Why did I watch it?
This was on TV a few weeks ago and I debated whether I should watch it or not. What swung it for me was the fact that I have not seen so many of Tom Cruise's 80's films like Risky Business or The Color of Money, Cocktail included.
What's it all about?
After leaving the army, Brian Flanagan (Cruise) returns to New York with an 'I want everything, and I want it now' attitude. Unfortunately for him he can only swing a job bar-tending alongside Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown) while studying for a business degree. Full of charm and adept at flairing, Brian is popular with the ladies and after a fallout with Doug, heads to Jamaica to earn the dollars necessary to achieve his dream and open his own top class cocktail bar. Here Brian meets Jordan (Elisabeth Shue) and love blossoms until he risks it all to chase his dream.
Should you watch it?
25 years old now, Cocktail is probably, more than any other film, the best example of the 1980's. The colours, the soundtrack, the cheese, it screams of this decade. To me it seems like the writers decided to take all the 80's elements of Top Gun (three years its predecessor) and 'Eighties' them further without stopping to really think about the film itself.
The plot is wafer thin to say the least and most importantly I simply couldn't relate to Coughlin and Brian scheming to come into money by luring women with wealthy purses, how shallow a premise is that? Despite both the film's and his character's flaws, Cruise still manages to appeal throughout as the lead, I don't know what it is but you just can't not like the guy.
If you have yet to see Cocktail, then I wouldn't rush to do so, unless you are either a Cruise or Eighties fanatic. A regretful trip back to the 80's at their worst.
Why did I read it?
Book number four of my Tom Clancy odyssey.
What's it all about?
Cardinal of the Kremlin combines a cold war race to develop Strategic Defence Initiatives (so called 'Star Wars' by the media) with arms reduction initiatives, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and most prominently, the exposure of the highly placed US intelligence source in Moscow, Cardinal. Once exposed, Jack Ryan develops a plan to rescue the source without interfering in the political battle taking place at the very top of the Soviet Politburo.
Should you read it?
An expert at what he does, Clancy manages to weave the various plot elements into a reasonably taught thriller. Although the book takes it's place in the Jack Ryan chronology, Cardinal acts as a direct sequel to Clancy's first book The Hunt For Red October, with Captain Marko Ramius making a reappearance. Jack Ryan actually only plays a small role for the majority of the story, only coming to the forefront for the final act.
The story is definitely most absorbing when in the USSR, either following the Cardinal, his US contacts or the KGB's counter-intelligence officers, especially once the Cardinal becomes compromised or when concerned with the political scheming of the Politburo's top officials, including the KGB chief, for whom the discovery of an American source is political gold-dust. I found the 'Star Wars' laser weaponry side of the story and the detail in which Clancy describes it considerably less interesting and nothing more than a distraction from the cut and thrust of the espionage action.
