timgowen.com

The original Top Gun from 1986 is one of the most classically eighties films that’s still much loved although also mocked. There are some crazy lines of dialogue and the relationship between insubordinate pilot-genius Pete “Maverick” Mitchell ( Tom Cruise ) and his instructor Charlotte Blackwood ; and also the love between him and his copilot “Goose”—and rivalry with Tom “Iceman” Kasansky ( Val Kilmer ) which ends with hugging. Shot like a music video, and with a brilliant score, wonderful soundtrack some incredible flight scenes, it has its place—it is more awesome than it has any right to be, and better than anything that tried to recapture its recipe. The sequel doesn’t mess about: it’s full of nostalgia, of course, but also a modern movie. Cruise put the cast through a flight-school so they could look authentic in the cockpit.  The film begins in exactly the same way (and all the music is intact except the Berlin song) but we suddenly cut to a The Right Stuff style test fli...

You wouldn’t expect the Moon Landing to provide us with another film, another fictional take on a pivotal point in scientific discovery. But Richard Linklater , who specialises in nostalgic portraits such as Boy —has created an animated/rotoscoped story about a boy who lives in Suburban Texas. His father works for NASA but the boy bemoans that Dad isn’t in a “cool” role like for instance an Astronaut. The film is a beautiful evocation of an event from the perspective of a child. Stan lives with his brothers and sisters, and his life is a mixture of school and playing: doing all the childhood things: enjoying the relative freedom with games, and of course getting into trouble and suffering the consequences. Jack Black provides the voice-over as adult Stan tells the story of life as the Apollo mission launches and the astronauts walk on the moon. The title refers to the bizarre conceit of the film which is that NASA have accidentally made a Lunar Lander at the wrong scale and they nee...

  The Bond Franchise is roughly in the same position as Doctor Who : they’re both roughly from the same period and have gone through stages when they’re well liked and on a high, and then have suffered from poor notices and ridicule… and specifically with Bond it didn’t continue to be all about “attempting re-entry” and those eyebrow-raised one-liners. For me the most fun Bond was Pierce Brosnan . The Daniel Craig era was sort of a re-boot, going back to the first book and giving us a dark, thuggish Bond. As the years went by there was talk about what would come after him, and now No Time To Die is the end of the Daniel Craig era. And the film, which was pushed back because of Covid and was (like Tenet ) the test of whether people would go back to the cinema. I chose not to, which is why this is pretty late but a disc dropped through my letter-box yesterday and I held my breath and played it. Two hours and forty three minutes later, I had seen what’s possibly up there with Casino ...

Brooke Shields has been around for decades and my first recollection is probably The Blue Lagoon. Then her cameo in Friends when that show was really on fire. And now we have her in a romantic comedy that’s become a Netflix tradition. Last year there was Operation Christmas Drop about a couple bonding over love, and doing good deeds, and Christmas. A Castle for Christmas is more like a fairy-tale but you are seriously going to have to bear with me on this. This is about an American romantic novelist (Sheilds) who has angered millions of her fans and escapes America as she is basically cancelled. She lands up in Scotland and that’s where the trouble starts. Not narratively, but because the first Scottish accent you hear is subtitled. Sophie goes to a castle and one of the people she meets there offers to give her a tour, and she sneaks to the off-the-tour part of the castle… Now the man she meets seems like the keeper or something, but he is Myles—and it turns out that it’s his ca...

  If the last few years has taught us anything it’s that uninformed conspiracy theories on the internet are a genuine danger to life. And when you think about conspiracy theorists through history, before the popularity of the web and social media, these people are nuts, right? They obsessively go over things that most of us have put right out of our minds. Nobody wants to be a nutter on the internet or anywhere… right? Well since Oliver Stone’s peerless film about the Kennedy Assassination and the only man to attempt to prosecute it, attitudes to the killing have changed. More documents were de-classified as a consequence of interest in the case. But historians rose to challenge its central thesis: that Kennedy was assassinated because he wanted to end the Vietnam war. He spoke of universal peace and this flew in the face of those who wanted to perpetuate warfare. This is the Military-Industrial Complex that we are warned of in the movie right at the beginning, through a real spee...

  What’s interesting about this film is… well, there’s a lot, but it’s a racially fascinating film that would make Quentin Tarantino gape. Yes it’s a classic revenge story and it begins with a brutal murder of Nat Love’s parents in front of him, the bad Rufus ( Idris Elba )—who isn’t fully revealed until much later, when his own gang rescue him as he’s transported across the country in a cell on a train.  The train hijack is stylish. So stylish. From the sight of a horse on the line to the brakes of the train and execution of the driver, the tension rises and falls. There’s also a saloon bar in a beautifully realised western town: the kind of place where well-to-do folk will stand around watching a fight. The violence is uncompromising but not explicit as it is in Django Unchained which has been mentioned in the same sentence—although that film never had “A White Town”. This movie has a script that’s wears its wit as matter-of-factly as the stylishly dressed adversaries. And t...

The musical Tick tick… boom was written by Jonathan Larson right before Rent, and Rent is the phenomenon of a musical that Larson didn’t live to see flourish. And so, a story of a songwriter who seemingly couldn’t stop himself writing songs—and really very good ones too, with a variety of influences including Billy Joel—is a great companion piece to Rent as well as being a celebration of a beloved talent who died tragically young. And it’s extra poignant that the musical is brought to the screen in a directorial debut from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda is a beloved figure in musical theatre and animated movie musicals, and you can draw lines from Hamilton back to Rent. Both shows brought in fans at the ground level with lotteries: you didn’t have to have hundreds of dollars, you just queued up daily to enter the lottery, and it was this that grew the Rent community in New York. It didn’t quite take off in London, and I wouldn’t say that Rent is for me, but I admire it and many of the ...