IN MEMORIAM: Tony Scott (1944-2012)

 "The idea of a Tony Scott movie, in fact, was always far preferable to actually watching a Tony Scott movie, an experience roughly comparable to that of having your eyeballs and eardrums mistaken for a percussion set by a passing Mariachi band. Any highlight reel would have to include Scott’s two brushes with Quentin Tarantino, True Romance and Crimson Tide (Tarantino scripted the first and polished the second) and of course Top Gun, Scott’s Wordsworthian Ode to mankind’s eternal need for speed, the joys of being top dog, and the sight of jet-engine tailfins shimmering in the haze of magic hour. “You're a great flier. You fly cowboy style. Reckless, wild, out of formation half the time,” Tom Skerritt informs Tom Cruise’s Maverick. “You buck the system and do everything the hard way.” Many heroes in the Bruckheimer/Simpson mould would like to think of themselves as mavericks, or would be rumored to be mavericks, but Maverick is the only one to come out with it and actually be called Maverick. That was the essence of ‘High Concept’, a fancy name for any idea pithy and punchy enough to survive the “aggressive advocacy and yelling system” that had sprung up at Paramount at the beginning of the 80s — an idea in shoulder pads. It produced movies shorn of needless peripherals, strip-mined for their pockets of triumph, and strung out along a beading of radio-ready pop songs: movies that looked, sounded and played like movie pitches. Top Gun begins in triumph, pauses for a victory lap, racks up a celebration or two, then after a perfunctory set-back, proceeds to full on ego massage and reputation floss. “You're here ‘cause you're the top one per cent,” Skerritt tells Cruise. “You're the elite, the best of the best. We're gonna make you better, because your job is damned important.” Applications for the Navy shot up — although God knows what they told the poor schnooks who turned up looking for Kelly McGillis with their Kenny Loggins records tucked under their arm. Scott’s great subject — and it was a great shame he never saw this — was Hollywood. His style may have been defiantly impersonal, but few bodies of work better speak to the muscular status battles and territorial snit-fits — the bluff, boast and braggadocio that rule Hollywood — than Scott’s. Beverley Hills Cop II may have been a bad movie about a cop, but it was a good movie about bluffing your way into the palm-shaded sanctuaries of West Hollywood. Top Gun may be a bad movie about Navy pilots, but it is a very good movie about the feeling of exultation that floods your system when your move about the navy pilots becomes the number one movie in America." — from my column for The Guardian