Movie Nation

“Top Gun Maverick” is movie about how people don’t change, and how hit movie formulas shouldn’t be messed with.

It’s a sentimental stroll through 1986’s “Top Gun” — a sentimental stroll at Mach whatever, pulling seven, eight or nine “G’s” along the way.

Every bit as simply-plotted as the original, it’s built around seriously impressive flying footage involving a lot more stunt work than digital trickery, and the stoic “Let’s make this REAL” presence of Tom Cruise. Starting with “Top Gun,” he set the bar for what movie stars should put themselves through in the “Holy crap, he’s really DOING that” realm of action stunts.

And that spreads throughout the cast of Joseph Kosinski’s adrenalin rush remake. Look at Cruise’s grimace as his character’s F-18 launches from an aircraft carrier, twists, rolls, dives and climbs. Look at the eyes and faces beneath the helmets of young co-stars Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis and Danny Ramirez.

If they aren’t “in there” and “up there” experiencing a version of what their characters go through learning to dogfight and carry out a desperate “Star Wars” bombing mission in a “rogue state” about to start enriching uranium, that’s the most impressive stunt fakery and acting in the picture.

This “Top Gun” shamelessly repeats huge chunks of the original film, and makes no bones about stealing from “The Right Stuff” and every action pic about feuding pilots and zig-zagging through “canyons” to evade radar (“Firefox,” etc.) and strike a target tucked into a mountain (“633 Squadron”) ever. Including “Star Wars.”

If screenwriters Ehren Krueger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie aren’t blushing, that’s OK. Let’s just hope they donated the DVDs of all the pictures they memorized and ripped off to their public libraries.

But none of that strips the fun from this nostalgic, jokey and balls-to-the-wall sequel. It’s pure popcorn fun at its corniest.

Cruise is a wizened if not wiser test pilot Maverick still given to “breaking the rules,” still “just a captain” over 30 years into his career. He gives us a little of the “Right Stuff” as he takes a prototype spy plane to its limits and beyond, inviting a chewing-out and dismissal from “The Drone Ranger,” the commanding officer (Ed Harris) who kills that program on the spot.

“The future is coming, and you’re not in it.”

But Maverick’s Navy flying career has a “guardian angel.” That’s how he ends up back at the dog fighting school he so disrupted during the ’80s. There’s this mission, the CO there (Jon Hamm) informs him, prompting Maverick to leap to the wrong conclusions.

“We don’t want you to fly it. We want you to teach it.“

A brash corps of Navy fighter jocks is to be trained, tested and culled to find the right ones to stop this over-armed and unnamed “rogue state” from going nuclear. One of them has a mustache, just like his old man.

Goose (Anthony Edwards) may be gone. But his kid (Miles Teller of “Whiplash”) is here. And “Rooster” holds a grudge. How will that endanger the mission, and can there be bro bonding between young pilots when not all of them are “bros,” and one of them is a geezer with a flight jacket covered with service patches?

Aside from fighting female Phoenix (Barbaro, of TV’s “The Good Cop,” “Stumptown,” etc) reminding us that the Navy’s not just a boy’s club any more, this “boy’s club” engages in the same camaraderie, hijinks and pilots’ piano bar sing-alongs that every fighter pilot movie since “Hell’s Angels” has showcased.

They’re still playing pool, only the cloth covering the table has fighter plane schematics drawn on it, still singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” only Rooster’s now tickling the ivories, still pranking “the new guy.” Only now he’s an “old man.”

Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly classes the picture up as the old flame who’s now the owner of “The Hard Deck,” as that bar is named. Penny has her own “need for speed.” She likes bombing around the waters off San Diego under sail in her racing J-boat. When she digs the lee rail in the water and rattles her old beau hanging on for dear life, it may be the most impressive stunt in the movie.

Naturally, she’s reluctant to take up again with hit-it-and-quit-it Maverick. But she looks so natural and at home on the back of his latest Kawasaki.

The wisecracks fly and characters shout out their “issues” mid-dogfight. Everybody takes a break from training for a rough, shirtless but Raybanned game of touch football in the surf.

And the homages to the first film begin with the recycled opening credits (original co-producer Don Simpson, long dead, turns up) and a near shot-for-shot Kenny Loggins-scored carrier flight operations montage remake, and continue through to a moving reunion between Maverick and the Iceman.

It’s all in good fun, even if you’re never really surprised by anything, even if you your eyes roll with every barrel roll of a plot twist in the later acts. The stunts, the knock-you-around-in-your-seat dogfighting, still has “the need for speed” and a license to thrill.

And yet “Maverick” — the character and the film — seems more sober, more reflective. It’s somehow less like the jingoistic “MTV Fighter Jocks” Navy recruiting film that the even shallower (and not aging well) Reagan-era original was.

“Maverick” is a reminder that while his non-action career has petered out, Cruise was and remains one of the greatest action stars ever. And if he’s dyeing his hair and doing stuff most folks pushing 60 shouldn’t or wouldn’t, he’s earned that right because we still believe it — every stunt, every damned time.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Jay Ellis, Glen Powell, Ed Harris and Val Kilmer

Credits: Directed by Joseph Kosinski, scripted by Ehren Krueger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, based on the film “Top Gun.” A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:11

August 17, Disney wrings a little more value out of that Marvel buyout with this series.

Ruffalo, sure. Not seeing any other familiar faces in it. Tatiana Maslany was in “Perry Mason.” The effects just turn her into a Kardashian…with an education and work skills.

Like the tone, though.

Britain simply canNOT get enough of that punk era Thatcherism or Thatcher Era provoking punk nostalgia.

At least Danny Boyle’s behind this Sex Pistols mini series. The cast look and sound right. It’s on FX May 31.

Maybe they’ll pitch it and I’ll review it. Or being FX, maybe they won’t bother. #Punkcablenetwork

Eichner stars in, comments on and co-wrote this with director Nicholas Stoller.

Hard to tell how funny it is, but he’s reliably hilarious on the TeeVee. And it’s sure to be a bit raunchy.

Sept. 30

How on Earth does a movie set amidst the sun, vineyards, food and earthy-sexy sensualists of Tuscany turn out as drab as Helsignor during a mid-winter rain?

“Toscana” is an Around the World with Netflix stab at “Italian for Beginners,” another story of stoic Scandinavians turning lighter and sunnier via exposure to Italy, Italians and the Italian food, culture and lifestyle. It’s a “stab” that mises the mark widely enough to matter.

Anders Matthesen stars as Theo, a hard-driving 50ish chef whose famous attention to detail extends to the table settings he triple checks and his kitchen, which he guards like a hawk because no matter how big his kitchen “crew,” “nobody cleans up after me” (in Danish, or dubbed into English).

But on the make-or-break day Theo must deliver and dazzle to a gauche, new-money investor-bro, he gets the news that his estranged father has passed away in far-off Tuscany. Buttoned-down, repressed Dane Theo keeps it together only so long before that arbitrary moment when he snaps and cusses out that “bro” (Sebastian Jessen) and lets down his crew and his manager (Lærke Winther).

Their last hope of fresh cash must be in Italy. His dad left the worn villa and “ristorante” Ristonchi” to him. A “quick sale” and they’ll be flush enough to carry on.

But “quick” anything is going to be a problem in Italy. And that would be funny in any other film covering this very familiar “Under the Tuscan Sun” transformation storyline.

But writer-director Mehdi Avaz, apparently new to comedy, can’t manage it.

Theo can’t find the lawyer/executor of the estate Pino (Andrea Bosca). Theo visits the ristorante, and Gordon Ramsay-fashion, finds everything there lacking. Throw in a little Northern European “don’t drink the water” prejudice, among other prejudices (the kitchen is filthy), and watch the sparks fly.

Only they don’t. Not for a moment.

His sarcastic, seen-it-all waitress Sophia (Cristiana Dell’Anna) dismisses him until she learns who he is. But there’s no apologizing. She grew up here, under Theo’s father Geo’s roof, raised like his daughter. She is Roma, but “feisty” barely figures into it. She may not be thrilled Theo is set to sell the place, but Dell’Anna plays that with resignation, not resistance.

The “magical” conversion scenes, where Theo tastes the olive oil and bread, the only thing Ristonchi has going for it, visits the vast aging warehouse for the local cheeses and such aren’t magical in the least.

Matthesen doesn’t play a single moment in this light and “fun.”

And the wedding banquet, which Theo decides to cater, partly to impress a potential buyer for the Italian property, and partly to impress, honor and “repay” Sophia (it’s her wedding), has a few mouth-watering moments, but no funny, sunny or even sweet ones.

The big emotion here is melancholy, shocking for a Dane I know, but ill-suited to the subject matter and aims of “Toscana.” Theo’s daddy issues have to be resolved, along with him surrendering to Italy’s charms, pace and ethos.

I didn’t buy that transition for a minute.

All “Toscana” has to offer is some decent (limited) scenery, a little taste of high-end cooking, and a love story that’s about as romantic as the one The Bard set in foggy Helsignor.

At least nobody kills herself this time round.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Anders Matthesen, Cristiana Dell’Anna, Lærke Winther and Andrea Bosca

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mehdi Avaz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Here’s the stand-out moment for many people who fondly recall 1988’s sometimes dazzling blend of live-action and animation, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

It’s the long-awaited teaming up of Warner Brothers’ wise-quacking anti-hero Daffy Duck with Disney’s sputtering, exasperated and always put-upon Donald Duck.

But it’s not just the startling sight of seeing them both on the screen at the same time that made it work. It’s the idea of them being a nightclub act, furiously pounding through a dueling pianos routine. It’s the funny lines they exchange, in growing exasperation with each other.

“I’ve worked with a lot of withe-quackerth, but you are dethpicable! Thith ith the latht time I work with thomeone with a th-peech impediment!”

That’s a key lesson ignored in Disney’s Chip’n’Dale version of an animation-in-a-live-action-setting comedy, an extension of their beloved-by-90s-kids “Rescue Rangers” TV show. You can round up “the old gang,” make one of the chipmunks — Chip — “tradigital” animated, the way we remember them from TV. You can make the other an “upgrade.” Dale’s “had the CGI (plush, textured 3D) surgery done.”

You can give “Chip’n’Dale: Rescue Rangers” a Roger Rabbitish quest/plot. Somebody’s kidnapping cartoon characters and forcing them to work in pirated versions of their films.

And you can throw The Simpsons and Flounder, Batman and Baloo the Bear and even Roger Rabbit himself into the mix, with either mentions, appearances and jokes about scores of other animated characters.

But if you don’t come up with gags and funny lines for them to say and amusing situations to stick them in, that’s all you’ve got — a “stunt.”

Cast comics Andy Samberg as Dale and John Mulaney as Chip, our lead chipmunks and leaders of the Rescue Rangers, but failing to give Mulvaney a single line that might merit so much as a grin is the epitome of missing the point.

Seth Rogen as a Viking king with a hilariously over-used laugh? Ok. But Aussie-accented Eric Bana, as kidnapped “Ranger” Monterrey Jack is wasted in a role that’s largely absent, as his character’s being held hostage.

Animated or live action, you can’t do better than hiring Will Arnett as your villain. He barely registers.

And on and on it goes.

Yes, the cop the chipmunks team up with (Kiki Layne) is a plucky young woman. But female cartoon inclusion comes up SERIOUSLY under-represented in the film, which had a male director and male writers and it apparently never occurred to them that little girls loved that TV show, too.

Still, the “Rescue Rangers” is technically impressive enough to be worth a look. And if you’re of a certain age, it might give you a bit of the warm fuzzies.

Me? These two just remind me of how much funnier the Warner Brothers gay gophers Mac and Tosh were and still are, lo these many decades later.

Rating: PG for mild action and rude/suggestive humor

Cast: The voices of Andy Samberg, John Mulaney, Seth Rogen, J.K. Simmons, Dennis Haysbert, Will Arnett and Eric Bana, with Kiki Layne

Credits: Directed by Akiva Schaffer, scripted by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. A Walt Disney/Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:37

The sinister side of that British passion to “Escape to the Country” is the font of horror in “Men,” a genuinely hair-raising thriller from the director of “Ex Machina.”

Alex Garland puts Jessie Buckley in jeopardy in a quiet country village, and makes her plight a universal statement on men’s mania for controlling women as she is judged, menaced and imperiled by every bloke she meets in tiny Cotson, where she’s rented a house to be alone with her thoughts and recover from trauma and tragedy.

Buckley, of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” and “The Lost Daughter,” gives a tense, troubled performance that leans into one of her great acting gifts — her ability to look stricken without saying a word.

Harper may put on a brave face on the phone with her best friend (Gayle Rankin) and give the chatty, “very specific ‘type'” Wellington’d landlord (Rory Kinnear of “Penny Dreadful” and the James Bond franchise) of Cotson Manor a smile. But she’s come here to escape something awful that haunts her. Her husband (Paapa Essiedu) killed himself, jumping off their apartment building, leaving her with the image of James staring her in the eye as he plummeted past her window to his death.

The toothy, jocular country squire Geoffrey might ask, “Where’s hubby?” of his renter “Mrs. Marlowe” in all innocence. That doesn’t mean she has to answer, or tell him the truth about anything — whether or not she plays the piano, for instance, as this 500 year old house with the bright red walls is equipped with one.

“I’m just going to have to learn to deal with it,” she tells her chum Riley.

But the moment she takes a bite out of the apple from the tree in the front yard, we don’t have to be reminded of “forbidden fruit” by Geoffrey to sense her unease or what this is about. That first long walk in the lush, dense woods cast in overcast English gloom hits us with other creepy metaphors. That long, echoey old train tunnel might make Harper giddy at its magical, musical properties. We see the danger before the silhouette of a strange man appears on the other end.

And there’s nothing like ending your near-panicked run back home like glancing back and seeing a naked, nicked-up and muddy man staring out of the gloom at you.

This “Escape” and recover idyll is going to be nothing of the sort.

Garland hurls assorted creepy local oddballs at Harper — an unfiltered, on-the-spectrum mean boy, a male cop given to shrugging off her concerns when his female partner takes her seriously, the comforting-and-helpful-until-he-judges-her priest.

“You must wonder how you drove him to it.“

And all the while, our heroine is remembering the grisly details of her last day with her husband, the horrific nature of his injuries, the reason she’s “haunted” by what happened to him, and to her.

Garland uses simple casting and makeup tricks and elaborate and gory childbirth effects to raise Harper’s threat level from troubled to alarmed about this conspiracy of “Men” — starting with her husband — who seek control over her, physically, psychologically and socially.

And Buckley gives us a stoic woman whose strong self-assurance is attacked and eroded by man after man in assaults that range from mental to physical, with a heady dose of the supernatural compounding her terror.

The writer-director and his star manage several chills, a bit of breathless suspense and some eyes-averting gore as they challenge us to stare down the threat of “Men” their EveryWoman faces and confronts. And they put us in her shoes, shaken by their violence, handicapped by her own empathy and guilt until she sees the Big Societal Picture — the cruel manipulation of a system engineered to keep her from “the forbidden fruit” and under control.

Rating: R for disturbing and violent content, graphic nudity, grisly images and language.

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu and Gayle Rankin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Garland. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40

Same director as “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Only…on Netflix.

Totally down with this as a concept.

June 7.

Perhaps the best representation of the tediously-over-titled latest installment in the “Ghost in the Shell” media vortex –– “Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Sustainable War” — is that hideously over-loaded title itself, translated from “Kôkaku kidôtai SAC_2045 Jizoku kanô sensô.”

Three directors, six credited screenwriters, vividly-animated characters with rigidly immobile faces, exteriors that have some of the most realistic CGI “sunshine” ever coupled with generally dull and dark eye-straining interiors, endless low-stakes action buried under endless exposition masquerading as dialogue from an infantry battalion of “characters” — some of them kewpie-doll voiced robots — one hardly knows where to begin.

How about at the end? This two hour movie never, for one second, lets your forget that it’s “content” — manufactured, formulaic piffle with a fixed set-price/run-time that’s been filled with material that feels more like something generated by an algorithm than anything humans put any heart and soul into.

With manga, TV series, video games and the occasional movie assembly-lined into existence over the past three decades, it’s damned near impossible to drop in and out of “Ghost in the Shell,” film by film. You don’t so much absorb the blizzard of words, the sea of characters and ever-deepening pile of backstory and exposition as let it wash over you. It’s a little like having your brain buried in sand.

The big idea here is that the “Ghost” mercenary team — with many members, vehicles and a robot or two — are treated as pawns by competing billionaire-run global conglomerates which came up with the concept of “sustainable war,” manufactured conflict designed for maximum profits, only to turn civilization into a few fortified citadels, cities and billionaire compounds separated by a near-wasteland on its way to “Mad Max” status.

“Even Japan’s dangerous now,” the ex-detective/ex-“Ghost” team member Togusa mutters.

One billionaire has been nicknamed “The Good One Percenter.” Random remarks reveal where this or that mercenary or “amateur” gang came from — ex-college athletes “bankrupted by student loans” created one.

Chases, chases and more chases end in fights, with characters chattering away to each other in future combatspeak that resembles telepathy because nobody’s lips move…much.

I guess adding that to the “content” would’ve cost too much. The entire affair looks pricey but cut-rate at the same time, like a Tesla… The Budweiser product placement does nothing to dispel that.

If you’re way down the rabbit hole of “Ghost,” you will almost certainly get more out of this than the rest of us. I guess my question, repeated too often when I dip back into this franchise, is “Why would anyone bother?”

Cast: Cherami Leigh, Michael McCarty, Dave Wittenberg, Laura Post, Keith Silverstein, Roger Craig Smith, many others

Credits: Directed by Shinji Aramaki, Michihito Fujii and Kenji Kamiyama, scripted by Ryô Higaki, Harumi Doki, Kenji Kamiyama, Daisuke Ohigashi, Kurasumi Sunayama and Dai Satô, created by Shirow Masamune. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00