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Bewitched, Bored, and Bewildered: ‘Notes on Beverly Hills Cop II’
From 1985: David Denby on the bad lessons Hollywood is learning from the success of Beverly Hills Cop II.
In the June 4 New York Times, Aljean Harmetz, the paper’s movie-business reporter, enunciates the lessons Hollywood has learned from the simultaneous success of Cop II and failure of Ishtar. Dreaming, or sloshed, a critic might imagine himself and his colleagues as powerful — as unacknowledged framers of the Law, sinewy wise men and women descending the Hollywood hills with engraved tablets: “Thou shalt not see Ishtar. Stanley Kauffmann gazes with pleasure into colorless pools of alienation; Pauline Kael gets excited over sexy or bloody movies that she thinks shock people; and David Edelstein has his twisty-headed horror pictures.
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