Turd Polishing

If I could make a time machine, I’d move somewhere into the future where I’m not constantly bombarded with trailers, newspaper articles, billboards, hagiographies of Tom Cruise, and other advertisements for the new Top Gun movie. It looks pretty gruesome, and I haven’t even been blitzed with the soundtrack yet, which was the worst thing about the original. Has anyone ever been held accountable for “Highway to the Danger Zone?” It’s like the musical equivalent of a war crime.

What if the Black Lives Matter and Antifa air forces joined together to fight Maverick? I think this interactive option is available for Trump supporters in select theaters. They also have private viewing booths for those who may need a little privacy, for people whose erectile dysfunction problems require large doses of jingoism.

I won't give away any spoilers but the final dogfight between Maverick and Hillary Clinton is awesome!

From the Department of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies:

“Mission: Impossible” was a slick espionage film, directed by Brian De Palma, based on a TV series from the 1960s.

I’d call the film many things, but slick? Hardly.

How is it possible that it yielded five sequels, and how is it conceivable that the sequels keep getting better, culminating in “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” (2018), which is pretty much an unqualified masterpiece?

How is it possible that it yielded five sequels? Are you joking? A better question is how could a lame TV show from the 60s yield a single film? The only thing that made it out of the TV series was the theme music and the bit about the tape self-destructing, which is ridiculous in the digital era, and the music is a few puerile bars.

Unqualified masterpiece? Wait. Does that mean good? Is he talking about the same movie I saw? Because the one I saw made almost no sense and was merely a bunch of ridiculously improbable actions scenes linked together by an even more ridiculously improbable story, if you can call it a story and I wouldn’t. Evil man wants to destroy the world, plutonium, yawn. It’s not fit entertainment for an adult.

What difference does it make if Tom Cruise did his own stunts or not? Answer: it doesn’t and who cares? Writers have been pushing the whole idea that Tom Cruise is the movie star we all need to the point of some of them actually believe this studio propaganda.

File under “Painting a Turd” NYT style:

Though you may hear otherwise, “Top Gun: Maverick” is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie. But it is also, and perhaps more significantly, an earnest statement of the thesis that movies can and should be great. I’m old enough to remember when that went without saying. For Pete’s sake, I’m almost as old as Maverick.

You can almost see the writer squirming in his chair searching desperately for a few words to describe this film that don't include awful, horrible, mind-numbingly stupid, absurd, and the worst.