Beverly Hills Cop--One of the iconic films of the nineteen-eighties, Beverly Hills Cop features Eddie Murphy at the height of his popularity, playing Axel Foley, a Detroit cop with a penchant for bending the rules. Axel witnesses the murder of one of his old neighborhood buddies, and so he has to travel to Beverly Hills to track down the killer, art dealer, bond hustler, and drug kingpen Victor Maitland, played by Steven Berkoff. Initially at odds with the local police department, Axel's charm is such that he eventually turns them, especially Judge Reinhold and John Ashton's characters, who function as comic relief. Although it's full of quotable lines--"We're not going to fall for a banana in the tailpipe"--Beverly Hills Cop is straighter than say, Rush Hour. Murphy's Axel feels like a street-smart cop, and you'll overlook the rather uncompelling plot to bask in the light of Eddie's comedic banter. Wikipedia states that Beverly Hills Cop was the highest grossing R-rated movie in the US since 1977, which is quite a feat. It's also notable for its rather modest action sequences and car chases, lacking the sort of bombast and million-dollar budget similar flicks would demand. You can make a good movie without breaking the bank, folks. You just need a compelling leading man.
Scavenger's Reign--A hidden gem on Netflix. Any fans of great animation, truly alien worlds, and compelling characters that have actual arcs should watch this immediately. It does have a good amount of body horror, but I haven't been so wowed by a work of visual sci-fi since Annihilation.
Alan Wake 2 is a gorgeous game with remarkable graphics and a unique presentation influenced by the works of David Lynch (namely Twin Peaks) and Chris Carter's The X-Files. You switch between writer Alan Wake, who's been trapped in a parallel universe called the Dark Place for thirteen years, and FBI agent Saga Anderson, who is investigating the sleepy Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls where Wake disappeared. In the twenty-seven or so hours it takes to complete Alan Wake 2, you'll wander through dense forests, a dilapidated theme park, a grimy alternate version of New York, as well as the small town of Bright Falls itself. The narrative is dense, and Saga must often retreat to her Mind Place, an imagined room where you'll pin photos onto a case board and try to unlock the next bit of the story. Wake, trapped in his looping hell, has the ability to rewrite portions of the story, which usually manifests as toggling environmental changes so that the player can find whatever MacGuffin they need to progress through the level. Both characters are beset by Taken, humans possessed by the Dark Presence, a malevolent entity attempting to escape the Dark Place and wreak havoc in the real world. To fight Taken, you'll have to burn off their darkness with a flashlight and then shoot them like you would in any other modern survival horror game. To say that Alan Wake 2's gameplay owes a debut to the recent Resident Evil games would be putting it lightly. Like that series, you'll find stashes that'll be locked and usually require a small puzzle to be solved in order to loot. The game is pretty generous with ammo and health, however, and you'll never really feel like you're down to your last bullet. Similarly, although Alan Wake 2 possesses ambience in spades, the horror never really hits home. The Taken are creepy rather than horrifying, and nothing truly grotesque or otherworldly ever crawls out of the shadows, unlike in say, Resident Evil Village (oh god, that mutant baby still gives me nightmares). While the narrative is never quite pretentious, I don't think it's as good as Remedy seems to think it is. We get into Saga and Alan's characters a little, but over the game's overly generous runtime (it starts to drag at about the halfway part) you still don't quite feel as though you know them, which is a shame, because this is a very narratively heavy game, to the point where parts of it feel like a walking simulator. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the overall package: how often do you get to play a game influenced by Twin Peaks? How many song and dance numbers do you get to battle through? But I feel as though Alan Wake 2 needed better gameplay to truly justify its runtime. Control, Remedy's last game (and part of Alan Wake 2's universe) had Jesse's mystical pistol and supernatural powers that really made the combat enjoyable. Whether or not you enjoy Alan Wake 2 will likely depend on your interest/tolerance of weird Lynchian tropes. One final note: Alan Wake 2 is pretty scalable, but the ray-tracing features will require a real top-end card and frame gen. On a 12 gig RTX 3080, I was able to get a steady 60 at 1440p with DLSS enable on the Balanced preset, but I could only turn Transparency (RT reflections) on. Enabling Direct Lighting with Ray Reconstruction brought frame rates down into the 40s in the forest sections. When playing at 4k, I had to lower DLSS to Performance mode and turn off RT effects entirely.
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