serious threats come in.

“When you begin to swim deeper, don’t be surprised when you meet the sharks.”

Seat-of-the-pants music business tales like this all owe a debt to “24 Hour Party People,” or even “Hear My Song.” Earlier this year, we were treated to the saga of the guy who “discovered Oasis” (“Creation Stories”). I find it a fun genre.

“Schemers,” with real Dundee locations (Caird Hall, where they wanted to book Iron Maiden, is featured) but zero star power, isn’t on a par with any of its predecessors. The story’s throughline is jumbled and the lack of music rights limits the concert scenes and takes away an important feature of the nostalgia being sold here — its soundtrack.

Another big problem. The film’s in untranslated Scottish, the English tongue at its slangyest and least decipherable. You can hope your ear-brain connection gets you into the -playful-musical rhythms of the dialect. But truth be told, I’d bet anybody who hannae lived in Dundee for a wee spell is going to spend a lot of time wondering “What’re they on about, then?”

This isn’t your typical “Trainspotting” Scots-you-can-decipher, albeit a few moments after the phrase has invaded your ear. This is full-on haggis and Highland Park whisky Scots. Oy.

Young Berry makes an agreeable lead, and Lee — perhaps playing a fictional character, considering her “function” in the film — adds sex appeal and nicely humanizes chancer Davie as her character makes him explain himself and face himself when things go wrong because his biggest lie to one and all is “I know what I’m doing.”

Thanks to them, and no thanks to the film’s delusions of Guy Ritchie “underworld” wit, “Schemers” manages to be a tolerable mess of a movie, but little more.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Conor Berry, Sean Conner, Tara Lee, Grant Robert Keelan, Carolyn Bonnyman, Kit Clark, David Izzat and Alastair Thomson Mills

Credits: Directed by Dave McLean, scripted by Dave McLean, Khaled Spiewak and Kyle Titterton. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:29

Hand it to Paramount. They keep making hay out of their most popular intellectual properties, “Star Trek,” and now “The Godfather.”

Miles Teller plays producer/hustler Albert Ruddy, Matthew Goode is handsome slick and vain studio honcho Robert Evans, with Giovanni Ribisi as mobster Joe Colombo, Dan Fogler as Coppola…

April 28 film buffs will be gathered on Paramount+ for “The Offer.”

The gold, or at least silver standard for teen heist movies was filmed way back in 2004. “The Perfect Score” was about breaking in and stealing the answers to that year’s SAT at the Princeton Testing Center, where such data was kept out of the reach of those willing to cheat the system.

The film put future stars Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans and Erika Christensen together, managed a tight, suspenseful and sometimes “Breakfast Club” amusing caper, and opened to middling reviews. But being topical, this little slice of middle class teen rebellion is aging well.

“Coin Heist” dips that formula in even more privilege as it concerns prep school kids trying to break into the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia for a caper they hope will “refill the school’s endowment.” It earned a limited release in 2017, to no fanfare, and as of yet, its stars — Alex Saxon, Alexis G. Zall, Sasha Pieterse, Jay Walker — haven’t emerged as among the major names of their generation.

But what Emily Hagins’ film, based on an Elisa Ludwig novel, gets right is that all-important hook — the caper. It takes us into unfamiliar territory — a Federal factory where coins are made — and shows how ingenious kids might figure out a way to “cheat the system, for a change,” it being a given that even as teens in an exclusive prep school, “the system” is giving them the business.

All those provisos aside, I liked it. I love the genre, and the idea that somebody could bone up on how to do this by “watching 12 heist pictures back to back” is an easy one for any movie buff to endorse.

We see Jason (Saxon), the flighty, “never finishes anything” headmaster’s son, dive into “Gambit.” He might have also watched “The Hot Rock” and “Going in Style,” “Tower Heist” and “Topkapi,” and probably some version or all versions of “Ocean’s Eleven.” One thing he knows they’re going to need to pull this off is “a team.”

Even the grungy clever hacker-chick (Zall) who first broaches the idea to him hasn’t wholly come to that conclusion. She’s trying to impress him, we figure, because he’s hot.

But they’re going to need footballer/part-time mechanic Benny (Walker), who might or might not join up, even though the white kids assume he’ll be down with this because he’s streetwise, aka Black.

And they don’t know it, but Miss Hyper-Organized Class President, Dakota (Pieterse), would be perfect at logistics, “coming up with alibis” and play-acting her way into the Mint to get a security pass they can copy.

They’re driven to this because Jason’s dad is arrested during the art class’s Mint tour for embezzling school funds and putting Dennington Prep in jeopardy. Everybody’s concerned about being able to finish school there. Jason feels spillover guilt for this. And Dakota’s motivated because all extra-curricular activities are the first things to go, “and we’ll have to have the Winter Formal in the cafeteria, unfortunately.”

There’s friction from the start, with Jason’s reliable unreliability clashing with hacker Alice’s risk tolerance and snobby Dakota’s recruiting of jock/engineering whiz Benny taking on a teasing flirtation that might not be the smartest move.

Their art teacher (Michael Cyril Creighton) is a little suspicious, and board of trustees chair Mr. Smerconish (Mark Blum) might have to be tricked, kept in the dark and outwitted.

Because there’s no way these kids can pull this burglary-based-scheme off, right?

Hagins, of “My Sucky Teen Romance,” doesn’t deliver much in the way of humor or witty banter here. There are a few sparks set off among our leads, but the director keeps her eyes on the heist and it plays.

The finale is seriously undigested, but that’s consistent with the film as a whole. It’s a workable, salvageable caper comedy that needed more comedy and a heist picture that needed a bit more interesting content and character development outside of the heist.

The actual heist she got right. It’s what leads up to it and follows it that she botches.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Alex Saxon, Alexis G. Zall, Sasha Pieterse, Jay Walker, Michael Cyril Creighton and Mark Blum

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emily Hagins, based on a novel by Elisa Ludwig. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38