If after watching the trailer for F1: The Movie, whether it be be at the theater, on a streaming service, or while you’re watching YouTube and you say to yourself, “That movie looks like it’s the Top Gun movie, but on a racetrack,” you wouldn’t be far off in your assessment. If you combine that feeling with other racecar or other inspirational sports movies, you’ll have the formula that makes F1: The Movie. Joseph Kosinski (Only the Brave, Oblivion) directed Top Gun: Maverick, so drawing similarities between the two films isn’t a stretch. Top Gun: Maverick was my favorite movie of 2022. It was a masterclass in storytelling, as well as what you could do with a production budget of $170+ million. That’s what makes it such a shame that F1: The Movie, with a budget exceeding $250 million, felt like nothing more than a retelling of better racing movies, which had smaller budgets, were more original, and offered stories and characters that we genuinely cared about. F1: The Movie felt like a propaganda movie to entice viewers to follow Formula 1 racing.
Category Archives: Brad Pitt
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Ready to call it a career, Frank James (Sam Shepard – Out of the Furnace, The Right Stuff) promises his brother Jesse (Brad Pitt – Legends of the Fall, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) one last train heist with the notorious James Gang. Then, Frank will drift off into the sunset and live out the rest of his life quietly. But what will happen to Jesse? Well, he will be assassinated by the coward Robert Ford. The film’s title gives the plot away unless somehow we are talking about the assassination metaphorically. We are not. So what keeps director Andrew Dominik’s (Blonde, Killing Them Softly) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford such an alluring watch for its nearly three-hour runtime?
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Legends of the Fall (1994)
I remember walking out of the theater with a group of my first-year college friends after watching Edward Zwick’s (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) Legends of the Fall when my one friend turned to me and said, “I feel like I just want go in a hole and die now.” Truer words couldn’t have been spoken for, perhaps, the most extensive epic I had seen in a theater until that point in my life. I knew little about the film besides that it starred Brad Pitt (Twelve Monkeys, Se7en), and it could be a darker, more adult-oriented version of the beloved A River Runs Through It. The unknown was just a fraction of what made Legends of the Fall become one of my favorite movies of all time and one that has never fallen out of my Top 50. That is until my 2023 rewatch, some 15 years after I last watched the film.
Babylon (2022)
Love it or hate it. There isn’t much middle ground or neutrality regarding Damien Chazelle’s (La La Land, First Man) divisive Babylon, a fantastical look at the debaucherous look at the rise and fall of the Hollywood movie industry during the 1920s. While some might believe its 56% /52 % scores on Rotten Tomatoes suggest it’s an ordinary movie, those average scores may result from people either loving or hating it. I enjoyed the movie. It is far from being in my top ten of the year. With only a couple of 2022 films left to watch, Babylon sits at #16 (out of the 74 2022-released films I’ve seen). It’s a fine film and one that is worth viewing.
Ad Astra (2019)
“To The Stars” is the Latin translation for Ad Astra, James Gray’s (The Lost City of Z, The Yards) powerfully ambitious space travel movie that features astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt – By the Sea, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) going from Earth to the moon to Mars to Neptune in an attempt to stop pulse bursts that have been devastating the Earth that has taken thousands of lives are a poised to take thousands more. The perceived bursts are thought to be coming from The Lima Project, a missing exploration ship piloted by Roy’s father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones – The Fugitive, The Company Men), presumed destroyed decades earlier. Taking the story out of it for a second, Ad Astra is a visually stunning masterpiece that deserves a viewing on the largest screen possible. It doesn’t quite feel like you are floating in outer space (like the equally brilliant Gravity does), but it’s not that far off.