Bruising For A Cruising

Whether writing a script, story or an opinion piece, I love to write. Film and television are my preferred subjects but I can and do, from time to time, write about anything that takes my interest. Still, it is film, television and all that surrounds it that really fires my passion.

As a sometime critic of media output, I have watched a lot of film and television over many years. I have seen popular films and critically acclaimed films that I have not understood the fuss over - Little Miss Sunshine? Why? - and have been nonplussed by shows and films that many people love and watch repeatedly.

A brief list of the films I have seen and not understood the fuss about is as follows - Taxi Driver - I am a huge Scorsese fan but this is one of my least favourite films of his. I just find it okay, even if I can appreciate DeNiro’s stellar performance. Jaws - I liked Jaws 2 better. The Last Seduction - ugh! Hated this film! The ending just left me cold. Basic Instinct - the reveal at the end is just insulting. Who the hell else could it have been?

I walked out of A Perfect Storm - a perfectly dull film - and even after watching and appreciating the cinematic achievement that it is, for the time it was made, just do not get the ‘greatest film ever made’ moniker given to Citizen Kane and I watched it twice!

Do not get me started on the nine hours of my life I wasted watching the bloody Lord of the Rings trilogy! If there is one story in cinema I really could not give a flying fig about it is Frodo and that damned ring!

There are a few more I could add but I feel I am rambling a little, getting away from the central focus of this article - though, just to even it up, I will mention a couple of television shows that I just do not get how people got sucked into them - Lost - really? I watched one episode and could tell it was not going anywhere. Similarly, The Walking Dead - a show about zombies and there being no cure kind of builds the conclusion into the premise.

As an aside from the carping, one of my favourite films of the last few years was the brilliant, Edge of Tomorrow. Starring the ever grinning, red carpet darling that is Tom Cruise, it was clever, funny, gripping and had a satisfying conclusion. It had taken a while for me to become a fan of the Cruise.

Scientology notwithstanding and his legendary red carpet fan walks, Cruise has made a fair amount of entertaining films. I really enjoyed Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men - brilliant script by Aaron Sorkin -, Rain Man, The Color of Money and his Mission Impossible franchise. I even liked, in a somewhat miscast role, his turn as the, six-four in the books, Jack Reacher. They are kind of nonsense but enjoyable nonetheless.

In trying to cast against type, he was less good in Interview With A Vampire but it was still a watchable film and he was great in the Michael Mann film - a director who really knows how to shoot a film - Collateral.

If there is one film that Cruise will forever be inextricably linked with, it is the film that has spawned a thousand copycat scenes and inspired those of little imagination around the world to go to fancy dress parties and stag dos dressed as fighter pilots. It helped to make once inexpensive sunglasses must-haves in the late eighties and made Cruise, whose star had been slowly rising, go supernova.

Top Gun is my least favourite film. Ever. I hated this film so much that I could not watch another Tom Cruise film for years. It is hard to explain my disdain for this film but there is just so little, from my point of view, to recommend this film.

There are the stupid, overly macho, nicknames, the swaggering attitudes. The flight scenes bored me to tears. I can barely remember the story, though I know what the film is about - mostly fighter pilot oneupmanship and their desire to be the best.

Director, Tony Scott, had come from commercials and it showed, the film mostly memorable in chunks than as a coherent whole. It admittedly has memorable scenes but I just cannot understand why people love this film.

I have, I’ll admit, watched worse films but my expectation of those films was not particularly high. Top Gun is supposed to be a good a film, a high budget film, a film that has, for many, a certain nostalgia. For me, it represents everything that is wrong in film; style over substance and spectacle over story. I do not like Top Gun.