Highway to the Gayer Zone.

TOP GUN – the movie that wrested the crown from MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR as the Gayest Movie Ever Made.

Y’know, I had a gay comment for this picture – but it speaks for itself.

Tom Cruise is Maverick, the pop gun let loose in billion dollar taxpayer war machinery, one of the best fancypants F14 Tomcat pilots stationed onboard an aircraft carrier, though so smug, irritating and insubordinate his commanding officers want to take him down to Chinatown, but he’s the only movie star in the herd, so is begrudgingly sent to TOP GUN school, to learn how to be more smug, irritating and insubordinate.

At Top Gun Academy, Maverick is one of many hotshot pilots in competition with each other for who’s got the best hair. Their slogan is “The Best of the Best,” but no one ever says what they’re the best AT – I’d say it’s pectorals, but others might go for abs, or even toyt botties.

Maverick is not just battling other homosexual pilots with call signs like Iceman (Val Kilmer, with hair frosted so high the canopy of his Tomcat has skid marks), Slider (Rick Rossovich, whom we presume uses awesome lube), Jester (Michael Ironside, who wears bells on his head on his days off) and Commander Viper (Tom Skerritt, obviously named for his big snake), he is also battling the ghosts of his past (his pilot father froze up and got other pilots killed, for the convenience of having traumatic backstory for Maverick to overcome later).

By the way, little known fact: the other fighter pilot called Maverick who is even gayer than Tom Cruise – John McCain.

Maverick outflies everyone with his wingman Goose (Anthony Edwards, who must be a bottom with a call sign like that), and taunts Iceman, “That’s right – I’m dangerous!” That put as much fear into me as a Hello Kitty backpack. It only made Iceman want him more.

Iceman chomps his teeth at Maverick – now hold on: Was that a show of machismo or an invitation to put it in his mouth? The sexual tension is mesmerizing.

Then it’s off to the locker rooms for the homoerotic posedown – suck in gut, stick out ass. Maverick leans on the bench, his toweled ass sticking out in the direction of Iceman, his torso glistening with strawberry body oil. Director Tony Scott cuts away before anyone ejaculates.

We were hedging on whether this was truly a gay movie – until manly Kelly McGillis shows up – now we’re sure! Is that a man in women’s clothing? She’s the Pentagon instructor, Charlie (see? A man’s name), talking about thrust and negative insertion. (Oh, I get it: she’s talking about SEX WITH MAVERICK. And if you didn’t realize that two seconds into her monologue, you’re a ten-year-old girl.) Charlie constantly reminds us she’s a Pentagon instructor, or we’d break out laughing at her pretend performance as a Pentagon instructor. She’s also the love interest for the ambiguously gay guy with the Raybans… oh, sorry, you’re right, that could be anyone – she’s the love interest for Tom Cruise.

He sings to her The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling in one of filmdom’s most embarrassing moments. Kenny Loggins sings the nominal “rock” song, Highway To The Danger Zone, which sounds more like a highway to a gloryhole at a men’s truck stop. Later, Berlin’s Take My Breath Away would accompany the Maverick-Charlie slow motion romance, and then start playing on national radio. And wouldn’t stop. Ever.

The soppy love story is inserted sideways into the plot so that girlies who are not taken in by the labia-pounding afterburners of the supersonic jets will have something to cling to after the testosterone subsides.

Man, these gay jokes are just writing themselves…

Nominated for the most flesh-crawling line in a movie: “And I just don’t want anyone to know that I’ve fallen for you.” (Years later, it would take BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN‘s “I can’t quit you” to dislodge this from the top of the pile.)

And who the hell is Charlie fooling instructing fighter pilots anyway? Do they really let blondes with no flight experience yap unintelligibly to a room of semen-throbbing males while wearing those heels?

You lost me at topless male volleyball.

Meg Ryan in a small weepy role with a bad hairstyle, as Goose’s wife (her first feature film). When Goose dies, due to his frosted hair impacting the canopy, Maverick is so cut up about the death of his bum-chum that when we next see him in the locker room, he’s not sticking his butt out even half as much.

All the Top Guns, no matter their former rivalry, have to watch each other’s backs as they fly off on a Real Mission into preternaturally red skies over Russia, or somewhere where there’s a pretend war they can stick their clams into. Who cares? They’re just happy to be watching each other’s backs. The air battle dogfights are man-merizing – it’s supersonic thunder and screaming speed, those swing-wing Tomcats engineered to do one thing and one thing only: make women wet. And gay guys.

Maverick and Iceman survive the mission because of their love for watching each other’s backs. They land, and run into each other’s arms: “You can be my wingman anytime!” “You can be mine!” Correct me if I’m wrong, but are they making plans for who’s going to be the “top” gun tonight? They look so right together that the “affair” with Charlie looks like the wrong type of love.

What was that about topless male volleyball again?…

END

If you go down to the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise…

WHAT A CUTIE! I want to hug him and kiss him and pet him and sleep with him in my arms. And the teddy bear’s pretty cute too…

TED (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) is a teddy bear who is raunchy and foul-mouthed, filthy-minded and immoral, a lecher, a pot-smoker, a hedonist and a sex addict. And Mark Wahlberg is pretty cool too. When John Bennett (Wahlberg) was a little boy, he wished his teddy to life and it came true, because – so narrates saucy Patrick Stewart – “there’s nothing more powerful than a young boy’s wish… except an Apache helicopter…”

Now Ted and John share an apartment, and a love of pot, a hatred of thunder, and a man-crush on Sam Jones from FLASH GORDON. The fame that would accompany a real talking teddy bear is quickly addressed, and explains how the populace takes Ted for granted now  (“No matter how big a splash you make in this world,” narrates the game Stewart, over shots of Ted doing the talk-show circuit, “eventually nobody gives a shit.”). And through all Ted’s dalliances with hookers and celebs, 35-year-old John has somehow retained a relationship over the past four years with Lori (Mila Kunis).

Written and directed by Seth MacFarlane (FAMILY GUY, AMERICAN DAD), TED is one of those relentless comedies that latches onto your jugular and refuses to be shaken off. Ted’s mouth runs like an exploding sewer, and his cuteness makes up for any non-pc banter that might offend the lesser-hearted; Patrick Warburton as a closeted workmate; running gags on Tom Skerritt; Ryan Reynolds cameos as a gay boyfriend (“that Van Wilder-lookin’ guy”); Jessica Barth as Ted’s trailer-trash squeeze (as Tarantino might be inclined to ask directors who hire hot chicks, “Did MacFarlane TAP that?); Joel McHale (THE SOUP) playing his sardonic SOUP card; fart jokes, dick jokes, scat jokes, smoking, drinking, drugging, prostitution. Bring the kids.

On their fourth dating anniversary, Lori is expecting a proposal from John, which (in her eyes at least) would indicate he is accepting responsibility as a man, rather than remaining (in her eyes at least) in a state of arrested development due to Ted’s ubiquitous presence and bad influence. To allow John to move on with his life, an ultimatum to Ted: get a job (which would definitely cut into his weed-smoking and hooker time).

“You think you got what it takes?” asks the grocery store manager (Bill Smitrovich) in Ted’s job interview. Ted replies, “I’ll tell you what I got: your wife’s pussy on my breath” – and gets promoted.

Meanwhile, an eccentric Ted fanatic (ominously funny Giovanni Ribisi) is stalking Ted to steal him for his own spoiled son.

Wahlberg’s man-pecs might be self-admittedly delicious, but his acting style still makes us think he’s pushing his voice forward against the wishes of his diaphragm. Funnily enough, in TED, it works! I like the guy as a person – he seems very sincere and a loving family man and great businessman – but no one’s going to accuse him of Thespianism any day soon. Sometimes that One Demeanor/Pushing Air vapidity works uproariously (THE OTHER GUYS, THE DEPARTED), and sometimes it just looks out of place (PLANET OF THE APES 2001) or fails miserably (THE HAPPENING). But he gets to dust off his “Bahston” accent here once again (while Ted sounds suspiciously like Peter Griffin from FAMILY GUY. He denies it though).

Then John and Ted meet Sam Jones (aka Flash!) and we realize how good an actor Mark Wahlberg really is! Bonus – upon meeting Flash, Queen songs start littering the soundtrack. (Queen composed the score for FLASH GORDON.)

Seth MacFarlane’s excellent directorial skills go unnoticed in TED due to the subject matter and content. Keep in mind, this is MacFarlane’s first feature film, and the finished product is so polished and powerful, it seems like he’s been doing this for years. Not only that, he’s writing, voice-acting, and working with CGI (Ted will hate me for telling you this, and will deny it profusely, but he is 100% CGI). MacFarlane keeps the tone upbeat through all the filthy action, and even when it gets dark, his writing keeps comedic tidbits and cultural refs flying at us from every direction – left field, right field, like a bolt from the sky and like a kick to the balls. Bring the kids.

END

A Little Extra Extra-Terrestrial.

The slogan for ALIEN is embedded in pop culture: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Even so, there’s an awful lot of screaming going on…

A deep space mining crew investigates a distress signal from an uncharted planet, and inadvertently takes onboard a malignant alien life form. What could possibly happen next, but grisly deaths, cattle-prod battles, flamethrowers, and chicks in panties?

Director Ridley Scott helms a horror movie that is actually horrifying, a space movie where the vacuum of space is treated with helmeted respect, a science fiction movie that is actually scientific fiction; blood-spattering us with an extra-terrestrial organism whose life-cycle is incomprehensible to human evolutionary idiom… everything about this movie is so alien to the Hollywood meatgrinder system, no wonder it’s called – ALIEN.

Aboard the mining vessel Nostromo (what a damn cool name!), leading the ragtag crew is unflappable Dallas (Tom Skerritt), dispassionate science officer Ash (Ian Holm), old Kane (John Hurt, eternally 60), weepy Lambert (Veronica Cartwright, whose constant screaming is so annoying it’s like – oh man! Y’know, I don’t even feel like rescuing you now with all that puffy-eyed crying and snot running down your nose…), journeyman mechanics Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton (griping about wages and overtime), and Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, strikingly young and man-sexy, her lethal jawline smooth like a baby’s angular bottom). Unbeknownst to all of us at the time, this movie would rocket her to superstardom as a fem-dom icon, who would yet never lose her womanly allure. (Her salary alone for 1997’s ALIEN: RESURRECTION would equal the production cost of ALIEN – $11 million.)

And haunting the darkened passageways of the Nostromo, the intruder, the infiltrator, the Alien – a creature of sensual nightmare conjured by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger. A creature with a lifecycle created from whole cloth by writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett – from egg to “facehugger” to “chestburster” to xenomorph, double-jawed and iron-clawed, with a steel-belted exoskeleton and acid for blood. Immediate lifetime membership in the pantheon of immortal screen monsters…

ALIEN would meld two classic genres: science fiction and horror, using a device as old as Vincent Price – the haunted house. And the stupid cat jumping out of nowhere.

The Nostromo reminds us of the best aspects of Monty Python set dressing: everything onboard looks worn and tired, well-used and wasted. A perfect setting for a haunted tale, where Dallas would go creeping through pitch black claustrophobic air ducts, with something on the radar blipping towards him… The ship is not a shiny technological marvel, it is a utilitarian warhorse, such an acclimated crawlspace for its crew they never exhibit that “soldierly” attitude toward being onboard a spaceship; they behave like they’re on a vessel at sea, with a camaraderie and familiarity that bespeaks this is not their first rodeo.

The breakfast scene where John Hurt is suddenly overcome by the “chestburster” is a marvel of naturalistic overlapping dialogue – and sudden gutshock terror, as a tiny, blood-meat thing squeals at the crew from Hurt’s innards. (The reactions of horror from the cast are apparently a result of them not knowing how ferocious this stunt was going to be.) The breezy performances also remind us of the best Spielberg movies of this era – CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, JAWS – where the acting sold the story as much as the plot and effects.

And ALIEN did not shirk on its effects. Ridley Scott was not going for space-battle action, but a sober and eerie reality: a spaceship that slowly spun for artificial gravity, only brief shots of the alien creature (inhabited by rail-thin Bolaji Badejo); the ship’s computer, nicknamed “Mother,” interfaced with all the green-texted “computers” (big-keyed typewriter-descendants that now look hokey); with H.R. Giger’s machine-flesh designs passim, from the ship’s innards to the elephantine “space jockey” discovered ossified in his seat in the horseshoe spaceship on the planet of the howling winds…

Let’s step back in time for a moment: Remember that feeling of awe seeing that elephant-skulled alien in that reclined seat? We had seen Lucas’s Cantina Sequence, we had seen Cylons and Sleestak and Kirk’s green-skinned bitches, yet Giger’s disturbing visual brought not only an otherworldliness to the production, but opened a million questions – “So are there other alien races that humans know of but choose to ignore?” “Was this extra-terrestrial just another miner or scientist?” “Do these aliens know of humans and Earth?” – and left them all unanswered.

A simple plot, but Darwinian in execution. We feel no pity for the Alien and it evokes no sympathy, but we realize it is killing because it is geared purely for survival. Ash tells us so, in another disturbing sequence where he is beheaded and discovered to be – a cyborg, hidden in plain view amongst the crew! His disembodied head is electrically charged back to pseudo-life and he reveals another layer of subplot – the mining corporation empowered him to bring back this death-dealing Alien species over the priorities of the human crew. And in a bizarre irony, Ash – oh, clinical, pedagogic Ash – reveals emotion. But not in the direction we’d expect. He lovingly praises the evolutionary primacy of the Alien species until Ripley interjects in horror, “You admire it!” He felt less empathy towards the species he was modeled after, his purely mathematical brain gravitating toward the species better equipped for survival and procreation.

The false reprieve – where Ripley gets down to her vulva-licious hip-bone panties – and then the full reveal of the Alien in a guttural climax will leave you shuddering in adrenaline, as the best-adapted creature wins out; the most ferocious animal the cosmos has ever birthed, the organism with the most ruthless killing skills against Man – Woman.

END

Buried within The Message from Vega – The Message from Sagan.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND needed updating. CONTACT is that update. Though it may never attain the lofty heights of commercialism that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS enjoyed, CONTACT is, in fact, a more intelligent vision of extra-terrestrial communication with our outer-spiral-arm planet.

Poffy Sagan

Jodie Foster is SETI maverick, Ellie Arroway, who discovers extraterrestrial alien signals that instruct mankind to build a machine to take us to the stars. Woven into this storyline are all the adversities that not only affect the world and its myriad misapprehensions and fears, but also factors that affect Dr. Arroway as a female in a man’s world (with Jodie Foster’s perfect features and sensual, leonine mane not helping any), or an atheist in a theist’s world (Arroway butts heads – and butts – with not only a preacher but the whole inculcated space committee on religion and gods).

From science maven Carl Sagan‘s optimistic novel of the same name, the movie is based on the ideology of the Drake Equation (the speculative theory postulating multitudes of Life-harboring planets in this galaxy, given the sheer quantity of possibly habitable worlds), defined in the movie by the almost-too-cute syllogism: “If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.”

The Drake Equation is weighed against the Fermi Paradox, which argues that if there are alien civilizations, why haven’t we detected them yet? This movie’s plot – obviously – negates that paradox.

Whereas CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ method of alien contact played on the age-worn industrial-era concept of aliens physically visiting Earth, an infinitely more efficient manner is effected in CONTACT by means of radio waves. SETI astronomers, headed by Ellie Arroway, stumble upon distinctly intelligent radio signals originating near the star Vega. In decoding The Message, they are astonished to find it is not merely a rudimentary greeting, but rather a technologically-superior detailed schematic for a Machine, to transport US to THEM.

Considering the economics of space travel – not referring to money, but expending energy – The Message defines the most judicious method for establishing contact, whilst discerning whether a recipient civilization is ready and/or worthy to step up to an interstellar level of commerce. The concept of “aliens” has matured in this film, from simple benign or malignant humanoids (treating Earth as the retarded child of the galaxy), to ambiguous “intelligences,” regarding us as near-equals, in placing the ball in our court.

This maturity is due in great part to the inexhaustible efforts of the late Dr. Sagan, whose quest to bestow a sense of cerebral wonder in a generation jaded by laser-wielding aliens and detestably non-scientific science fiction found a culminating point in this movie.

With aliens being so apparently existent, there comes the inevitable contention of Religion vs. Science, and though Sagan clarifies his position in the novel, the movie must necessarily leave the issue ambiguous to appeal to its demographic of (real or imagined) “christians” – the bulk of Earth’s popcorn-plucking populace. The film ultimately preaches to the converted on BOTH sides. No Atheist or Christian will be jumping their razor-wire fences on the grounds of this movie.

The Machine. The journey to the future begins with the logo on the Atom’s head.

As with all major-studio releases, the screen story tampers with the novel’s finer details, slotting it squarely within motion picture dramatic parameters – most notably modifying the overweight evangelist of the book, Palmer Joss, to that of Hollywood man-toy, Matthew McConaughey, to give Ellie that seemingly necessary love-interest. Thankfully, the broad strokes retain enough of Sagan’s driving pursuit of knowledge, elevating it above mere alien-invasion fare. And/or butting butts fare.

Yet we do not lack for effects – stunning, thought-provoking effects, rather than whizbang jaw-droppers. The challenging opening sequence sees a camera panning backwards through space away from Earth, beyond the edge of the Milky Way, outracing a jumble of radio static, which gets progressively “older,” the farther out we go (as indicated by familiar tunes, news snippets and cultural signpost sounds – i.e. the farther out in space you get, the farther back in time you hear; in essence, time-traveling backwards – faster than light, no less, if you are outpacing radio waves!).

The visualization of The Machine (that The Message instructed to build) is a marvel of utility and “alien” design, seamlessly integrated into the landscape of Cape Canaveral. Most impressive was the tragic sequence which destroyed the first Machine – so artfully contrived, with views from the scores of “media” cameras covering the event – that the viewer never thinks to question where the reality ends and the green-screen babble begins.

An astounding camera trick with a running girl in a mirror (Jena Malone as young Ellie) will leave directorial aficionados in mortal brain pain trying to decipher its ingenuity.

One can only hope that viewers can delve through the flummery (which must necessarily blossom during the latter stages of the movie, as The Machine traverses worm-holes) to the REAL message from Sagan: that the questioning and scientific mind is infinitely more precious to our species and creates more impetus for launching Mankind to the stars than the stagnating minds of the pseudo-science shamsters, which includes fanatical christian contingents.

One of the best arguments against religionistas – played out in the movie by the ever-psycho Jake Busey – is that no scientist has yet strapped himself with explosives and taken innocent lives in his quest to force an opinionated Physics viewpoint on other people, whom he believes he will “save” by blowing them up…

The incomparable David Morse is Ellie’s encouraging father, while William Fichtner poignantly plays a blind astronomer colleague. A stoic Tom Skerritt is simultaneously Ellie’s supervisor and adversary, although thankfully is not painted as villainous, even though cast as the obvious antagonist; an intelligent rendering, keeping his interests “scientific” rather than petty. Although he does prevaricate to score his Machine seat, he is noble enough to admit to Ellie, “I wish we lived in a world which rewarded honesty like yours,” to which Ellie replies, “I thought the world is what we make of it.”

Carl Sagan died before production was completed on CONTACT, making it one of his last gifts to a blinkered world. The film’s dedication read simply: “For Carl.” I wept.

Without him, the Universe seems like an awful waste of space.

END