David Vining's Blog, page 42

Susan’s Plan

Do you ever get the sense that John Landis has no idea what he’s doing? You get to a point in a filmmaker’s career where he should simply be incapable of making a movie this bad. He should have developed skills across the decades of his career that would have prevented him from making any host of choices he makes in this quick one million dollar film he made in the wake of the disappointing and frustrating experience of making Blues Brothers 2000. The only saving grace for Landis professiona...

Blues Brothers 2000

This is not the complete and utter disaster I thought it would be. It’s bad, a limp retread of the much more energetic and purposeful original, but Landis’ heart was in the musical numbers, the only thing the studio apparently didn’t force him to completely compromise on, and those are dotted throughout the film. Probably too much, though, it’s a double-edged sword on this one. This legacy sequel has no real reason for existing, misses John Belushi, and has no identity of its own while it bl...

The Stupids

You know, this isn’t the complete disaster that I thought it would be. It’s still bad and not funny, but it’s not as completely miserable as I expected it to be. This is a one-joke film that actually tries really hard to make that one joke vary itself across 93 minutes of screentime. It’s just unfortunate that it’s not terribly well assembled, especially in the beginning, It’s also just not funny, jokes consistently falling flat. What saves it from being completely miserable, though, is a qu...

The Beverly Hills Cop Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

Whew…that was quick. All in one day.

This is just generally not a great franchise. It rode high from the first film but never really recovered.

It rode entirely on Eddie Murphy’s appeal, but Tony Scott was more interested in his own stylings and Landis was butting heads with a Murphy who didn’t want to be funny anymore. At least Netflix found a way to bring back something of the original formula even if Murphy was beyond his comic peak.

So, here’s the quick definitive ranking of the...

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

In terms of long-dormant movie franchises that were never that great to begin with suddenly coming back, I suppose you could do worse than Netflix’s revival of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, bringing Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley back once more decades after his last, dismal effort. I mean, this isn’t good, but it’s not bad either. It doesn’t have the breezy comedic air of the first or the extreme stylishness of the second, but it has a cohesive plot and efforts at comedy unlike the third.

...

Beverly Hills Cop III

This is a disaster of a movie, a film where it feels like absolutely no one cared about it, like no one wanted to make it, and that no one knew why they were there. Making movies is hard business that takes a lot of effort, especially from directors, but when you read stories that John Landis simply let Eddie Murphy walk off set consistently without a fight and stood in for him? That’s just a portrait of a set where everyone is just doing the minimum to get through the day. Throw in the fact...

Beverly Hills Cop II

The first Beverly Hills Cop film was an Eddie Murphy film. This second one is a Tony Scott film. Scott’s stylistic flourishes are front and center throughout the film as it goes through the motions of replicating all of the things that went into the first film. The problem is that I have always found Tony Scott to be a largely empty filmmaker more concerned with panache than storytelling, so combining him with a retread of a story that didn’t have a lot of meat on its bones to begin with is ...

Beverly Hills Cop

This was the third of three movies that took Eddie Murphy from big comic personality to super star status in the early 80s. After the successes of 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, he hit again with this Martin Brest directed cop film about a Detroit detective who plays by his own rules, goes to Beverly Hills to investigate the murder of a friend, and just kind of does police work with near impunity. Well, at least the first one in the franchise seems dedicated to the idea that local cops wouldn’t...

The Beverly Hills Cop Franchise – A Statement of Purpose

So, with the decision to watch all of John Landis’ filmography comes the inevitable clash of hitting up against the Beverly Hills Cop franchise. Do I just watch the third without any real knowledge of the franchise from before (I think I’ve seen the first two before, but many moons ago), or do I find time in my schedule to watch the whole thing, do it right, and create one more definitive ranking?

Sometimes, I think I hate myself.

Because yes, I’m going to do them all. Not that I think...

Innocent Blood

After John Landis’ light return to form, he comes back with a return to the dull, plodding nature of Into the Night. Innocent Blood is caught between genres, unwilling to make any of them interesting on their own or even find ways to try and blend them convincingly until the film’s final act when so much good will has already been lost towards long stretches of tedium. It’s also kind of odd in that it almost feels like a George Romero movie. I’m surprised he doesn’t have a cameo.

Marie (A...