There is a moment between the previews and the opening credits of
Top Gun: Maverick where Tom Cruise appears as himself, seated in a director’s chair, and welcomes the audience to the film. This is not the first time a film’s lead actor has welcomed an audience and thanked them for coming since the Coronavirus Pandemic began in March 2020. John Krasinski famously did this in the spring of 2021 before the much-delayed
A Quiet Place Part II, arguably the biggest and most anticipated movie (with all due respect to
Tenet) that made its return to a wide-release audience.
Continue reading Top Gun: Maverick (2022) →
Consistent with many of the most successful biopics about the greatest of American songwriters/bands (i.e.,
Walk the Line, Ray, Love & Mercy, La Bamba, What’s Love Got to Do With It, 8 Mile, Great Balls of Fire, Straight Outta Compton, Bohemian Rhapsody) in the last 30 years comes Oliver Stone’s (
Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) distant, unsteady, and unapologetic story of Jim Morrison and his band in the 1991 movie
The Doors. Liked more by
audiences than critics, the Val Kilmer (
Top Gun, Heat) led movie takes us through the formation of the band in the early 1960s to Morrison’s mysterious 1971 death in a Paris bathtub at the age of 27. One of the founding members of the infamous 27 Club, Morrison was an energizing performer whose limit-pushing love of drugs and alcohol led to his early death.
Continue reading The Doors (1991) →
Movies I Watch That Inspire Me to Critique!