Two Weeks in Movie Nights

Icons of the late twentieth century

I didn’t do a Movie Nights post last weekend because there was only one: The Pip’s baseball team had a cookout Friday. So I just rolled that one movie in with this weekend’s two:

Speed:

This came up as we were scrolling through recommendations, and The Pip agreed to watch it, as he’d heard references to it. It holds up pretty well, which is not to say that it’s not fundamentally pretty silly— it is extremely silly, but it comes from the tail end of an era where the third Executive Producer credit on every action movie might as well be “A Giant Pile of Cocaine.” But everything about it is very competently done and it’s all good fun.

The Untouchables:

This one is the fault of the Rewatchables podcast, whose episode on this movie I listened to just recently and said “Oh, I should watch that with The Pip…” This is a bit slower than I remembered, but the action scenes are very good, and The Pip was duly impressed with the baby carriage shoot-out. Connery is terrific, and De Niro is enjoyably over-the-top in what is very clearly about two weeks’ worth of shooting, largely independent of the rest of the cast.

Top Gun:

Since the many-years-removed sequel is the biggest movie of the year, I suggested checking out the original, and The Pip agreed. This is much less an action movie than I had remembered— I thought the dogfight-to-chemistry-free-romance ratio was higher— but remains kind of dopey fun. For this one, the giant pile of cocaine is billed just above a couple of admirals.

(The started-as-a-joke reading that it’s actually a romance between Maverick and Iceman holds up pretty well, for the record…)

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I’ve also been keeping up with Only Murders in the Building when forced to exercise bike rather than getting out on the roads, but as always with tv will hold comments on that until the season is done. If you’d like to read that as soon as it happens, here’s a button:

And if you would like to suggest other executive-produced-by-a-ton-of-blow movies that a modern sixth-grader might enjoy, the comments will be open.