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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 23 May 2022

A teaser trailer was revealed in July 2019 but since that time, the release date for Top Gun Maverick has been moved a gazillion times due to extra post-production work and the impact of COVID-19 on movie theatres.  I’ve joked with friends that perhaps the film didn’t exist at all and this was a giant ruse on the part of Paramount Pictures!  Thankfully, the wait is now over.  36 years after the release of the original movie and more than 3 years after shooting wrapped, the much-anticipated Top Gun Maverick has arrived in cinemas across the globe.

A close friend described it as “the best sequel since The Empire Strike Back” and while that may not be wholly true (Mad Max: Fury Road springs to mind), the intent of his statement has merit.  This is a sensational film that surpasses its predecessor in almost every way.  The flight scenes will have you twitching in your seat, the splashes of comedy are perfectly timed, and the story is kept short and straightforward.  I can’t imagine too many people being disappointed.

To quickly cover the narrative, pilotless planes are the way of the future with experienced military pilots told they are “heading for extinction”.  That won’t stop Maverick (Cruise) from proving himself one final time.  At the request of an old friend (Kilmer), he is brought back into the Top Gun training program to enhance the F-18 flying skills of 12 young pilots described as “the best of the best”.  The reason?  They’ll be needed on an incredibly dangerous mission to destroy a heavily guarded uranium enrichment plant which threatens the world order.

It’s as simple as that.  To the film’s betterment, time isn’t wasted developing (or even identifying) the villains.  You’ll just have to picture some Christoph Waltz-style baddie with an Eastern European accent with any army of incompetent henchmen who want to obliterate mankind.  This frees up the writers to focus solely on the rebellious Maverick, his interaction with the Top Gun graduates, and a quick-fire romance with an old flame (Connelly).  The closest we get to a “bad guy” is a humorous yet straight faced performance from Jon Hamm as a Vice Admiral who doesn’t think too highly of Maverick and his unorthodox training methods.

It’s a two-hour movie centred on a single mission but it still moves at a cracking pace thanks to the editing skills of Eddie Hamilton (Mission: Impossible – Fallout).  Rather than watch the in-the-air training runs and then the subsequent on-the-ground debriefs, Hamilton overlays these sequences to save time and maintain the film’s energy.  It all leads to a spectacular action climax which, to promote Hamilton again, is edited in a way which is easy to comprehend.  It doesn’t fall into the trap of being too chaotic.

Knowledge of the 1986 original will help but it’s not essential.  There’s a short flashback and a few well-placed photos that provide background for newcomers.  The emotional core of the film is centred on Maverick befriending Rooster (Teller), the son of his former colleague/friend who died in the earlier movie.  There’s tension between the pair from the outset but given Rooster is one of the selected F-18 pilots, they need to mend bridges and move forward.  The entire cast deserve praise for their performances but the banter between Tom Cruise and Miles Teller set them a notch above the rest.

Directed by the creative Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy), Top Gun Maverick offers a full, complete experience within the action genre.  One of the year’s best.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 11 May 2022

Operation Mincemeat reminds us once again that truth can be stranger than fiction.  It’s a tale of secretive military operations but it’s one that has been told before.  A book (The Man Who Never Was) was published in 1953 and a movie was made three years later.  Further details were made public in a 2010 non-fiction work from author Ben Macintyre and it’s that book which serves as the source material for this latest feature film.

Operation Mincemeat was the code name for an elaborate, borderline-farcical deception tactic orchestrated by the British military in the middle of World War II.  Allied forces were intending to invade Italy via Sicily in 1943 but the problem was, Germans knew about the strategy and were already guarding the territory.

To throw them off the track, the body of a dead British soldier was placed in the ocean off the coast of Spain with hopes it would wash to the shoreline and be inspected by high-ranking German officials.  In the soldier’s possession were fake documents and letters referring to the Allies’ secret intentions to invade Greece instead of Italy.  It was a long shot that required a lot of pieces to fall into place (luck is sometimes more important than skill) but it was hoped the Germans would believe the ruse and move their troops out of Sicily.

It’s a serious story but writer Michelle Ashford (Masters of Sex) and director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) strive for equal amounts of humour and tension.  The plan is led by two unlikely people – a former British judge (Firth) and a Royal Air Force officer (Macfadyen) working for MI5.  Not everyone was a fan of the scheme but it had the blessing of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The better material in the film revolves around the chaos in pulling off such a crazy idea.  There’s a great sequence where they speak with a local coroner and try to find the “perfect” corpse which would be used.  They needed a body which could resemble a high-ranking British soldier but also one which no family member would come looking for.  They eventually settle on a homeless tramp who had died from accidentally eating rat poison!

The weaker scenes involve an unnecessary love triangle with a co-worker (Macdonald) which feel superfluous to the main narrative and have only been included to satisfy those in the audience looking for a splash of romance.  They don’t add much.  Instead, they could have focused more on the involvement of naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming (Flynn) who was using his work as inspiration for a series of spy novels.  We know him today as the creator of James Bond.

Targeted at those who enjoy an entertaining World War II tale, Operation Mincemeat isn’t fully satisfying but it’s still an interesting yarn to add to the memory bank.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 18 May 2022

There are some terrific coming-of-age films about kids wising up to the world and discovering the importance of great friendships.  They span an array of genres include adventure (The Goonies), horror (It), fantasy (Harry Potter), comedy (Ladybird), drama (The Perks of Being a Wallflower), and animation (Toy Story).  I’m not sure where it fits but I’d throw Bridge to Terabithia in there too as a personal favourite.

The Innocents is an engrossing Norwegian flick that espouses the same messages but does so with a chilling splash of science fiction.  It’s like a superhero movie but without all the formulas and expensive action scenes.  It begins innocuously enough with 9-year-old Ida (Fløttum) befriending two kids of a similar age from her neighbourhood, Ben (Ashraf) and Aisha (Asheim).  Rounding out the friendship group is Ida’s autistic older sister, Anna (Ramstad), who struggles to communicate.

Growing up can be a challenge.  That’s no huge revelation.  The catch here is that these four children have a mix of telekinetic and mind reading skills which their parents know nothing about.  It sounds cool but given they’re immature children still learning the difference between right and wrong, the stakes are high and the consequences are higher.  It’s one thing for a bully to push someone over in the playground… it’s another to have the bully tap thoughts and control the other’s physical actions.

The Innocents will keep audiences on their toes.  You’re never quite sure where it’s heading and it’s not afraid to go down dark, heavy, confronting paths.  Writer-director Eskil Vogt has found four gifted young actors who take on the challenging material and deliver credible performances.  They act like kids and that’s a major reason why, despite the supernatural elements, it feels like a gritty, authentic story.

If this was a commercial, X-Men style movie, you’d have mature adults teaching them how to harness their abilities and a nasty villain for them to team up and defeat.  As alluded to above, this isn’t that kind of movie.  The parents are seldom seen and so it becomes a simpler, more interesting tale about power dynamics, both physical and metaphorical, amongst the children.

Vogt is better known for his writing credits and he was recently nominated at the Academy Awards for co-writing The Worst Person in the World alongside director Joachim Trier.  The Innocents is just his second effort as director (after Blind in 2014) and shows his skills with a camera and just as strong as those with a pen.  It’s the kind of movie you won’t easily forget.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 09 May 2022

Kids know parents pay the bills but at what point growing up do they have a fulsome appreciation of their work and financial status?  It’s an answer that will vary significantly between families depending on the openness of the parents and the savviness of the children.  This question is front and centre in To Chiara, an Italian drama from writer-director Jonas Carpignano.

Set in the region on Calabria in southern Italy, events are told from the perspective of 15-year-old Chiara (Swamy Rotolo).  To help introduce us to the characters, the film opens with the 18^th birthday party of Chiara’s older sister – an evening which has brought the wider family together for food, drinks, toasts, dancing and loud music. 

Events following the birthday celebrations open Chiara’s eyes to a side of her father she never knew.  The reason they live in a nice home and have ample money is because dad is a drug runner for the local mafia.  The clues were always there (such as her dad having secretive conversations with shady men outside the front door) but Chiara had never previously connected the dots.  Perhaps she didn’t know.  Perhaps she didn’t want to know.

This newly found awareness is the best part of the film.  Swamy Rotolo, in her first significant film role, turns in a beautiful performance where facial expressions trump dialogue.  In the second act, the cops close in and Chiara’s father is forced to flee.  There’s a simple but powerful scene where she watches a TV news clip showing her father’s criminal dealings and you get a clear sense of her shock and confusion.  How can she go to school and face her friends with this information now public?

The script weakens in the later stages when it comes less of a family drama and more of a contrived Hollywood thriller.  Chiara, seemingly oblivious to the risks, goes down some dangerous paths and in search of her missing dad.  She meets a curious assortment of people and her eyes are opened to more of her father’s dealings.  How does she feel about it though?  If you knew a close family member was drug dealer, would you help support and protect them?

Drawing on learnings from his last two movies, writer-director Jonas Carpignano has developed an interesting approach to create authentic performances.  He generally uses non-professional actors and, if you’re wondering why so many of the actors in the closing credits have the same surname, it’s because the family we see in the movie is also a family in real life!  The story maybe fictional (don’t worry, they’re not really involved with the mafia) but the strong bond between these individuals is not.

Carpignano also kept them on their toes during the shoot by withholding plot details.  The movie was shot chronologically with actors only given information about their own characters (and not others).  There was also no rehearsal and so the reactions you see from the key players (such as when Chiara opens a hidden door) were, to use Carpignano’s own words, “fresh” and “spontaneous”.

Nominated for best feature at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards (losing to The Lost Daughter), To Chiara can’t maintain its intensity all the way through but it’s still an interesting, provocative watch.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 16 May 2022

I’m too time-poor to watch much television but one show I admire is Ted Lasso.  The broader storyline makes no sense.  Could you imagine anything remotely plausible in relation to a top club in the English Premier League?  The on-field soccer scenes, such as one where a dog is struck by a football as part of a penalty shot, are about as credible as a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The reason the series works is because of the interplay between the likeable characters and the way they cathartically open-up about their troubles and concerns.  The writers tackle real, serious issues and delve into important topics like mental health and empathy.  It reminds us that the positivity and confidence people display publicly doesn’t always marry up with what they think internally.

How to Please a Woman is an Australian movie which appears to have been cut from the same cloth.  The storyline makes even less sense, but it’s designed as a warm-hearted crowd pleaser about finding happiness within one’s self.  English actress Sally Phillips (Bridget Jones’s Diary) steps into the shoes of the lead character, Gina, and retains her British accent – explained by the fact she grew up in the UK and moved to Australia with her lawyer husband (Daddo).

It requires a lengthy set-up but to simplify as best I can… the middle-aged, timid Gina loses her office job at an insolvency firm and, without telling her husband, buys a small, financially strapped removalist business with four male employees.  Inspired by a birthday gift from her close friends, she transforms it into a company which is part cleaning, part prostitution.  It turns out there are a lot of single women interesting in paying a guy to sleep with them and also clean the house (not necessarily in that order).  I can’t understand the business model, from the finances to the hopeless website, so best not to think too hard.

It’s odd that a film promoting the positives of (illegal) prostitution is so conservative with its approach.  There’s very little sex/nudity, minimal discussion of kinks, and almost no insight into the two main guys.  If trying to promote the wonders of lovemaking, why not delve into the valid reasons why the young, surfy-looking Tom (England) is willing to have sex everyday with different women?  Instead, we get a weak, poorly developed subplot involving him trying to reconcile with his pregnant ex-girlfriend (a superfluous character if I’ve ever seen one).

There are glimpses of a better movie.  Gina’s husband has lost his sex drive and they haven’t been intimate for close to two years.  She harnesses the courage to address this issue by talking with her helpful friends and exploring other “alternatives”.  The best conversations in the film are those between Gina and Steve (Thomson), a colleague with deep-seeded problems of his own.  Their connection is contrived but at least their conversations feel open and authentic.  We finally get to see behind their exterior!

Writer-director Renée Webster (The Heights) is trying to have it both ways with an edgy, sexy comedy which escapes with a mere M-rating but I’m not convinced it works.  The finale provides further proof.  How to Please a Woman might satisfy some but I was left unfulfilled.