... and then some weeks I just review five movies

In recent months, my movie reviewing has become, shall we say, nominal.

Sometimes you just aren't into something you've been doing for more than 25 years (closer to 30 in fact). Sometimes it feels like more of a drag than others. That's probably especially the case with a sisyphean task like reviewing movies. 

Consider my recent output.

I tend to think of reviewing movies as a week-to-week thing, as in, how many movies am I giving my readers this week? And since I follow what I believe is considered to be general internet wisdom by not posting on the weekends, the week is defined as Monday to Friday.

Ideally, I would review two movies in that period, maybe three on a busy week. One is considered an absolute minimum, without which I am falling down on the job.

Well, it's been a long time since I've reviewed two movies with any regularity. In fact, some weeks, even one was a struggle.

Let's look back:

July 1st to 5th: Reviewed one film, A Quiet Place: Day One, on Tuesday the 2nd.

June 24th to 28th: No reviews.

June 17th to 21st: Reviewed one film, Ultraman: Rising, on Friday the 21st.

June 10th to 14th: Reviewed one film, Hit Man, on Wednesday the 12th, though at least I did post reviews from two other writers on the Thursday and Friday.

June 3rd to 7th: Reviewed one film, The Watchers, on Friday the 7th. 

May 27th to 31st: Reviewed one film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, on Wednesday the 29th. 

May 20th to 24th: Reviewed one film, IF, on Monday the 20th. 

May 13th to 17th: Reviewed one film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, on Monday the 13th.

May 6th to 10th: Reviewed one film, The Idea of You, on Monday the 6th.

April 29th to May 3rd: Reviewed one film, The Fall Guy, on Thursday the 2nd.

April 22nd to 26th: Reviewed two films, Rebel Moon - Part 2: The Scargiver on Monday the 22nd and Challengers on Thursday the 25th.

I'll stop there. I had gone ten weeks without reviewing what I consider to be the correct number of movies in a week. That obviously tells you something.

Well I must have surprised the hell out of my readers this week, because I posted a review every single day. And since I never post more than one in a day, that was the maximum. 

That's right, with each linked for your perusal, on Monday I reviewed Space Cadet, on Tuesday I reviewed Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, on Wednesday I reviewed The Bikeriders, on Thursday I reviewed Fly Me to the Moon and today I reviewed Twisters.

The ratings were all over the spectrum: one 9/10, one 7/10, two 5/10s and one 2/10.

Now of course, this is necessarily an ebb and flow thing, based in part on what's going on in your life. Some weeks I have a hard time getting out to the movie theater, in part because it doesn't seem like they've released anything new, or at least not anything new that I would ever plan to review. (I'm sorry, I'm not going to review the latest Garfield movie.) Then you have travel and other things that can interfere. 

But I think as this summer season has gone on, it has gained clear momentum. This may be an oddity of the Australian release schedule specifically, but yesterday saw the release of four movies that a person might be interested in prioritizing, albeit for different reasons: Twisters, Fly Me to the Moon, MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness. In fact, I chose Twisters as my second film on Thursday, after my family finally got out to see Inside Out 2, because my wife claimed interest in both MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness, and none in Twisters. (I'd already seen Fly Me to the Moon at an advanced screening on Monday, which she was supposed to attend but couldn't.)

The number of four new releases in a given week is a couple standard deviations away from the mean. Most weeks it seems there is one new release, or maybe one movie for the adults and one for the kids. Obviously it increases in intensity at different points of the year, but even what should be a busy summer movie season has felt quiet this year, allowing me to slip down to just one review a week, and sometimes needing the streamers even to accomplish that.

So this probably also means next week will be busy, as I'll want to see at least one of MaXXXine or Kinds of Kindness to review it in a timely way for my readers.

Of course this busy week was not just a function of increased new releases in theaters. Three of my five reviews were recent theatrical releases, but the latest Beverly Hills Cop movie, released to Netflix, seemed something my readers would want to hear my take on, and then the movie I actually got to first, Amazon's Space Cadet, was something that hadn't even been on my radar, but beat Axel F to press after I watched it on Sunday and disliked it so much that I essentially started writing a vitriolic review immediately afterward.

I guess the larger takeaway on this is, I'm not burnt out yet. This week has reminded me that I can still write a large quantity of critical content in a short period of time, and it's not merely out of obligation. With so much on my plate, clearly I could have just not written one or even more than one of the reviews. In fact, the only review I had to write was Fly Me to the Moon because it was fulfilling my obligation by attending the free screening.

Twisters was the 599th review I've written for ReelGood, meaning I'm on the precipice of another milestone. When I reached the last milestone at 500 -- which was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, so early 2023 -- I wondered if I should use the round number to just close up shop. Yes, I considered, however briefly, just quitting this whole thing as recently as 16 months ago.

A hundred reviews later, I've just written five in one week.

I guess I'm here for a bit longer. 

The other Eddie Murphy movies they might reboot

Eddie Murphy has now appeared in two of the more prominent dustings off of movies and/or franchises that originated in the 1980s. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F joins Coming 2 America in that regard. In fact, the only other one that immediately comes to mind -- I think the latest Mad Max movies are something different since they don't feature the same actors -- is Bill and Ted Face the Music, so Murphy has been in two-thirds of the movies that profile this way. (There are others, I'm just saying they are not immediately jumping to mind.)

Since both of Murphy's movies have been generally well received, it got me wondering what might be next for reheating in Murphy's catalogue.

But first, a few thoughts on Axel F, which I finished on Friday after overestimating my stamina on Thursday night.

I enjoyed this movie. Perhaps more so than the others mentioned, it is not trying to be an updated Beverly Hills Cop movie, in which the joke is how old Axel Foley interacts with these new-fangled 2020s concepts like social media. In fact, it is trying as much as possible to feel like it was made in the 1980s, including usage of theme songs from both Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel ("The Heat is On" and "Shakedown") and generally mimicking the action beats of a 1980s movie. In fact, it directly mimics a lot of scenes and moments of especially the first BHC movie -- I might not recognize callbacks to the second and third movies, the first of which is the only one I've seen, and only once. And though that sort of fan service can be obnoxious or just insulting, it's fine here.

A lot better than he played Prince Hakeem in Coming 2 America, Murphy really inhabits Axel Foley. I think this is a strength of both his performance and the writing of Foley's dialogue. He's still capable of the verbal diarrhea that is part and parcel to his general persona and a key strategy to confusing whoever he's talking to. He's still capable of raising his voice into righteous outrage when he's trying to embarrass someone into letting him in somewhere. The only thing that disappointed me is that Murphy is either incapable of doing or unwilling to do the old Murphy laugh -- you know the one -- which was one of the things that ingratiated us to him 40 years ago. It may have been 30 years or more since he's done that, so I guess I should not be surprised.

Other quick thoughts:

1) I was pleased to see that John Ashton (Taggart) is still alive, and he's actually in decent shape. But since he's only just now 76, that got me thinking -- this guy was 36 years old in Beverly Hills Cop? That's the most middle-aged-looking 36-year-old I've ever seen.

2) Despite being nine years Ashton's junior, Judge Reinhold (Rosewood) might look nine years older than Ashton. He's still got sort of a baby face, but it looks all punched up by a boxer, like Mickey Rourke.

3) I can't decide what I think about Taylour Paige, who plays Axel's estranged daughter, an attorney. I found Zola, in which she starred, to be highly overrated, and that means she didn't do much for me there. During this movie I went back and forth on whether she has charisma or does not have charisma. By the end I decided I was okay with her.

4) I know Lisa Eilbacher has been retired from acting since 1995, and she wasn't even in the first of the two sequels. But I was kind of hoping to see her turn up here. She didn't for probably the same reason Kelly McGillis didn't show up in Top Gun: Maverick: Hollywood is not kind to aged actresses who have been retired for many years and therefore have not paid special attention to keeping themselves camera ready. (Oh yeah, Top Gun is one of those revived 1980s movies I couldn't think of in the opening paragraph of this piece.) At 68, Eilbacher is McGillis' senior by two years, and retired a lot longer ago than McGillis. (Looking at her credits, it appears McGillis may not actually been retired, but the work has been pretty spotty the past ten years.)

So which Eddie Murphy movie can we expect to be rebooted next?

Yet Another 48 Hrs. - Nick Nolte is still alive! Get him while that's still true!

Trading More Places - See above comment, but about Dan Aykroyd! (Ghostbusters -- another revived 80s franchise.)

The Silver Child - This time it's not golden! 

The Nutty Professor: No Fat Shaming - Woke! 

Dr. Doolittler - He's a miniature doctor who can talk to animals! 

Meet Dave Again - Once was not enough!

Holier Man - This time, he's even more holy! 

Imagine This Also - Way more imaginative than Imagine That! 

Vampire in Brooklyn: Undead Again - Sure! Why not! 

Boomerang Comes Back Around - I don't even remember what Boomerang was about! 

Further Adventures of Pluto Nash - If it didn't work the first time, this can't be any worse! 

Beverly Hills Cop is just as good 40 years later

I saw Beverly Hills Cop a number of times in the 1980s. It was probably one of the first profanity-laden films I'd ever seen, to say nothing of one of the first films I'd ever seen where people were regularly being shot. My friends and I also thought it was hilarious, as we'd quote lines to each other all the time. I can't remember if I saw it in the theater for the first time -- I would have only been ten and that would have been too young -- but I feel like I have a memory of an audience going wild when John Ashton's Taggart tells Judge Reinhold's Rosewood "If you do that again, I'll shoot you myself!"

But did I ever see Beverly Hills Cop after the 1980s? I don't know.

It seems a strangely long drought for a movie that was beloved by me, which may still be the best-ever use of Eddie Murphy. (Coming to America is gentler, but this is the version of Murphy that originally became famous and was most like his stand-up concerts, which I also ate up and watched repeatedly.) Maybe in the back of my mind I thought it wouldn't hold up. Maybe in the back of my mind I'd heard Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F" (one of my favorite songs at the time) one too many times. Maybe Murphy had slid too far into disgrace for me to want to revisit one of his earlier efforts, even though I still see basically every Eddie Murphy movie that gets made.

Well, the release of the new long-delayed Netflix sequel, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, gave me the excuse to revisit the movie, as I'm sure it is doing for many of you.

And I can tell you that it holds up, that "Axel F" plays in almost every scene and that I never got tired of it, and that there may not have been a more charismatic performance ever given on screen than the one Murphy gives here.

I'll probably watch the Netflix movie tonight so I can review it tomorrow.

Let's address each one of these points individually:

1) The movie holds up. How many movies made in 1984 can you say that about? I expected a lot of gay panic and poor representation, but the movie is pretty good on those fronts. Yes, there is a scene where Axel pretends he is gay in order to embarrass a hoity toity maitre d' into allowing him to approach the table of the villainous Victor Maitland to reveal the news he has herpes simplex 10. (One of the first STDs I ever knew about, although I think that may not be a real variation on herpes.) But that scene is more about the embarrassment it would cause to convey private information in a public setting than it is about homophobia. And there may not be a lot of Black characters in this movie other than Axel, but at least there's one other cop on the Beverly Hills force who shares Murphy's skin color. (And Murphy mocks him for not talking black enough, though he then tells the guy he's just giving him a hard time, with a phrase I found charming: "Sorry, I find that funny.")

2) "Axel F" is not obnoxious to listen to. There was a time in the 1980s when everyone I knew had learned how to play the melody of "Axel F" on a piano, and would regularly walk up to unoccupied pianos to play it. Yes this song definitely reached its saturation point at one time, and lately is known to younger people for its version by the internet meme Crazy Frog. But you know what? It's still a great song. It literally plays a dozen to 15 different times in this movie, and never once do you wish they would vary up the music. (Although there are also plenty of other good period songs, like "The Heat is On" and "The Neutron Dance.") And each time the theme kicks in, you think "Yes! Go Axel Foley!"

3) Eddie Murphy is great. Oh my goodness is Murphy great in this. My memory had been that Murphy might have been rude and crude and unpleasant. But he's actually a softie, a charmer. He drops F bombs, but it's primarily when someone else is treating him unjustly, not casually for sport. He's initially nice to everyone he meets, if they deserve that courtesy. He laughs a lot (oh that laugh). He apologizes if he thinks he's delivered a cheap shot to someone. And his moral compass is incredible. I think I thought I was getting the less charming Murphy from some other movies in that era, particularly 48 Hrs., which I saw only recently and didn't much care for. But this is superstar Eddie Murphy that even a mother could love, and he is charismatic as fuck.

Some other observations:

1) I appreciated how much time is spent on reloading guns in the final act, when most of the gunplay occurs. It was probably an excessive amount of gunplay -- and let's not talk about how terrible Maitland's thugs are with machine guns -- but at least they consciously devote time to the need to reload.

2) However, I do think it's funny how there can be a giant police involved shooting with a dozen bodies and instead of that in itself raising the alarm and creating all sorts of terrible headlines for the LAPD, it gets everyone an "Attaboy" clap on the back. Look, it's still a movie and it's still escapism.

3) I saw Paul Reiser in the opening credits, and though Paul Reiser was not a star yet, I was still surprised at how small his scene was. It's like, they put him in long enough to showcase a personality, but then they just excise him from the proceedings.

4) But speaking of small parts for actors who would become big ... Damon Wayans plays the guy who gives Axel the bananas!

5) When Jonathan Banks materialized on Breaking Bad, I thought "That was the guy who was so menacing in Beverly Hills Cop." I'm sure I'd seen him in the intervening years, but not in any part that had made an impression on me like Beverly Hills Cop had. There's something about his face in this movie that always gave me the chills, and I suspect it had to do with him executing Axel's friend at the start of the movie -- something I had probably never before seen in a movie.

I could go on, but like I said, I'm sure you have been watching Beverly Hills Cop again this week yourself.

Let's just hope Axel F does not make us cringe so much that we forget everything we loved from the original.