WHY TOP GUN (1986) IS SHIT

I was at a party a few months ago when somebody asked me what my favourite film was. Deciding on a favourite film can sometimes be emotive at the best of times but it is almost always subjective; your favourite film may be someone’s least favourite.

My friend John thinks that The Big Lebowski is the worst film he has ever seen; he’s wrong, of course, as I happen to think it is one of the best. It’s a film by the Coen Brothers who, aside from their misguided attempt at remaking Alexander MacKendrick’s deliciously dark The Ladykillers, I consider them to be the best writer/producer/director team since the heady days of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, whose films A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus in the 1940s were true master-classes in imaginative production.

I have about five favourite films that alternate with each other for the number one position. These are, in order of release, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Powell & Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).

The reason why I like these films is that each of them went some way to changing the way we look at the cinema.

Often cited as the best film ever made, Citizen Kane is a long hard look at the corrupting influence of wealth and power and of how even the most corrupt of all cling on to items that remind them of a lost but innocent time. Produced, directed, co-written and starring a twenty-six year-old Orson Welles, this tour-de-force of a movie was, at the time, the most sophisticated work of art ever to come out of a major film studio anywhere in the world. Charles Foster Kane’s story is multi-layered, told through different viewpoints, each narrator giving an opposing opinion of Kane and it’s up to you to piece it all together.

What also set this film apart from anything else released that year was Greg Toland’s astonishing black-and-white camerawork and his pioneering use of deep-focus photography. Welles came a cropper when the newspaper magnate, William Randolf Hearst, was handed a copy of the film’s script and, upon reading it, recognised certain similarities that had occurred in his own life – for example the word “Rosebud”, which is the catalyst for all the subsequent events in the film, was thought to have been Hearst’s pet name for his wife’s clitoris. Hearst tried to get the film banned and all copies of the script and the negative burned.

Fortunately for us he didn’t succeed and what we have in Citizen Kane is a unique experience, a film like no other. Like Alfred Hitchcock, who was only just starting his Hollywood career, Orson Welles changed the face of cinema forever.

When I first introduced my teenage kids to Citizen Kane the first question they asked, before it started, was, “Is it in black and white?” Since then I have made them repeat the mantra, “Just because a film’s in black and white doesn’t mean to say it’s rubbish!” Unless, of course, the film happens to be Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger under the production banner of The Archers is considered by many to be the finest British film ever made. It was supposed to be another of the propagandist films that were designed to help the war effort, but Powell & Pressburger had other ideas. What they made instead was the story of Clive Candy, beautifully played by the excellent Roger Livesey, and how from 1902 to 1942, he went from a dynamic young officer to be a single-minded old general, out-of-touch with the art of modern warfare. Not only that, Clive Candy’s best friend was a German!

Winston Churchill hated its message so much that he tried, unsuccessfully, to get it banned. Add to this mix the gorgeous Deborah Kerr playing three women, who at different stages come into Clive Candy’s life, and what you have is a wonderfully satirical film that works on many levels – as comedy, as drama, as social history – but what it does convey is the message that no matter how important a person feels he is, no one is indispensible.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a masterpiece of voyeurism and obsession with a devastating ending that is dripping with ambiguity. Hitchcock is often regarded as having invented modern cinema. He was the first director to remake his own films – The 39 Steps became North by Northwest for example.

He developed new camera techniques and new ways of filming shocking events – Bruno’s brutal murder of Guy’s wife in Strangers on a Train, seen through the lens of a pair of spectacles, the high camera angle at the top of the stairs in Psycho, as we see Noman Bates dressed as his mother flash out of a side room and stab Martin Balsam’s detective in the head, and the camera effect known as a dolly zoom in Vertigo designed to disorientate the audience.

Remember that famous scene in Jaws (Steven Spielberg’s last great film before sentimentality underscored all of his subsequent work) where the boy on the Li-Lo is eaten by the shark and the camera zooms into Roy Scheider’s  face while the background moves away – that’s a dolly zoom, although it’s now more commonly known as the vertigo effect. Watching Hitchcock’s films in the order they were released is like watching the development of the cinema – we should be eternally grateful to him.

What makes Blade Runner a classic is its overall theme of what it is to be human. It was based on visionary philosophical science fiction writer Phillip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and it was one of the first sci-fi films that touched on one of Dick’s favourite themes – identity. A group of replicants, led by Roy Batty, Rutger Hauer’s finest performance ever,  are searching for an extension of their lives (they were designed to last seven years). Blade Runner units are sent to retire them. Rick Dekkard, played by a suitably grizzled Harrison Ford, is one of them. This intelligent film begs the question, “Who is really human here?” The unicorn provides the answer.

I used to go and see Blade Runner every time it was re-released at the cinema, and one year a group of us decided to go to Southampton to see it. We asked our friend Graham if he wanted to come, but he said he’d already seen it. “But, it’s Blade Runner,” I said, “it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen it before.”

“Nah,” he replied.

He always was a bit of a weirdo.

Pulp Fiction – ah Pulp Fiction. This film brings back some memories. I first went to see this film in Southampton with a group of mates and I was so impressed with it I rushed home and, upon seeing my girlfriend, blurted, “You have got to see this film! It’s amazing! It’s the best film I’ve seen this year so far!” She didn’t really listen to the last sentence because I said that about every film I saw – but the thing is I really meant it this time (talk about the boy who cried wolf!).

Anyway, she agreed to come and see it with me when I went to see it a second time with another group of mates (all of whom had seen it before). She hated it; she hated every single second of it. All the way through the first half of the film she huffed and puffed and sighed and moaned so much that she was in danger of draining the enjoyment out of everyone within a fifty yard radius of her. We went to see the film at the Theatre Royal in Winchester and, in a desperate attempt to break even, the management ensured that there was an interval halfway through each performance to ensure that its punters made use of the well-stocked bar.

It was during the interval that she told me that she was offended that I would take her to see such a film, and that she couldn’t, for the life of her, see what me and my friends were all sniggering about. She also demanded that I take her home immediately, to which I responded in the negative and that if she wanted to go home she could take the car and I’d get a lift home with one of my mates.

It was the beginning of the end of our relationship.

Now, I don’t think Pulp Fiction is one of the best films of all time because of the reason I’ve just quoted; I think it’s one the best film of all time because of a number of reasons, among which are:

• The highly original structure,
• The naturalistic and funny dialogue,
• The fact that the two hit men are dressed in black, but are not silent, preferring instead to spend the entire length of the film  talking shite to each other,
• Harvey Kietel as The Wolf
• The return of John Travolta

Quentin Tarantino is a brilliant film maker; I haven’t seen one film of his that I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed. Yes, he’s controversial in his choice of subject matter and the language that he uses, but you only have to watch Inglourious Basterds to see how he gleefully subverts history, or the film that should have won all the Oscars this year, Django Unchained, a hilariously funny (I could have sworn during the Ku Klux Klan scene that I was watching a missing segment from Blazing Saddles) but at the same time deeply serious film about slavery and its legacy.

I’ve always liked things that are little bit different. I’ve never liked run-of-the-mill music, books, television or films. When I listen to something, read something or watch something I want it to challenge me and get me thinking. The person who asked me what my favourite film was did not think like me. I told him that my favourite film was either Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, to which he replied, “Oh . . . my favourite’s Top Gun.”

You’ll probably have noticed that there is a theme running through all the five films I mentioned above and that, no matter what genre it is, there is something common to all of them. If you haven’t noticed it – stop reading now!

Right, for those of you that are still with me – the theme running through all five films is humanity. All of those films place character and plot above special effects and production. Most of the major genres are covered in them – comedy, drama, social history, suspense, sci-fi and crime. I think only westerns and horror are missing, but Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and The Haunting directed by Robert Wise are bubbling under at Numbers 6 & 7.

Everything really depended on what I said next. I wasn’t going to lie to him; I thought about breaking my opinion of Top Gun to him gently, but then I thought . . . bugger it. “Top Gun,” I said, “is a film made specifically for girls and homosexuals.”

He went mental. “Whaaaaat!” he roared. “What’s wrong with it?”

“For a start,” I said calmly, “it’s got Tom Cruise in it, secondly it’s full of unintentional homo-erotic scenes but, more importantly, it’s flag-waving American shit.”

I didn’t really mean that first bit about Tom Cruise; it was a cheap shot. I actually think that Tom Cruise is a good actor who is capable of some outstanding work – particularly as the repulsive bald-headed, hairy-armed Les Grossman in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder and as the woman hating, sex guru Frank T J Mackey in P T Anderson’s wonderful Magnolia, a role that should really have earned him an Oscar.

I don’t apologize for the flag waving American shit comment, though, because if Top Gun had been a British film I would have accused it of being flag waving British shit instead.

What really annoys me about Top Gun is that its director, Tony Scott, is capable of so much more. He was, after all, responsible for Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Man on Fire and the Tarantino scripted True Romance.

Before I go on, I should probably mention that the person I was talking to was a pilot and we were both extremely drunk at the time. The argument between us about the comparative merits of Top Gun would have come to blows at that point had my wife, being the level-headed person that she is, not stepped in an attempt to calm the situation down.

“Don’t listen to Steve,” she said. “He has absolutely no opinion about Top Gun whatsoever. He’s doing it just to wind you up. I mean, one of his favourite films is Dumb and Dumber.”

“It is,” I said proudly.

This didn’t help matters.

But wait. Let’s take a closer look at Dumb and Dumber. It’s a totally character driven road movie which features hilarious situations that could easily happen in real life. It’s also a brilliant mixture of puerile and intelligent humour, with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels delivering two of their finest performances – and it makes me laugh like a drain every time I see it.

So, if the makers of Dumb and Dumber can create believable characters living believable lives (and, yes, there are people that stupid in the world today), how did Top Gun end up full of cardboard caricatures with empty pointless lives? And why is it that I can recall virtually every line of dialogue in Dumb and Dumber, but all I can remember from Top Gun are the flying sequences?

Because Top Gun is shit – that’s why!

THE SMELL OF LAST NIGHT'S FINGERS

I was in love.

Geraldine McLellan had long been the object of my adolescent sexual fantasies. She was pretty rather than beautiful, but she wore clinging tops and short skirts that accentuated her breasts and her lovely, long, shapely legs. When she walked her peach-shaped bottom moved with the rhythm of an exotic dancer and, if I thought hard enough, I could imagine the sounds of sleazy, sensual, late night jazz following in her perfume scented wake. With almost depressing regularity I would push my pen off my desk whenever she walked by so I could stoop down to pick it up, hoping for a tantalising glimpse of her stocking tops.

One night I dreamed about her stealing naked into my bedroom, her firm breasts bouncing to the rhythm of her long, shapely legs. Moving seductively towards me, she took hold of my bed covers and in one violent, passionate movement threw them to the ground, revealing my hardness and vulnerability. She tossed her head back, her long, dark hair gleaming under the cool light radiating from the lampshade suspended from the ceiling and screamed, "Get out of bed, you idle bugger! You’ll be late for school again!"

And then I woke up in wet and sticky sheets to the sound of my mother calling me from downstairs. As I threw off the bed covers and reached for my tape measure, I breathed the forlorn sigh of a thousand wretched teenagers who, like me, were all held prisoner by the unrequited love of their history teachers.

Pete Webster was waiting for me in the kitchen. Mum was asking him how he was and he was stepping nervously from one foot to the other. My mother was a small, petite woman with blonde hair and a ready smile. I grabbed a piece of buttered toast from a plate off the table, picked up my bag and said, “Right, then.”

Pete smiled at my mother and then quickly followed me out of the door.

As we walked to school Pete said, “She’s a bit of alright, she is.”

“Who?”

“You’re mum.”

“Aw, come off it, Pete – she’s my mum.”

“That doesn’t stop her from being a bit of alright.”

“Look, will you shut up and talk about something else.”

“I was only saying.”

The previous evening Pete and I were rooting through one of the drawers of the sideboard in the front room of our house. I knew it was one of the secret places where my stepfather hid cash that he didn’t want mum to know about. He must have moved the money to another hiding place because there was not even a brass farthing in there, but what I did find was a million times more exciting than a bundle of bank notes. Underneath a pile of papers and scrunched up chocolate bar wrappers was a well-thumbed, 64-page, dog-eared magazine full of naked women. Not only that – it was in 3-D!

Once I had the magazine in my hands Pete started to dig a little deeper into the drawer until he found a pair of the cardboard glasses with the red and green filters.

He immediately snatched the magazine from me and yelped, “Me first!”

We took turns passing the glasses to each other and staring at the fantastic feast of female fancies before us.

“They’re all bald,” said Pete, eventually.

“No, they’re not,” I replied in all innocence.

“Yeah they are – look,” said Pete, “they have no hair down there.”

Back then pubic hair was not allowed to be shown and it was the job of government appointed airbrush men to supervise the removal of any trace of bodily hair on the female form before publication. These tireless guardians of the moral high ground, however, were totally unaware that their acts of censorship were raising the temperatures of men around the nation who were now being turned on by the sight of grown women with shaved fannies.

Pete and I stared – transfixed – at those pictures for what seemed like hours; at one point I was so mesmerised by what I was seeing in front of me that I began to dribble down my shirt. We only stopped looking when we heard my mother outside the door. We hurriedly threw the magazine and glasses back into the drawer and pushed it shut just as my mother opened the door and peered inside.

“What are you two buggers up too?” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement, but I answered it anyway.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well make sure you carry on doing that,” she said, before leaving the room.

The next morning Deborah Delaney waved at me from the other side of the assembly hall. Deborah was fifteen going on twenty-five and had already managed to obtain carnal knowledge of almost ninety percent of the fourth and fifth year boys at Highfield. But Deborah didn’t go out with just anyone. She only went out with boys who didn’t ask her out. She had her principles. If you asked her out she’d refuse you; you had to wait your turn. Eventually when she felt you were old enough she would get around to you.

Pete, who was a couple of months older than me, had already been seduced by Deborah and the morning after his unbridled passion with her he came rushing into the playground and shoved his fingers under my nose, saying, "Smell them. I haven't washed them yet!"

I breathed in the faintly salty smell and asked, "How many fingers did she let you get up her?"

"Two."

 

"Did she let you shag her?"

"Yeah."

  

And then we held a long, meaningful discussion on how many fingers Deborah had let Pete insert into a part of her body that I had never seen on any girl.

Deborah lived on the next street up me and when I was younger Mum used to tease me about her, saying she was my girlfriend because we were always playing together. Deborah would sometimes boss me about when no-one was looking, but I liked her anyway, even if she was a girl.

Deborah was sat in between her two ugly friends, Violet Evans and Christine Smithand when I waved at her she whispered something to them. The girls looked over at me and started to giggle and I was sure she’d just told them about the time she tricked me into getting my penis out for her when we were playing in the back garden.

I was six at the time.

"Let’s play mummies and daddies," Deborah said.

"Don’t want to," I told her.

         

"I don’t care if you don’t want to, we’re playing it anyway." She picked up one of her dolls and pretended it was a baby. "You’re the daddy and I’m the mummy."

         

I sighed and said, "Alright then."

         

"I’m putting the baby to bed now, daddy."

         

"Where’s my tea?"

         

"Make it yourself, you stupid bugger!"

         

I started to giggle behind my hand but Deborah shouted at me.

         

"Stop it!" I cried, putting my hands over my ears.

         

"We’re supposed to shout at each other," she said. "That’s what mummies and daddies do."

         

"Mine don’t."

         

"That's because you haven’t got a daddy."

         

"Have."

         

"Haven’t."

         

"So?"

         

"You just have Uncles. They don’t count."

         

"They do."

         

"Don’t."

         

"Do."

         

Deborah looked at me and smiled. "Right, now we’ve had our argument we’ve got to go to bed and have sex."

         

"What’s sex?"

         

"It’s when the daddy takes his willy out and shows it to the mummy."

         

"I’m not showing you my willy."

         

"Go on," Deborah said, "I’ll show you mine if you show me yours."

         

I thought about this for a few moments. "Alright," I said, finally.

         

"You first."

         

I unbuttoned the fly of my shorts and took my little boy’s penis out. Deborah looked at it and smiled.

         

"Now you," I said.

         

"Nah nah," Deborah said, sticking her tongue out. "Girls don’t have willies stupid."

                  

I just stood there looking gormless with my fly undone and my willy hanging out when the back door flew open and Mum charged out. "What the bloody hell’s all this racket about?" she barked.

         

Deborah’s lip began to quiver. "S . . . Stephen took his willy out and he wanted me to touch it."

         

"You dirty little bugger," snapped Mum, slapping me across the back of my head with the flat of her hand. "You know what they do to little boys like you?”

“No, mum.”

“They lock them up and throw away the key, that’s what they do."

         

As Mum took hold of my ear and dragged me into the house I could see, through watery vision, Deborah smiling her sweet smile at me.

Deborah was smiling her sweet smile at me again, but this time my day improved beyond measure when she approached me and said softly and sexily, "Do you want to come babysitting with me tomorrow night?"

My answer was a swift, simple, emphatic, “Yes.”

         

The next evening I stole some of my step-father’s aftershave and splashed it all over, dressed myself in my very best, trendiest clothes and hurried forth, smelling like the cosmetic counter of the local Timothy White’s, to meet with my destiny.

         

The couple we were babysitting for were already out when I arrived and they weren’t going to be returning until the early hours of the morning. Deborah was wearing a revealing, tightly fitting top with a short denim skirt when she answered the door and I was hot and nervous even before I stepped over the threshold.

It was all very civilised at first. She got me a drink and we sat on the large couch watching telly. I had my arm around her and she had her head nuzzled up under my chin. When we started kissing I felt Deborah's hand move swiftly down to my crotch. I could feel my whole body trembling as she began to caress the bits of me that only I had ever touched.

"Do you want to put your fingers inside me?" she whispered in my ear.

It was a question that required no answer.

Did I want to?

Bloody right I did!

As I stroked the inside of her thigh, she moaned softly, spreading her legs at the same time, allowing my excited fingers to slide easily into the smooth cotton warmth of her panties.

A tingling sensation ran through my body as my fingers entered her, and the next thing I knew she had my trousers undone and my penis in her hand.

"Now, where have I seen this little fellow before," she said.

She did the whole thing in a swift and expert movement that suggested she had performed this manoeuvre many times before. This didn’t bother me in the slightest. Like her, I was only there for one thing and everything else was of no significance. For all I cared the world could have exploded into a billion tiny fragments. It didn’t matter, just as long as I got to shag Deborah Delaney before it happened.

   

She moved her body around and looked me straight in the eyes.  Then she smiled and said, "I think you’ll like this."

I’ll bet she said that to all the virgins.

I wanted to say, I love you Deborah, but all that came out was a strangulated, “Nnnneeeeeeeerrrrrraaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”

Although my whole being was exploding with sexual fulfilment, deep down inside I knew that, like Pete and all the other boys before him, I was just a one-night stand, another sorry name crossed off an endless list. But, that night, as I lost my virginity to Deborah Delaney, all the carnal thoughts I’d ever had about Mrs McLellan evaporated. The next morning at school I was asked a multitude of intimate, personal questions about what happened the night before. I told everything in graphic detail, and although Pete had experienced it before, he stayed and listened anyway.

And, of course, I let him smell my fingers.