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Review of TOP GUN: MAVERICK (Blu-ray)

November 2, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+/A-
Action-Adventure Drama Romance
Rated PG-13

Top Gun: Maverick outgunned all other films at the box office so far in 2022, besting #2 Jurassic World: Dominion by nearly half-a-million dollars. It’s slick Hollywood action blockbuster filmmaking at its finest. 

Critics thought it better than the first Top Gun because of the increased number and authenticity of the aircraft action sequences. With the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, a film crew spent over a year working with six cameras placed inside the cockpits and additional cameras mounted at various spots on the planes’ exteriors. Reportedly more than 800 hours of aerial footage was shot, so the sequences that made it into the film were really something special.

And the planes? The production crew used 20 functioning aircraft and modified them to have the look that they wanted, including the fictional “Darkstar” that was designed with the help of actual engineers from legendary aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

The 1986 Top Gun was so popular that composer Giorgio Moroder and performer Kenny Loggins probably expected to see a hastily produced sequel and earn residuals for their “Danger Zone” theme. But it took almost 25 years before Paramount announced a sequel with Cruise signed, Jerry Bruckheimer onboard to produce, and Top Gun director Tony Scott expected to work behind the cameras again. Then, later in 2012, Scott died and production didn’t begin until 2017, with Joseph Kosinski directing. Then came delays related to COVID-19 and the prolonged filming of those complicated action sequences. But the results speak for themselves. If you don’t already have a big TV, this might be a reason to splurge. Top Gun: Maverick was made for the big screen.

Cruise at 60 looks boyish as ever and because of his action roles has maintained his muscle tone and slender frame. In Top Gun he was paired romantically with Kelly McGillis, five years his senior, but McGillis said she wasn’t asked to be in the sequel. Instead, writers gave Cruise another love interest to take his breath away:  Navy hangout bar owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly, age 48), with whom it’s implied he had a previous relationship—the old heartbreaker.

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Review of WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Blu-ray combo)

September 15, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+
Drama
Rated PG-13

Unlike many reviewers of Where the Crawdads Sing (2022), I don’t have an axe to grind or a subject to bludgeon. I never read the first novel by 70-year-old Delia Owens that this Olivia Newman film is based on, and only heard about the hype—a Reese Witherspoon book club selection that sold 12 million copies in four years—and the controversy after watching the film. For some people, Owens’ background makes a difference, so I’ll address it briefly, though even without the backstory there’s plenty enough to get riled up about.

The film, like the novel, tells the story of a girl who is forced to fend for herself in the marshes of North Carolina after her abusive father drives off her mother and older siblings, and later bows out of the picture as well. Shamefully, it doesn’t occur to any of her family to take her with them. They just take off, leaving her alone with him.

The townspeople aren’t much better. They dub her “the marsh girl” and obviously recognize her situation, but only one couple shows her any kindness. And they certainly could have done more for her. Kya attends school barefoot, but is treated so shabbily that she never returns. Later, as a teenager after living in the marsh for years, she draws the attention of two young men: one a rich boy with a penchant for partying and taking what he wants, and the other a college-bound youth who at one point decides to teach Kya how to read. Some think that sweet; others call it condescending and controlling or a perverse sort of  relationship imbalance fetish.

Maybe the razors were sharpened after it was brought to everyone’s attention that Owens, like Kya, was (and is still) a suspect in an unsolved murder. In the film, one of Kya’s suitors ends up dead and she stands trial, with David Straithairn playing the kind of down-home country lawyer with uncommon wisdom and empathy that we saw in Harper Lee’s attorney, Atticus Finch. In real life, Owens and husband Mark were working as biologists and environmentalists in Zambia and were being filmed when a poacher was shot and killed . . . on camera. The couple left the country and was advised not to return because they remain persons of interest, as shown on ABC’s 1996 special Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story.

But back to the film. Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild) wrote the screenplay, Witherspoon co-produced, Polly Morgan (The Woman King) was responsible for the gorgeous location cinematography, Taylor Swift co-wrote and sang the theme song (“Carolina”), and Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Under the Banner of Heaven) headed a talented cast as Kya. Though men also are involved in the project, Where the Crawdads Sing feels very much like a female empowerment story and holds considerable appeal because of that.

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Review of COSTA BRAVA, LEBANON (Blu-ray)

September 1, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Drama, Foreign (subtitles), PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B-
Drama
Not rated (would be PG-13)

Americans have never been good at thinking about the future. A 2019 Northwestern Mutual poll found that 15 percent of Americans age 40 and older haven’t even put aside a single dollar toward their retirement years. And if the price of gas isn’t too crazy, no one gives a second thought as to whether the oil will run out some day, or whether the polluting side-effects of petroleum consumption will one day become intolerable. Same with the mountains of trash that Americans produce on a daily basis. Does anyone wonder if there will ever come a time when all the refuse becomes too much for the government to handle?

Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)is an environmentalist fable in Arabic (English subtitles) from Mounia Akl and the Lebanese entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars. A cautionary tale set in the near future, it has an engaging cast and some powerful moments as it tries to sound the alarm to alert people to an impending crisis of waste management. Except that in some countries it’s not all that impending. It’s already happening. Visitors to Egypt’s pyramids, for example, must first drive past mounds of trash pushed to the sides of roads and freeways. And that could happen anywhere . . . and everywhere.

Saleh Bakri and Nadine Labaki star as Walid and Soraya, a couple who eight years earlier decided to leave their Beirut home because of the poor air quality, pollution, and corrupt politics that made life there untenable. Now they live in the mountains with Walid’s aged mother and the couple’s two daughters: a teenager eager for more than the sheltered life her parents provide, and a precocious adolescent. Presumably because of the mother’s previous income from her pre-marriage career as a popular singer, they were able to build a house in the country’s last unspoiled place, an idyllic hillside home that even has the luxury of a small in-ground swimming pool. But it doesn’t take long for this paradise to be lost, and that’s the whole point of the film. Society’s problems are everyone’s problem. There’s no escaping them—even if you try to live off the grid.

You’d think that Walid and Soraya, former activists who met at a protest, would know that. But the impulse to survive and protect loved ones is even stronger than the drive to fight for the change that society needs. Alas, not long after we meet this family, men from the government show up. And like the earth-moving equipment operators from earlier films such as The Emerald Forest or Avatar who displaced forest-dwellers, the workers force the family to make the same hard decision that drove them to the mountains in the first place. On a micro level, Costa Brava, Lebanon could have been about any disaster, because it’s an intimate look—rendered so by Akl’s directorial style—of how one family deals with adversity.

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Review of SO PROUDLY WE HAIL (1943) (Blu-ray)

August 20, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater PG-13 rated, Romance, War Leave a comment

Grade:  B/B-
Drama
Not rated (would be PG-13)

Studs Terkel won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two, a title he said was suggested by an army correspondent. “The Good War” was a phrase “frequently voiced by men of his and my generation” because it was the last war fought that was not divisive or controversial, Terkel said. Americans rallied behind the flag after Pearl Harbor, and when everyone is in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, there’s a sense of shared purpose and commitment. That leads to a feeling of solidarity, of shared joys or sorrows that nonetheless bind people into a greater family or community stronger than the individuals themselves. There really is strength in numbers, and patriotism at its workable best is a group activity dependent upon full (or nearly full) participation, not an individual attitude—and certainly not competing attitudes.

All of which is to say, aside from the aesthetics of film, there’s value in watching an old black-and-white patriotic war movie because it can remind us of what patriotism really involves.

Colbert tends to Lake

So Proudly We Hail (1943) is an interesting case in point. Most of America’s World War Two movies were about the front-line heroism of fighting men, designed to keep the recruits coming and the people on the home front encouraged, still feeling the commitment and still willing to accept the sacrifices of wartime patriotism. When So Proudly We Hail was first released, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised the film’s  “shattering impression of the tragedy of Bataan” and producer-director Mark Sandrich’s reenacted battle-action scenes, but complained that “we behold the horror of Bataan through a transparency, through the studiously disheveled glamour of the Misses [Claudette] Colbert, [Paulette] Goddard and [Veronica] Lake.”

To a degree, that’s unfair, because the formula behind every patriotic war movie pulled against the film’s intended realism. I think Sandrich (who would direct Holiday Inn the following year) does a decent job of focusing not only on the professional aspects of military nurses serving in Bataan and Corregidor, but also on their love lives. So Proudly We Hail was billed as the “First great love story of our girls at the fighting front,” and Sandrich does a commendable job of adding romantic involvements to the standard war movie.

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Review of JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION (Blu-ray)

August 18, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, PG-13 rated, Sci-Fi/Fantasy Leave a comment

Grade:  B-
Sci-fi action-adventure
Rated PG-13

In 1990, Michael Crichton scored a hit with his sci-fi novel about dinosaurs brought back into existence through DNA preserved in amber. A film version was released in 1993 to critical and audience acclaim. The concept was inspired, the special effects were wondrous, the characters were introduced in such a way that we got to know them before the coprolite hit the fan, and the science was sufficiently explained. You believed it was possible, and that made it all the more terrifying.

Since then, the franchise has failed to clear the high bar set by the first film, which was a hit with 92 percent of the critics and 91 percent of viewers at Rotten Tomatoes. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) only got a 54 percent approval rating from critics and a 51 percent rating from viewers. Jurassic Park III (2001) dipped even lower, with a 49 percent critics’ rating and 36 percent fan approval. Part of the problem was that there was less story in the sequels, which began to take on the one-dimensional character of action films.

After a dormant period, the franchise rebooted with Jurassic World in 2015, and that pleased 71 percent of critics and 78 percent of fans, helped by Chris Pratt and his “raptor whisperer” antics and the bond he had with one special raptor. But the 2018 sequel in this second trilogy, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, only appealed to 47 percent of the critics and 48 percent of fans. That makes it the lowest rated film in the franchise . . . until now, if you believe the critics.

Only 30 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics liked Jurassic World Dominion (2022). Curiously, though, 77 percent of viewers liked it—making it the fans’ third favorite, behind the original and Jurassic World. So depending on your outlook, it’s either the absolute worst of the six films, or the third best.

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Review of FIRE IN THE MOUNTAINS (2021) (DVD)

August 15, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Drama, Foreign (subtitles), PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B-
Drama
Not rated (would be PG-13)

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page,” St. Augustine wrote way back in the 4th century. Travel broadens your world. It increases your understanding, gives you perspective, and, if you’re able to see the world through the emotions of people whose lives are incredibly different from yours, travel also develops your sense of empathy.

If you can’t travel, film is the next best thing. Consider this: if all you and your family watch on your home theater are Hollywood-made formulaic action films and comedies, you’re “reading” just a few pages of the human experience. So I’m going to suggest, as I have in the past, that families with children old enough to manage subtitles should agree to watch a foreign film once a month, then hopefully talk about it afterwards. You could even make it a themed affair, with movie snacks or food from the culture.

Fire in the Mountains is a film in Hindi that offers plenty of possibilities for discussion, starting with the film’s background, which children can research on the Internet. This Indian film debuted in 2021 at Sundance, but for director Ajitpal Singh it was the culmination of many years of work to become a self-taught filmmaker. That’s right. No film school, no mentor—just the spark that came from seeing Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which Singh says really touched him, enough to where he kept at it and finally created his first full-length feature at age 43.

“I connected so deeply with that film. And then I suddenly realized that cinema can be so much more than Bollywood,” he told No Film School. “I realized, I don’t need to know any language. I can just learn this visual language, and I can make films. What I didn’t know at that time, it would take me another 10, 15 years to learn that language.” But he did. First he tried imitation, and it didn’t work. Finally he realized that he needed to film a subject close to his own experience. When he did that, “Suddenly the framing changed, editing changed. Everything changed because this time, I knew what I’m trying to say.” That kind of passion and persistence is certainly worth talking about with children.

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Review of THE LOST CITY (2022) (Blu-ray)

August 2, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, Comedy, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B
Adventure-comedy
Rated PG-13

Sandra Bullock is at her comic best when she plays a character that would seem more comfortable in a drama than a comedy—someone who gets swept up reluctantly in the narrative events, but learns something about herself and others in the process. Including how to lighten up a bit. She excels at being the equivalent of a vaudevillian “second banana,” who plays it tongue-in-cheek straight while the other person is more ostensibly funny. It happened that way when she played opposite Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal and opposite Melissa McCarthy in The Heat, and it works the same way in The Lost City as she reacts to Channing Tatum.

The 2022 adventure-comedy fared well at the box office and with most critics, with the Rotten Tomatoes bunch giving it a 79 percent “fresh” rating, while the audience score was 83 percent. That’s a pretty high ranking, considering that the screenplay itself is nothing really new—just a mash-up of Romancing the Stone and Indiana Jones/Allan Quartermain adventures.

You’ll recognize similarities in a number of scenes, as when a ruined car forces them into a jungle gully and bad guys start shooting at them. But mostly the influence is made obvious when the film opens and former academic-turned-romance-novelist Loretta Sage (Bullock) is imagining a scene with her long-haired dashing hero who’s humorously named Dash McMahon (Tatum). Because Tatum’s character, Alan Caprison, is a model who was hired for a previous book cover and ended up being even more a fan favorite as Dash than the author herself, he’s part of a tour to promote her new book, The Lost City of D. But his flamboyance annoys Loretta and a first-event fiasco leads her to withdraw from the tour.

As good as Tatum and Bullock are together, they’re almost upstaged by Daniel Radcliffe and Brad Pitt in supporting roles. Radcliffe plays Abigail (more cheeky naming) Fairfax, a billionaire who realizes Loretta’s latest book was based on research she did with her late husband. When she refuses Abby’s offer to join his expedition to recover the Crown of Fire, he chloroforms her and kidnaps her. And like any self-respecting romantic hero, Alan decides he has to save her, with a little help from a man he once took self-awareness and flexibility lessons from:  Jack Trainer (Pitt), a former Navy SEAL and CIA operative who meets him on the island and proceeds to grab the spotlight in hilarious fashion. If you enjoyed Pitt’s dramedic talents in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you’re going to love how he manages to be more over-the-top yet still understated and deadpan as can be.

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Review of HOT SHOTS! and HOT SHOTS! PART DEUX (Blu-ray)

July 9, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  C+ and B-
Comedy
Rated PG

With Maverick raking in close to $600 million in total gross and drawing praise from critics and viewers, many fans have started re-watching the original Top Gun. But if you’re also a fan of silly parodies, why stop there? You might as well add the Top Gun parody to your home video library. It’s available with the sequel (Hot Shots! Part Deux) on both domestic and imported Blu-rays.

Hot Shots! (1991) was the first parody Jim Abrahams directed without Jerry and David Zucker after the three parted ways following silly successes like Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Top Secret! As far as parodies go, you should be warned that none of the three found the same level of success as when they worked as a team. But there are still some laughs to be had. Many of the laughs here come from Lloyd Bridges’ performance as Admiral Tug Benson, who is hilariously clueless and never present, though he’s standing right there. Hot Shots! is mostly a takeoff on Top Gun, but other films that get spoofed include An Officer and a Gentleman, 9 1/2 weeks, Dances with Wolves, Superman, and The Fabulous Baker Boys. And Bridges plays a version of a character fans will recognize from Airplane!

Charlie Sheen does a pretty good job of deadpanning the leather-jacketed, bike-riding role Tom Cruise made famous, with Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride) serving as his main fighter-pilot rival, Kent Gregory. The film follows Harley’s reluctant return to flying—reluctant because, like his father before him, he was responsible for another flier’s death. And things don’t bode well for his new partner, “Dead Meat” (William O’Leary). When things heat up “somewhere in the Mediterranean,” Harley and Kent are picked to join the mission to knock out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons factory, with secondary targets being an accordion factory and a mime school (one of the funnier lines from co-writers Pat Proft and Abrahams). Complicating matters? Harley’s fragile psychological state and an evildoer of the capitalist kind (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) who is trying to sabotage the planes for personal gain.

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Review of UNCHARTED (Blu-ray)

May 19, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, PG-13 rated 1 Comment

Grade:  C+/B-
Action-Adventure
Rated PG-13

I’m a big fan of the Indiana Jones and National Treasure movies, so I wanted Uncharted and its treasure hunt to have the same energy level and quality.

But it doesn’t. The writing isn’t as crisp, the plotting isn’t as complex-yet-understandable, and the whole film tonally just doesn’t feel as if the writers could agree on the level of tongue-in-cheekiness vs. serious adventure vs. video game style. Then there’s this nagging feeling that the stars aren’t having as much fun as they should be, all things considered. Tom Holland is engaging. Mark Wahlberg is engaging. But they feel separately engaging, and not consistently so.

When it hit theaters in 2022, Uncharted quickly became the fourth highest grossing film of 2022—which, given the mixed reviews, pretty much hints at how badly fans wanted to like this film in spite of what critics may have been saying.

I mean, when you cast Holland fresh off his latest Spider-Man success and pair his built-in naiveté and nice-guy affability with someone like Wahlberg and the world-weary cynicism he seems to drag behind him like a bag of complaints, you’d think something more fun would happen—or at least more than what the film provides.

You almost feel like the film is in trouble in the early going when the attempt to establish a backstory for Nate (Holland) feels a bit clumsy and confusing. So how is it that orphans Nate and brother Sam are somehow accomplished enough to try to steal a map from a Boston museum and can come and go as they please? And why, when the orphanage kicks Sam out and he leaves through a window, doesn’t brother Nate go with him if they’re legitimately a treasure-hunting team with that kind of capability? Whether Sam is using or protecting his brother, the sequence felt rushed and paint-by-numbers.

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Review of TOP SECRET! (Blu-ray)

April 25, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+
Comedy
Rated PG (but more like PG-13)

In 1987, when I interviewed David Zucker—one of the trio responsible for inflicting non-stop gags on movie audiences in such zany satires as Airplane! and The Naked Gun— Zucker, brother Jerry, and Jim Abrahams were basking in the success of Ruthless People. But they were also thinking a great deal about what made Airplane! a run(a)way success and wondering why Top Secret!and their short-lived Police Squad TV series weren’t as popular with audiences.

Cult favorite
“The problem with Top Secret! was that the story wasn’t strong enough, even though the jokes were probably funnier than Airplane! or Ruthless People, and many of the scenes were far more clever,” Zucker said.  “We were very much in tune with the jokes, but the characters weren’t very well-developed. We just used them to spout these jokes. The other thing is, it really wasn’t a readily identifiable concept.  The idea of a rock ‘n’ roll singer who goes to East Germany to fight what seem to be Nazis is kind of an esoteric concept. It was surrealism, and intended to be surrealistic”—which is why Top Secret!, though not a mainstream hit, has achieved a kind of cult status among comedy fans who relish the trio’s mind-boggling juxtapositions and the way the actors somehow manage to maintain deadpan faces as they deliver those deliciously funny lines. As Zucker explained, “With our style, the writers are the funny characters. When people watch our movies, they’re aware that somebody had to write this stuff.”

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