The bad lessons Hollywood is learning from the success ofBeverly Hills Cop II.
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Notes on a summer-season mega-hit: Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer have ruined my breakfast again.
The most important lesson: Bring movies under tight producer and studio control.
Most producers and studio executives are interested only in hits.
Making hits, not good movies, is the way up the status ladder in Hollywood.
They want to realize their own ideas.
But their ideas pulverize movies they make the notion of movies as an art form impossible.
Critics cant slow the success of this sort of movie.
Thou shalt seeRivers Edge.
But in fact, few people decide what to see on the basis of reviews.
Their function is quite different and, in commercial terms, much more modest.
Critics enlarge the buzz of opinion that gathers around a new movie.
They are makers not of the Law but of Talk.
Apart from that, critics keep score and venture to keep certain traditions alive.
Most people who write about popular culture assume that the audience has both bad and good impulses.
The infamous common denominator can be low or high it doesnthaveto be low, and certainly not lowest.
Today, when something as broadly conceived and as good asE.T.orPlatooncomes along, a huge audience responds to it.
And will in the future.
Vincent Canby adores rude slapstick comedies, and Richard Schickel has his square-shouldered, cornfield Americanism.
Were all part of the audience for movies, bad ones as well as good.
They are right to do so, but thats not all there is to say.
Stallone makes the movie the audience makes it a hit.
And the audience making hits may not be as demanding as it once was.
Though no fault of their own, they are cut off from the movie past.
Teenagers cant easily see as my generation could the Hollywood studio product of the 30s and 40s.
And young moviegoers may have trouble seeing good old films in college either.
The continuity of movie history, and movie appreciation, has been broken.
Like rock videos, Simpson and Bruckheimers movies offer hyper-up moods rather than fully worked-out narratives.
Unlike videos, they always offer the same mood: The emotion of triumph, Simpson calls it.
Not even sexual desire interrupts the high-torque adrenaline tip (Eddie Murphy is increasingly sexless).
The music, the tempo pull everybody in, and then the audience makes it happen.
The movie, like an old disco single, is just a pretext.
The movie is nothing.
