Movie Log: Hot Shots!

Hey, remember when my two sons were crazy about watching "spoofs"? Well, it's back -- this evening, we saw -- after several weeks of mild nagging from the elder boy, Thing 1 -- the minor piece of cheese Hot Shots!, which I'd managed to otherwise avoid over the past twenty years.

(There are lots and lots of movies that "everybody's seen" that I never have -- even Top Gun, the movie this one spoofs, is something I only half-saw because it was on the TV at my grandmother-in-law's house fifteen or so years ago during some family function. That side of the family used to be -- they're getting better -- part of the great American tradition of leaving the TV on at all times, to keep from missing anything.)

Hot Shots! comes from the era when Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was fracturing to run off in their own directions, but they were still all basically making the same kind of movie, and doing a decent job of it. (This one is from Abrahams.) It's a grab-bag of random gags, mostly based on Top Gun, but with Superman and Dances With Wolves and plenty of others tossed in here and there. It's all boy humor -- slapstick, sight gags, and the like -- and my boys mostly liked it, though they oddly had trouble following the plot for a while. (The plot's not complicated in the least; I think they just weren't paying any attention to the dialogue.)

It is indeed a dumb movie, but it's an enjoyable dumb movie, and so, if you have rambunctious boys around the ages of ten and thirteen, I can definitely recommend it. (They won't be sure what to do or think during the making-fun-of-9 1/2 Weeks sex scene, but that's OK: neither will you, since they're also in the room.)