Nobody makes a Maid-Rite, they’ll tell you, like Taylor’s in Marshalltown. That “they” includes the director of Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski, who hails from the home of the last best loose-meat sandwich. F1, the Marshalltown man’s new film starring Brad Pitt, opens on June 27. Before you give yourself over to the very real vroom-vroom, Little Big Screen is taking a rather scenic route to catch up with his work.
Only the Brave (2017)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
I was fine seeing Top Gun: Maverick at Flix Brewhouse. It was a legacy sequel. How good could it be? I don’t have to explain what happened next. We were all there. We all saw a film as good as big can get. And yes, I saw it again, without the silhouettes of so many chicken tenders scurrying across the screen.
Now when I think of Maverick and Kosinski, I think of this Tom Cruise interview where he talks about finding the right director for Mission: Impossible. Cruise had gone to dinner at Steven Spielberg’s house and Brian De Palma happened to be there, and anyway, Cruise ended up watching 14 hours of De Palma films. (Same, Tom.) Just beneath the sleaze and gloss and boobs and blood, Cruise started to see how, say, De Palma’s museum sequence in Dressed to Kill might translate to his reboot of a secret-agent TV show.
You can do a similar movie marathon thing with Kosinski, watching and seeing how Tron Legacy, Oblivion, and especially, Only the Brave translated to Maverick. If the wind blows a certain way in 2017, Only the Brave could’ve caught on like it deserved. The true-story studio drama about wildland firefighters, in Kosinski’s hands, becomes both a bodacious hangout movie and a movie that’s absolutely gutting. He’s got a couple calendars’ worth of beef cakes for the firefighters, and somewhere between Oblivion and Maverick, whips up digital fire and in-camera brimstone until the flames nipping at Taylor Kitsch’s ankles can be felt, hot, on the viewer’s own two feet.
Stream it on Pluto TV. Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Zodiac (2007)
Directed by David Fincher
David Fincher almost directed the Gears of War launch trailer. This should be an “aww, man” kind of what-if, but even 12-year-old me would be stoked on how it worked out. Fincher dipped to do Zodiac — no matter how many times I rewatch Jake Gyllenhaal’s wannabe bloodhound chase his own tail, and get my own nose rubbed in the uncrackability of the case, I can’t help but sniff around Google for answers — and picked Kosinski to be his replacement.
The trailer, which looks like Children of Men rendered in Unreal Engine 3, is still a thing for those who hold dear Gears’ thicky-thick infantrymen and chainsaw-guns. “Truly one of the best pieces of art work ever,” reads a YouTube comment from three years ago. “Bless whoever made this trailer.”
Stream it on Pluto TV. Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Grand Prix (1966)
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Enzo Ferrari wanted nothing to do with this movie. The great big “no” was an issue because Frankenheimer and his crew had followed the Formula One circuit for five months — like Kosinski and his crew would do for F1 — capturing 850,000 feet of film that, naturally, had a few Ferraris in it. Then Enzo saw a rough cut of Frankenheimer’s footage from the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix. He changed his mind and then some. It was that good. It still is. The footage ended up in Grand Prix’s title sequence, a Saul Bass montage of starting-line geometry and multiplayer split-screens. I’m hoping for an homage in F1 where the IMAX screen gets divvied up into 64 little Pitts.
Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012)
Directed by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim
“There is a scene in the film where a character is defecated on by several people at the same time,” wrote Roger Ebert in his half-star non-review of Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. “And I dunno … I didn’t enjoy it.”
I do enjoy it. I just don’t enjoy living in its stupid dystopia. Of course the first (and only) feature from Tim and Eric, the guys who basically made five seasons of Robocop TV commercials for Adult Swim, would have a Verhoevenian prescience. Their Billion Dollar Movie had to be mentioned here, of all places, because it nailed the nation’s need for more Top Gun, kinda-sorta calling Kosinski’s own billion dollar movie.
Stream it on Hulu, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel and Tubi.
