Tom Cruise Flies Into the Danger Zone in Top Gun

Do you feel the need? The need for speed? My brother did after he watched Top Gun, the adrenaline-soaked 1986 movie about a cocky fighter pilot living in his father’s shadow. Like many others who watched those jets zoom past each other executing fancy maneuvers, he eventually joined the Navy, and while he didn’t end up becoming a pilot, this movie remains a favorite in my house.

It stars Tom Cruise as Maverick, a hotshot whose overconfidence is his biggest asset and liability. He’s a brilliant flyer, but he has a tendency to take unnecessary risks. As the movie begins, he and his best friend Goose (Anthony Edwards) have just enrolled in Top Gun, a program that trains the most accomplished pilots in the Navy. While the jovial Goose is generally well-liked, Maverick faces some hostility, especially from Val Kilmer’s Iceman, who sees his methods as dangerous.

For aviation enthusiasts like my dad and brother, much of the movie’s appeal is in the explosive firefights. While these are what make the movie so distinct, I find the spectacle a bit dizzying, and I prefer the human drama unfolding on the ground. In a classic scene that has rendered the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ taboo in most karaoke joints catering to Naval officers, Maverick meets Charlie (Kelly McGillis), a no-nonsense beauty he soon learns will be his flight instructor. Maverick may have the moves when it comes to MiGs, but can he win over this cool-headed teacher, especially when such a relationship would have to be clandestine?

This is the movie that brought us Take My Breath Away, the steamy song that seeps its way into the score at nearly every opportunity. I prefer the fist-pumping Danger Zone, though the former was the theme song for my senior prom. But when it comes to music, what I like best are the performances by Cruise and Edwards, which are more exuberant than melodious, aside from Edwards’ perfectly passable piano playing. While Maverick and Charlie heat up the screen, it’s his friendship with Goose that is the true heart of the movie. I also like Maverick’s relationship with the accomplished Viper (Tom Skerritt), who serves as a mentor both as a skilled pilot and a friend of his late, wrongly maligned father, and Meg Ryan turns in a sweet performance as Goose’s boisterous wife.

Whenever my dad watches Top Gun, he likes to point out inaccuracies like pilots taking off their masks mid-flight, which no doubt was done primarily so we could see their faces better. Certain aspects of the movie paint the Navy in a rather unflattering light, though that didn’t stop thousands of boys like my brother from feeling inspired to take to the skies after watching it. With the movie smack in the middle of the 1980s, some of the dialogue is a bit on the cheesy side, but that adds to the fun, as does a running joke involving an officer who really ought to know better than to accept a steaming cup of coffee when an irrepressible pilot is coming in for a landing nearby.

While Top Gun is not my favorite Tom Cruise movie – that honor goes to the underrated Far and Away – it did serve as my introduction to him, so it’s little wonder I tend to think of him as being pretty hot on himself. Of course, that demeanor does seem to permeate many of his roles, and like those others, Maverick can be pretty hard to take. All the same, I can’t help but root for him as he faces daunting challenges in the air and a painful maturation process on terra firma as he goes from a man whose “ego’s writing checks [his] body can’t cash” to a man truly ready to face the world.

It's Love at First Listen for Annie in Sleepless in Seattle

“Do you believe that two people can be connected? Like soulmates?” This is the question that gentle Libby poses to The Teddy Bear Formerly Known as Hurley in Everybody Loves Hugo, his only centric episode of LOST’s sixth season. They’ve never met in this intriguing timeline in which everything seems slightly askew, but Libby can’t shake the feeling that he is her destiny. Crazy, right? Or could there be something to it?

This was the scene that kept replaying in my mind as I watched Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle for the first time in years. With Libby, it’s a glimpse on TV that sparks the sense of recognition. For Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), the young woman in the movie, it’s hearing him on the radio. After his precocious 8-year-old son Jonah (Ross Malinger) calls in to a radio show to discuss the sad state of his dad’s life, recently widowed Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) reluctantly spills his guts to radio psychiatrist Dr. Marcia Fieldstone (Caroline Aaron).

Annie is not the only woman who feels an instant connection; hundreds of women write to him after the show airs, offering to help him dip into the dating scene again. But Annie is our focus, and we’re meant to believe that her attraction to him is deeper. That they truly are soulmates. Which would mean, it seems, that Sam has two, since all indications are that he and his wife Maggie (Carrie Lowell) shared an idyllic relationship, and now he can scarcely function without her. Early in the movie, Sam states, “It doesn’t happen twice.” That’s not to say that a person can’t have two happy, fulfilling marriages. But if he and Annie were "MFEO" ("made for each other," one of the annoying acronyms coined by Jonah’s even more precocious friend Jessica (Gaby Hoffman)), where does that leave Maggie?

That aspect of the movie bothers me a bit. Jonah, like Eddie in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, is obsessed with finding a replacement mom. “I’m starting to forget her,” he sadly confides at one point, but mostly he seems to be okay with that. He wants to get the show on the road. Sam doesn’t. Sam seems like a very real, reasonable guy who spends most of the movie in a bit of a haze. He’s a devoted dad; that’s his one defining characteristic here. But he still misses his wife terribly and just isn’t sure how to proceed in her absence.

Sam is the one unwittingly caught up in this, annoyed by his son’s initial interference and later fixation on a woman who lives on the opposite coast. Throughout the movie, he is all practicality – except on the three occasions on which he actually sees Annie. The first two times, he doesn't know that she is the one who wrote the letter that so impressed Jonah, but he too feels a sense of connection. It’s enough to jostle him out of his stupor. But he has no idea if he will ever see her again.

Ryan brings all of her usual charm to the role of Annie, though anyone who acted as she does in real life would be charitably considered erratic. She abuses her privileges as a journalist to essentially stalk Sam and Jonah “for a story”, flying all the way out to have a look at them for herself. But when Sam spots her looking and greets her from across a busy street, she panics and bolts.

Her obsession with Sam is all the more troubling because she is engaged. Walter (Bill Pullman) isn’t one of those stereotypical jerk boyfriends you so often find in movies like this. We’re meant to find him boring, and clearly there’s a certain zing lacking in their relationship. But Walter is a seriously nice guy who has done nothing whatsoever to drive his fiancée into the arms of a strange man. So while I confess that I do get caught up in the whimsy of this movie and catch myself feeling all fluttery, I can’t help feeling really sorry for poor Walter, who, while the woman he loves is dashing off to fulfill a cinematic fantasy atop the Empire State Building, is having the worst Valentine’s Day of his life.

And then there’s the fact that this big moment is preceded by Jonah, with the help of Jessica, securing a plane ticket to New York and somehow managing to make that journey all by himself and then spending the day atop the Empire State Building waiting for Annie to show up, as she proposed in her letter, to which he responded – except, since he has no idea what she looks like, he has to ask every woman in sight if she is Annie. It’s a colossally stupid and dangerous plot.

Four years later, Ryan and Hanks teamed up again for You’ve Got Mail, which was loosely based on the Jimmy Stewart classic Shop Around the Corner and features another unconventional romance, this time involving anonymous Internet pals who are falling in love online and don’t realize that they are rivals in real life. I really like that movie and the gradual development of the relationship at its heart. While I’m watching Sleepless in Seattle, I like it too. But when I stop to think it over, it’s no surprise to me why my dad walked out on it after ten minutes. “This is so contrived,” he complained. Although I am not immune to its charms, I can’t disagree.

“It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together,” Sam tells Dr. Fieldstone when she asks what was so special about Maggie. A million tiny little things that he doesn’t know about Annie. Do I believe that two people can be connected? Like soulmates? Yes. But once the warm fuzzies wear off, I don’t think that Sam and Annie are quite there.

The Birth of Internet Romance

I'm still not entirely sure what to think of on-line romances. I certainly don't condone it when the persons involved are married. But the idea of developing friendships with complete strangers over the internet allows for some pretty interesting scenarios. What if you actually knew the person you were conversing with on-line but didn't know it because he never told you his real name? This is the premise of the romantic comedy You've Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Last semester in cinema class, I learned that this movie was created as a propaganda tool for AOL to get people to warm up to the idea of using e-mail. The writers dashed off a script resembling Sleepless in Seattle and starring the same two actors. They figured that they had a winning combination that audiences would immediately go in for. They were right.

I actually thought that this movie was much less like Sleepless in Seattle than I expected. Yes, it's got Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starring as two people who seem to have a mysterious attraction to one another. We get the same scenes of them narrowly missing one another again and again, only this time it occurs at the beginning of the film before they actually meet. What makes this movie so different is the fact that Joe Fox (Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) actually know one another.

Fox is the owner of a huge bookstore a la Barnes and Noble which is about to move in down the block from Shop Around the Corner, a small children's bookstore owned by Kelly. The two first meet when Fox decides to take his aunt and brother (both young children) to the story hour at Kelly's bookstore. During this initial encounter, Fox does not reveal his identity to Kelly, and it is not until later that night at a dinner party that she realizes she has been speaking with her competitor. Throughout most of the movie, Joe Fox is a step ahead of Kathleen Kelly when it comes to knowing things about the other person.

Both Joe and Kathleen are in unhappy relationships. Kathleen's beau Frank is a rather dull man who insists upon using a typewriter and is obsessed with politics, while Joe's girlfriend Patricia is just plain obnoxious. It's no real surprise that they're both seeking more fulfilling relationships, and the internet seems a safe place to find a little bit of stimulating conversation. Shopgirl and NY152 (Kelly and Fox) have been e-pals for quite some time, and while the tensions between their real-life counterparts build, they find themselves turning to one another for advice on-line.

At last they decide to meet, but when Joe discovers the true identity of Shopgirl, he is unwilling to go through with the meeting. Instead, he joins Kathleen for dinner uninvited and does not reveal himself as NY152. Kathleen finally gets up the courage to say what she's been wanting to say to him for a long time, but she feels awful afterwards. She shares her guilt with NY152, and Joe is moved to try to befriend her in real life. While Kathleen discusses her changing relationship with Joe with NY152, she listens to Joe's advice concerning her e-pal.

The dynamics of this relationship are fascinating because Kathleen believes she is dealing with two completely different people when, in fact, they are the same man. It says a lot about how we interact with people differently in different situations. The premise of the movie does not seem nearly so absurd now as it would have five years ago, but it's still strange enough to produce a lot of comedic situations. Above all, this is an old-fashioned romance in a new-fangled world, and while it might not steadfastly hold the attention of the action crowd, it's sure to please the romantics. Chick flick? Perhaps. But one of the best that genre has to offer.

Journey to the Past

How many elementary school kids could say they knew about the Russian revolution before Anastasia came out? Not to say that this movie is any more historically accurate than Disney's Pocahontas. Instead of a talking willow, the most bizarre character in this movie is Rasputin, who actually did exist. But in this rendition of the tale of the missing Russian princess, Rasputin is dead and we watch him literally fall apart in scene after scene. It's morbid to the point of being comical.

The story centers around Anya, an eighteen-year-old orphan whose only link to her family is a locket which says "Together in Paris". She can remember nothing of her life before the orphanage. As the headmistress sends her out to strike out on her own, advising her to get a grunt job in town, Anya wonders if there might be more in store for her. She waits at the crossroads and prays for guidance: should she be Anya the orphan forever, or should she pursue the one clue she has to the family she's always wanted? Her answer comes almost immediately in the form of a puppy tugging her towards St. Petersburg.

When she arrives, she is directed to Dmitri, a con artist bent on finding someone to portray Anastasia so he can present her to the Grand Dowager, her grandmother, in Paris. If he can convince her that his Anastasia is real, he'll have a hefty reward to look forward to. Anya knows none of this. She only wants to get to Paris, and she has heard that Dmitri can get her there. Stepping into the abandoned castle, memories come flooding back to her, but she can make sense of none of them. She is rudely interrupted when Dmitri sees her and demands to know how she got in. But then he notices how similar she looks to the princess who disappeared ten years ago when the rest of the Romanov family was killed. Ecstatic, he and his partner Vladimir agree to take her to Paris.

With Pooka the puppy in tow, the travelers set off, but Rasputin attempts to foil them at every step along the way. It is one thrilling adventure after another as Anya grows ever closer to Paris, and to discovering the key to her past.

With endearing characters, many played by big names (Meg Ryan, Kelsey Grammer, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Lloyd), amazing graphics, and a great plot, this movie is a sure hit. Images of St. Petersburg and Paris are especially elegant, and each character is animated to perfection. The songs range from fun to beautiful to frightening, each standing on its own merit. The haunting Once Upon a December will leave you with chills running down your spine.

As stated before, this is not incredibly historically accurate. But it's first and foremost a story in this movie, and if kids want to find out more about the Russian Revolution they should be inspired to read up on it in the library. This is an adventure, a love story, and a tale about the ties of family. It has something for all ages, and it will be a treasured addition to your family video collection.