What You Need to Know Before Seeing Top Gun: Maverick

In the run-up to “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” there were not only myriad articles explaining the litany of references and easter eggs In “Doctor Strange 2” like the one proffered by The AV Club’s husk, but plenty of primers for what a viewer, perhaps a viewer who has not yet screened all 222 movies of the Marvel Multiverse, needed to know before seeing “Doctor Strange 2” lest having failed to see all previous 222 movies of the Marvel Multiverse left them in the dark about certain characters and plot points, as if movies are now just history tests rather than a set of moving images. But I’m not here to whine (again) about Marvel. No, all these pieces got me to thinking about the forthcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” and how so many youths all set to see it (or testily see it against their will, noisily condemning its Reagan-era politics which they, of course, are the first ones to have ever noticed), might need a preparatory post on specific characters and terms from the original “Top Gun” lest they be left their scratching their heads. Fear not, the blog’s got your back. Here’s a handy pre-viewing reference guide. 

What You Need to Know Before Seeing Top Gun: Maverick

Call Sign: a unique military identifier.

Maverick: call sign of our main character to symbolically denote his Naval nonconformity. 

Mailman: father of Maverick, tragically killed in a case of hunting mistaken identity.

Slider: a very small hamburger. 

Goose: Maverick’s best friend who exists to tragically die to help Maverick summit the emotional mountain. 

Carol Bradshaw: Goose’s wife, played by Meg Ryan in the original, who will not be in “Top Gun: Maverick” because she’s 60 years old and as such past the Hollywood Blockbuster Age Cutoff Line.

Penny Benjamin: the woman in the white dress with the white parasol of the original who now needs to exist as an actual character on the screen because present-day society is firmly incapable of letting the mystery be. 

Flying a Cargo Plane Full of Rubber Dog Shit Outta Hong Kong: a synonym for Worst.

I’m Not Leaving My Wingman: John 3:16 of the BroBible. 

Ray-Bans®: that shining city on a hill was so bright you had to wear shades. 

Budweiser: King of Beers.

The Edge: where you need to be. 

Danger Zone: where Kenny Loggins lives.

Kenny Loggins: a “harmless case study in contemporary pop” to quote the Dean of Rock Critics Robert Christgau.

Jukebox: a coin-operated automated-music playing device.

Buzz the Tower: Ickey Shuffle of Naval Fighter Weapons School.

The Bird: international greeting custom. 

Target Rich Environment: social safety net. 

Music Video: videotaped performance of a song, a staple of 80s MTV, and principal aesthetic of Top Gun. 

Beach Volleyball: now an Olympic sport, then a form of male ritual bonding.

Quentin Tarantino’s Top Gun Theory: early example of the Klosterman-ization of pop culture.

Hard Deck: a metaphysical plane suggesting none of us are really grounded to anything at all. 

A Very Serious Review of Lady Gaga's Top Gun: Maverick Anthem

I couldn’t tell you the first time I dreamed of flying a plane and what prompted it. It might have been touring the SAC Museum in Omaha or the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs as a kid, but more likely it was Luke Skywalker making his target run, or Maverick putting on the brakes so they could fly right by, or perhaps most realistically Snoopy envisioning himself as the WWI Flying Ace. That beagle had an active imagination and so did I. All I know is that any dreams I might have once harbored about flight pretty much died the day during an adolescent game of backyard football when I removed my glasses during a rainstorm and fired a pass to what I thought was my best friend running something approximating a crossing route only to hear the pigskin thwack off a tree. If you’re throwing passes to trees, you probably shouldn’t be strapped into a cockpit. That all came to back me last week as I waited to board my flight at the Duluth International Airport back to Chicago. After all, the Duluth Air National Guard is housed on the airport’s grounds, and as I sat twiddling my thumbs (looking at my phone), a couple F-16s thundered down the runway and into the sky, the takeoff so loud the windows I was watching them through rattled. “What,” I wondered, “would that feel like.” Mentally, I sighed for, surely, I’d never know.



After I settled into my seat aboard the tiny regional airliner and we taxied out to the runway, I suddenly remembered that earlier that morning I had downloaded the just-dropped Lady Gaga track – “Hold My Hand” – off the forthcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” soundtrack. What better way to christen my ears with it than during takeoff? I put on my headphones, taking that moment that I do before listening to any new Gaga track to appreciate the fact that I’m about to listen to a new Gaga track, and cued it up. And as our elbow room-less little aircraft lifted into The Gopher State air and Gaga pulled the throttle forward to that first rendition of the chorus, I could have sworn, for four bars there, our Air Wisconsin Canadair Regional Jet eclipsed the sound barrier. 

What Song Will They Sing Along to in Top Gun: Maverick?

The latest trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick”, which was originally scheduled for release in 2019 before being pushed to 2020, at which point it was pushed again to 2021 for reasons you damn well know, before being pushed again to 2022 because even if Tom Cruise believed the movies were back when he went to see “Tenet” in a theater during a raging Pandemic he didn’t want to test out that idea on his own movie, man, and have the box office gods smite him. So, instead the studio has kept putting out “Top Gun: Maverick” trailers, trying to tide us over as the Thanksgiving meal, in a manner of speaking, gets pushed back to Friday, and then Saturday, and then Sunday, teasing new bits of information with each new two-minute spot, like the latest version dropped a couple days ago that revealed 1986 winner of the TOPGUN Trophy Tom Kazansky is now an Admiral and Commander of the Pacific Fleet. Iceman, holding down the same position as Husband E. Kimmel, what a time to be alive.

The rest of the trailer, well, I don’t know. I admit to being weirded out at how young all these pilots looked assembled around a pool table. “Did Cruise and Kilmer and Rossovich and Edwards look that young?” I honestly thought to myself. And then I thought, “Of course they did. Of course, they looked that young. They looked that young because I’m this old. I saw that movie at the Southridge 3 with my dad. The Southridge 3, for God’s sake!” That doesn’t mean anything to you, non-central Iowans, but trust me, we’re going back to the Radio Shack newspaper ad age. Cruise, meanwhile, seems to be doing this thing, as I tried to explain it in an emergency “Top Gun: Maverick” trailer text thread with Friends of the Blog Rory and Daryl, where he seems to be playing in the register of twenty-tens Tom Cruise, the twenty-tens “Mission: Impossible” Tom Cruise, rather than the 1980s Tom Cruise as Maverick imagining what Maverick would be like in the twenty-tens, if that makes any sense. (Except for maybe that “manage expectations” line where I detected a faint glimmer of Pete Mitchell in Cruise’s eyes.) 

What am I doing? I’m trying to aesthetically appraise a trailer? A trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick?” Who wants that? Besides, there is a more pressing question. We have seen glimpses in each trailer of all the young pilots gathered together and singing – you know, like Maverick and Goose singing The Righteous Brothers to Kelly McGillis in the original. I imagine they are singing The Righteous Brothers in the sequel, too, just as I imagine we will see another volleyball duel in the sand, because movies now have no imagination, they just bring what they already brung ya before. But still, it’s a fun exercise, to dream of a little soundtrack creativity and what the “Top Gun” sequel might sonically serve up.

“Top Gun” was released in the mid-80s and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” was released in the mid-60s which means our “Top Gun: Maverick” singalong would come from the 90s, which is proper, of course, evoking both our longing for the past and how the past becomes trendy again. This provides tantalizing possibilities like Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” (which you can just hear all these pilots poorly but sincerely belting out in unison), Sugar Ray’s “Fly” (a pun which also would allow for Goose’s Son to play the part of Super Cat), Wycleaf Jean’s “Gone till November” (strong singalong potential, if we’re not afraid to repurpose a romanticized ode to drug running for Naval Weapon Fighters School), and, of course, Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It” [editor, plz change this one b4 publish]. 

I like Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” if only because it sounds like the smooth sheen that afflicts all cinematography now and appears ready to afflict this cinematography too. But I also don’t know why we need to be so gender specific? This is 2019 (theoretically)! What if our “Top Gun: Maverick” singalong was Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In a Bottle” with all these dogfighters performing Xtina’s genie-ish dance moves as they belted it out? Hmmmmmm, perhaps. But ultimately I’m inclined to go with Aerosmith’s “Cryin.’” 

You can hear it in a raggedy a cappella, for one thing, but it also contains the kind of wistful longing (in a 90s, Steven Tyler sort of way) present in “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’” and contains a totally incidental yet no less apropos “take my breath away” lyric. Also, and this is crucial, you can hear that aggressive intro coming up on a jukebox, really making a person look up and around, then the downshift leaving space for a conversation, before ratcheting back up to the chorus which is when you can cut to the closing credits as each character is flashed up on the screen. Yup, “Cryin’” is the one, let’s see if we can get it to chart again in 2022. 

Additional Notes: Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire”, of course, which Goose plays on the piano in the original, was released in the 50s meaning we’d have to go back to the 80s to find the corollary for “Top Gun: Maverick.” So, why not go back to the moment of the movie’s release and select Van Halen’s “Why Can’t This Be Love?” It would work on the piano and then could segue right into Cruise and Jennifer Connelly taking the moonlit motorcycle ride. 

The era-appropriate “Lead Me On” by Teena Marie of the original, meanwhile, will become the era-appropriate “Señorita” by Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes.

Lady Gaga’s “Boys Boys Boys” will take the place of Kenny Loggins’s “Playing With the Boys,” but that goes without saying. And as for Berlin’s all-important “Take My Breath Away”, hey, no need to sweat it. Rumor is, Gaga’s that one covered too. 

An Appreciation: James Tolkan

It was the damndest thing, in early 2016, just a few days apart, I watched “Bone Tomahawk” (2015) and then watched “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973). In the former, there was James Tolkan, aged 84 years, sitting at a piano in an Old West saloon. In the latter, there was James Tolkan, aged 42 years, as a messenger for The Man. Forty-two years apart, and though his brief role in “Bone Tomahawk” drew from his age, portraying him as seemingly dead at his piano keys before suddenly be roused from a mere drunken stupor, that distinct bald head nevertheless rendered him unmistakable in each part. It made me think of his iconic role in “Back to the Future” as Principal Stanford Strickland who looks exactly the same accosting Marty McFly in 1985 as he does accosting Marty McFly in 1955 after the film’s infamous occurrence of time travel, evoked in Marty’s bewildered observation “Didn’t that guy ever have hair?”

Few supporting actors had as good a two-movie run as Tolkan did in the mid-80s. Not only was he Principal Strickland in the 1985 box office champion, he was Stinger, commanding officer of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, in the 1986 box office champion, “Top Gun.” And so I initially thought something akin to a role face/off was in order, to determine whether Strickland or Stinger was more iconic. But then I thought, that cheapens each Tolkan performance, and anyway, I’m a biased blogger and would stack the deck of such a face/off in favor of Stinger. I mean, Stinger is just a name he got for the credits; he’s never called Stinger in the film; he’s never called anything! That’s how iconic Tolkan was in “Top Gun”; he just was.

Both Stinger and Strickland are antagonists, pushing back against, respectively, Maverick’s bravery to rescue a frozen-in-air Cougar and Marty’s rock ‘n’ roll dreams. In fact, in his most memorable “Back to the Future” moment, Strickland harangues Marty for much more, his very essence as a McFly, citing the kid’s old man, condemning them both as slackers, weaponizing that word in such a way that, speaking as a Gen Xer, I remain disappointed we didn’t get to hear him shout at, I don’t know, Steve Zahn in some mid-90s dramedy. Tolkan’s harangue memorably concludes in a two shot of he and Michael J. Fox, the former doing this thing where he juts his chin out, the shape of his head given the baldness evoking the idea of a missile that is aimed straight for Marty’s head. It mirrors what Tolkan does in “Top Gun’s” narrative-setting scene, where he chews out Maverick and Goose, first from his desk and then rushing around from behind his desk in a neat bit of comical blocking to get right in their faces, metaphorically towering over Maverick and Goose even as he looks right up at them.

Yet if in “Back to the Future” Tolkan was employed to try and dash dreams, in “Top Gun” his character becomes a reluctant facilitator of them, very reluctantly, saying “You two characters…” and then drawing out the pause with this little twitch of the neck as he looks from one to the other, like he’s delaying saying it because he really doesn’t want to, “…are going to Top Gun.” And though then his spiel is pure exposition, it’s cool, first of all, that Tolkan gets the exposition, giving us the background on Top Gun and why these two characters get to go, which he doesn’t deliver with authority so much as you morons-better-not-screw-this-up exhortation which is why he doesn’t need to conclude it by warning Maverick about screwing it up though the line, of course, about a flying a cargo plane outta Hong Kong full of you-know-what is so good that, no, it did need to conclude that way after all. And though the scene is about Maverick and Goose’s ass-backwards triumph, Stinger still gets the scene’s closing shot, a doozy, watching them go, looking, now that I think about it, very much like a Principal who knows he’s going to see those two kids again after class real soon.

Maverick does end up back in Stinger’s presence come movie’s end, of course, though it’s more of a hero’s welcome. And though it is, Tolkan, bless him, does not dial it back and act all humbled in this hero’s presence. No, he has Stinger blow cigar smoke in Maverick’s face and when Maverick expresses his interest in returning to Top Gun as an instructor, unleashes this comically disbelieving guffaw and then half-attacks the hero, joshingly perhaps, but still with enough intensity that Cruise palpably blanches.

It’s Maverick’s movie, certainly, that’s why he’s getting a second one, but let me be clear: Stinger wins both scenes.

Top Gun 2: Now or Then?

As “Top Gun” concluded, rather than fading to black, director Tony Scott chose to first roll his main cast’s credits over an accompanying live action image of each one, as if taking care to freeze that persona in time. That was appropriate. “(Tom) Cruise is Maverick. And Maverick is America, at least America back in the go-go 80s,” wrote Chris Nashawaty for Entertainment Weekly, a quote I referenced in my 2014 argument that “Top Gun” was the quintessential 80s movie, wholly, specifically of its time, a sort of maximalist the-present-is-so-bright-I-have-to-wear-sunglasses that defined the Reagan Administration – America, Now More Than Ever. In that way, “Top Gun” should have remained sequel-less; it is 1986, forever and ever. Then again, this is now, 2019, when not only is our dearth of creative cinematic ideas leading to a proliferation of ho-hum sequels but where much of America seems gripped by a political and social fetishization of 80s styled gung-ho patriotism, which is underlined in America’s current Man in Charge being a product of the Me Decade. And that might well make the “Top Gun” sequel, set for a 2020 release, the perfect movie to comment on our strange times.

The trailer that dropped last week for “Top Gun 2”, however, doesn’t look all that much like Now. Yes, it’s got Now Tom Cruise, but Tom Cruise of Now goes to great lengths to stay Forever Young which is fine for an “M:I” movie where escalation by way of repetition – even if directors change – is the point but oddly unsettling when pointedly flashing ahead 33 years. Why we see Maverick pull the cover off a motorcycle and go for a ride alongside a runway right straight into the sunset of nostalgia. But that’s not all. The trailer includes a brief shot of a volleyball game, sure enough, and a quick sliver of what appears to be a Goose-styled singalong at a Kanas City Barbeque-style joint, wouldn’t you know it, and, my God, even the light filtering across Tom Skerritt – er, Ed Harris’s – face there at the start makes it look like they haven’t changed the style of window blinds at the Naval Weapons Fighter School since, well, 1986. This looks suspiciously like fan service, “Top Gun” as “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, a narrative more chock full of Easter eggs than new ideas because all we want is what we already had which I thought was why we had home video but maybe the movie theater is the new VCR?

Of course, that in and of itself could become the ultimate commentary. Right? Make Hollywood Great Again by just playing the hits, whether earnestly or ironically, montages and machismo of a whole new generation. And that’s why we must reserve judgment until release. And anyway, even if intellectually my eyes rolled in the face of one more sequel whose makers seemed to have fallen asleep during the litany of “Great Gatsby” book reports, emotionally I felt a quiver in my heart when I heard the apparent update on Harold Faltermeyer’s score. “I can’t wait to see this,” I thought. In the end, I guess, I’m just like everyone else.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Top Gun Version

America First is the foremost policy slogan of the current President of the United States. And it is an interesting phrase. America First, as in “If you’re not first, you’re last,” which was the philosophy espoused by Reece Bobby (Gary Cole) to his son Ricky (Will Ferrell), NASCAR driver extraordinaire, in “Talladega Nights”, one of the finest film lines of the new century, so exact in its absurdness that NBA superstar Kevin Durant literally, un-ironically quoted in a written profile. And it seemed that much more prescient when Durant, not long after quoting it, ditched the Oklahoma City Thunder for superpower Golden State to get a ring because because, well, it’s all about winning, whether it’s the basketball court or, as we were reminded the other night, the battlefields of Afghanistan.

It’s a thin line between politics and sports. Why else would there have been an over/under on the Clinton/Trump debates or bars offering drink specials during the Comey Hearing? Partisan entrenchment is just like picking a team, throwing on a metaphorical t-shirt with a donkey or an elephant and following the party leader’s plea to MAKE SOME NOISE. “Scoreboard!” supersedes policy. Why else would President Trump refer more to the specifics of his electoral victory than the specifics of, say, his healthcare bill? This inherent insistence on filtering politics through a sports prism, however, often goes beyond party and to country. In the go-go 80s, for instance, when America was in the midst of a war served cold it was Us vs. Them, Red, White & Blue vs. Red.

This geopolitical competition was part and parcel to “Top Gun” (1986), the preeminent American movie of the 1980s. The infamous (or was it just famous?) volleyball scene was not superfluous; this was a sports movie in which everything boiled down to rivalries, on the volleyball sand, in the air as Navy fighter pilots competed for the Top Gun Trophy. “Remember boys,” says Slider (Rick Rossovich), “there’s no points for second place.” The actual Naval Fighter Weapons School on which the film was based did not have a trophy or a competition, both of which were added to the cinematic version as a means to add urgency, of course, but also to underscore America’s overarching competitive drive. And that comes home in the concluding sequence in which Americans duke it out with Russians over the Indian Ocean, Maverick and Iceman vanish the evil MIGs and our two adversarial aviators meet on the aircraft carrier afterwards and...wait.

What’s that I spy?

Whether the extra was told to do this or was caught up in the moment we will likely never know, but whatever the case may be, it was the right decision. After all, index fingers after sports victories had become all the rage, so much so that some scholars cite Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing holding aloft his index finger after losing in the NCAA Basketball Championship game to Villanova the previous year as the moment “We’re #1” jumped the shark. Not me. I pinpoint that moment as right here, when the deck of an aircraft carrier in the midst of the Cold War became like a gym floor at the end of the NCAA Basketball Championship game. Maverick returned to Miramar to become a Top Gun instructor, as everyone knows, but no doubt in-between he went to Disneyland and in a Rose Garden ceremony gave Reagan a Top Gun bomber jacket.

All Female Top Gun

On the most recent episode of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” their patented Not My Job quiz was administered to astronaut Sunita Williams, current record-holder of total cumulative spacewalk time. In her interview with host Peter Sagal, however, she revealed her roundabout way to becoming an astronaut involved early dreams of being Tom Cruise in “Top Gun.” At which point my ears emitted joyous steam and I paused the episode to write this entire article. Because what if “Top Gun” went “Ghostbusters” and became strictly female?

Well, Andy Benoit and his legion of feeble-minded men’s rights activists would no doubt take to Twitter to say things born of only the dimmest wit, of course, but I’m not concerned about those oblivious asshats. No, I’m concerned about who would be in this “Top Gun” movie? Who would be Maverick? Who would be Goose? Who would be Ice? Who would be Slider? Who would be Viper? Who would be Jester?

Jennifer Lawrence & Amy Adams (Maverick & Goose)

Who else could our lady Maverick be but JLaw? Or, make that Nitro, seeing as how it was Lawrence’s childhood nickname and “Nitro” would look so good on a fighter pilot helmet. She’ll play by her own rules. She won’t take guff from anybody. She’ll tick off those around her even as she endears everyone else. She’ll cruise around on a motorcycle in Chanel sunglasses to the sounds of Cut Copy. The image of Jennifer Lawrence saying it’s time to buzz the tower and then emitting that classic Lawrence cackle should be enough to scream “Jonathan, bring me my green light!” in any language. Meanwhile, the estimably effervescent Adams would counter our Naval free spirit with aplomb as her level-headed RIO.

Emily Blunt & Keira Knightley (Iceman & Slider)

Yes, yes, you got me. This is on account of my debilitating anglophilia as much as anything; my chance to see Blunt & Keira as a pair of cocky, too-cool-for-school Brits firing off dry witticisms who win the Top Gun Trophy. (And for whom I'm secretly rooting, a la Ice & Slider.) And so what? THIS IS MY MOVIE. NOT YOURS. Also, if you think it's weird to drop a pair of Englishwomen into America's Naval Fighter Weapons School...did you see “Spy”? Half of our country's defense system is apparently English.

Geena Davis & Susan Sarandon (Viper & Jester)

Davis: “Tell me, if you had to go into battle, would you want her with you?”
Sarandon: “I don't know. I just don’t know.”

Rooney Mara (Sundown)

I mean, why not?

America Is.....

5 Favorite Movie Houses

On Saturday I found myself passing for roughly the ninetieth-dozen time this particular house in my Chicago neighborhood that I have affectionately come to call The Meet Me In St. Louis House. Admittedly the two homes are not precise comparisons. The house in my neighborhood is classified as Colonial architecture whereas the Smith household in the 1904-set “Meet Me In St. Louis” is Victorian, and yet I compare them because they both evoke such an old-timey feel. Whenever I jog past the house in my neighborhood, with its wraparound porch, white picket fence and illustriously turreted window, I imagine a horse and buggy pulling up to drop off its family. I imagine them entertaining guests at the grand piano in the parlor room. I imagine someone sitting on the porch in the warm afternoon sun, sipping iced tea and reading The Saturday Evening Post. I imagine Jean Harlow seeing me from an upstairs window seeing the house and sassing me for gawking. “What do ya staring at, funny boy? Haven’t ya ever seen a dame in a three story home before?” All together now…… Sigh.

This house is right down the block from me.

Where was I? Right. The house in my neighborhood. Passing it yet again on Saturday finally, as it inevitably had to at some point or another, got me to thinking. What are my favorite houses in the movies? And before we get to the requisite list, let me make one thing clear – this is Cinema Romantico. When it comes to movie houses, we are not going to be interested in, shall we say, futuristic houses. In Des Moines, where I grew up, there was a house in the countryside referred to by the locals as The Spaceship House – as in, a colossal raised home that looked like a spaceship. It would have been right at home in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”. But The Spaceship House compared to the house in my neighborhood isn’t the same ballpark. It isn’t the same league. It isn’t even the same sport. So you won’t find The Vandamm place in “North by Northwest” or or Tony Stark’s semi-bachelor pad in “Iron Man” or The Lake House in “The Lake House” or some such thing. No, these houses are more of the, shall we say, classical variety. These are the houses that hold court in the strange imagination of Cinema Romantico.

My 5 Favorite Movie Houses

5. The Goonies 

Despite barely being in the movie, the "Goonies" house drives the plot - they need the money to save it - and perhaps for that reason retains a popular place in pop culture imagination. But the house. Take "The Goonies" themselves out of the equation and just take the house at face value and, heck, it's not really that different from the Meet Me In St. Louis House in my neighborhood, is it? You can hear the whimsical creak in the floorboards, can't you? You can imagine looking out a second-story window and gazing at the ocean, can't you? You can hear the pitter-patter of rain on that porch awning, can't you, and smile?

4. Atonement 

Yes. I get it. I understand. I know what happens in this house in the movie, and that so much of it is awful and depressing and Debbie Downer Masterpiece Theater, etc., and I don’t care. You know why? BECAUSE IT’S THE TALLIS HOUSE, YOU AUTOMATONS!!!

3. Top Gun

To be sure, any house could probably look like The Greatest House On Earth with a little Tony Scott-ization. You know, he serves the orange sunset and the billowing drapes in the soft focus with the Berlin on the soundtrack but that's only half the battle. I mean, the house is parked under the palm trees and the Pacific Ocean is right over there and, well, heck this is the house on the list that I don't simply love but want to live in. Mansions really aren't my style. All I want is a seaside bungalow in California with my little front porch to drink my morning coffee while I gaze romantically at the water. (One great regret I have in life is the fact that my friend Jed and I on our infamous California road trip that found us in Miramar also found us in Oceanside, the location of this house. I had no idea. This was 14 years ago. You couldn’t just Google “Charlie’s House Filming Location” on your iPhone. C'est la vie.)

2. The Myth of Fingerprints

Originally erected all the way back in 1791, the Merrill-Poor House of Andover, Maine that served as the foremost location of my third favorite film of all time is a luxurious rental property with twenty-five rooms. Which, of course, is why the film never feels as if it runs out of space, why every room feels new and different, even as the film cleverly obscures the fact that the house is actually so freaking huge. And even if the characters and their feelings can often come across as cold, the house onscreen comes across so genuinely lived in, so astonishingly tangible, just like a childhood home, not simply a place but a thing ingrained in your psyche.

1. Meet Me In St. Louis

Well, if this wasn't the most obvious # 1 in the long history of Cinema Romantico's blatantly obvious # 1's. What can I blather about to summarize it? Just look.

Top Gun Is The Awesomest, Part 224

When Tony Scott tragically jumped to his death in 2012, Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times considered Mr. Scott’s distinct pop music sensibilities in conjunction with his filmmaking. He wrote that “Kenny Loggins' ‘Danger Zone’ may be used most often as a punch line today, and the video Scott directed, with Loggins kicking around a bed in the early morning hours, can now be viewed as camp. Yet don't hold time against it. ‘Top Gun’ was a film that celebrated mid-'80s military technology; why shouldn't it also celebrate mid-'80s rock 'n' roll, one of the dominant sounds of the period?” If there was ever a film that does not deserve to have time held against it, it is most assuredly “Top Gun.”

Matt Zoller Seitz, currently editor of Roger Ebert’s page at the Chicago Sun-Times, a fantastic critic, a Pulitzer nominated critic, whom I deeply respect, does not hold time against “Top Gun” because, in fact, he did not care for “Top Gun” at the time of its release. He made this clear in his answer to last week’s Criticwire question which wondered about cases wherein critical consensus was correct the first time around and resistant to re-evaluations. He said: “’Top Gun’ was terrible when it came out and it's still terrible. Every time somebody online tries to stick up for it as some sort of American pop classic, I just roll my eyes. It's a burp from the Reagan era, no more worthy of serious consideration than ‘Rambo: First Blood Part II.’”

So, here’s Nick, right, about to try and stick up for “Top Gun” as some sort of American pop classic? Eh, not quite. Not as an American pop classic. But as an 80’s American pop classic? Oh, most definitely. I think of Rob Sheffield's passage in his memoir “Talking To Girls About Duran Duran” in which he discusses “the truly loathsome opening shot of ‘Top Gun’ with the caption ‘Indian Ocean: Present Day.’ That totally sums up where Hollywood culture was at in 1986: the ruling principle was that the ‘Present Day’ would always look, sound and feel exactly like 1986.” Obviously, Mr. Sheffield meant this as a besmirching of “Top Gun’s” quality and ethos, and more power to him. I, however, read that passage as a backward compliment.

“(Tom) Cruise is Maverick,” wrote Chris Nashawaty on its 25th anniversary. “And Maverick is America, at least America back in the go-go 80’s.” In other words, “Top Gun” was not intended to transcend its time because it was so utterly rooted to its Reagan Era-ness. Consider the moment when Maverick wryly informs Slider he stinks. In that shot, perched on the desk, is Slider's can of Pepsi. It's product placement, sure, but it's definitively 80's product placement. That's what a can of Pepsi looked like in the 80's and that's how Rick Rossovich looked in the 80's and people wore those rickety foam Walkman headphones in the 80's that Rossovich is wearing and no one listened to Kenny Loggins ironically in the 80's. You don’t hold time against it.

Do the "Top Gun" dance. Don't be shy.

Clearly the "Present Day" does not look, sound and feel exactly like 1986, just as the "Present Day" of 2006 or 1996 did not look, sound and feel exactly like 1986. And that, I suspect, is precisely why Mr. Seitz dismisses "Top Gun" as a burp. It had nothing to say beyond the "Present Day". It lived for the moment, which made it so emblematic of the decade in which it was set. If “Top Gun” wasn’t the ultimate evocation of 80’s America, what in God’s name was?

Which I realize is not necessarily a defense of “Top Gun” in its official capacity as a film. Because if it’s not a good film, where does any of the rest get us? But it is good - nay, great. And Lord, spare me the “so bad it’s good” blasphemy. “Top Gun” is too pure in its Tony Scott Maximalism to be so reductively viewed. One term people like to hurl at me when I dismiss some numbing popcorn flick is this: "It's a movie that knows exactly what it is." I often take umbrage with this sentiment because a movie knowing exactly what it is would suggest tonal coherence, and far too few movies that I’m told know exactly what they are manage tonal coherence. They have to be everything to appeal to everyone to ensure first weekend box office. “Top Gun”, however, never loses sense of itself as an 80’s music video adrenaline rush in which action, drama and romance are all handled precisely the same way – with gloss, montages, machismo, and pop music.

In a comprehensive analysis of the film, Tim Brayton writes: “’Top Gun’ is basically perfect, even it is perfect at one of the worst sorts of things a movie can attempt.” I agree with the first part.