Dan Fitzgerald Movies

Curtis Hanson's adaptation of Jennifer Weiner's novel In Her Shoes stars Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz as a pair of very close but very different sisters. Free-wheeling irresponsible Maggie Feller (Diaz) gets through her life thanks to her remarkable looks and her lack of scruples. She constantly goes to her straight-laced, plain-Jane successful lawyer sister Rose (Collette) for financial help. The two sisters have been very close to each other in part because their troubled mother died when they were girls. Right about the same time that Maggie discovers hidden letters that reveal she and Rose have a grandmother, Maggie does something to betray Rose's trust. Maggie sets off for Florida to find the grandmother. A failed workplace romance forces Rose to rethink her career, a career that has been the center of her life. As Rose tentatively begins a new relationship and Maggie gets to know her grandmother (played by Shirley MacLaine), the two learn a dark family secret that helps smooth the path toward reconciliation. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

An international collection of well-known directors contributed to this compilation film, each fashioning a short film inspired by an aria from a famous opera. The approaches vary broadly, from the playful abstraction of Jean-Luc Godard's segment, which illustrates Armide with exercising body-builders, to the more literal approach of Franc Roddam, who transports Tristan und Isolde's story to modern-day Las Vegas. A particular stand-out is Julian Temple's take on Rigoletto, which recasts Verdi as the accompaniment to a contemporary Southern California sex farce. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

Former Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser warmed the director's chair for Band of the Hand. The film zeroes in on five juvenile delinquents who are plucked from their various detention facilities and unceremoniously dumped in the wilds of the Everglades. The boys begin to panic until hardcase Vietnam veteran Stephen Lang arrives. Lang explains that they've been paroled in his custody, and that it is his task to teach them how to work as a team in order to survive. The logic of this plan is to whip the boys into an elite vigilante unit, then sic them on the various drug dealers of America. The film features early performances by Lauren Holly and Larry Fishburne and Bob Dylan can be heard singing the title song. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This red-baiting action film stars Chuck Norris as Matt Hunter, a retired CIA agent who lives in the Florida Everglades. A communist invasion of Miami brings Hunter out of retirement to fight the encroaching hordes led by everyone's favorite low-budget bad guy, Richard Lynch. The film is extremely jingoistic, presenting the evil communists staging an invasion on Christmas, demolishing a church, and attempting to blow up a school bus full of children. From the same school of thinking which produced Rambo and Red Dawn, this film at least features some convincing gore by makeup wizard Tom Savini (Friday the 13th), working on his third gig for director Joseph Zito. Zito and Savini returned with Red Scorpion. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Veering off in several thematic directions at once, A Night in Heaven starts with a torrid student-teacher romance which becomes somewhat derailed by adding on a failing marriage, political allusions related to NASA, a frustrated sister of the teacher, and several additional characters, many of whom are stuffing bills into male dancer's jock straps. Faye (Lesley Ann Warren) has just flunked a student in her speech class when she goes out that night to the "Heaven" nightclub and lo-and-definitely behold, there is Rick (Christopher Atkins), the failed student in his incarnation as a successful male stripper. This was a view of the student that Faye had never expected, and before anyone can flip a $20, the two are making mad, passionate love. While this may satisfy a few fantasies, events lead to an ultimate confrontation between the teacher's husband (who worked for NASA) and Rick that is even less believable than the student-teacher sexual liaison. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Spaghetti-western stalwarts Terence Hill and Bud Spencer star in the Italian actioner Go For It. The stars play a couple of self-styled "supercops" who take on a demented scientist. The villain has invented an all-powerful "K Bomb," intending to detonate the device in a major metropolis. Hill and Spencer must contend with martial arts-trained busboys, a femme fatale called Der Vamp (Faith Minton) and -- even worse! -- a troupe of demonic child actresses, as they race against time. The "E. B. Clucher" credited with the direction of Go For It is actually a pseudonym for Enzo Barboni. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The USS Nimitz, a modern-day nuclear-powered aircraft carrier captained by Kirk Douglas, passes through a time warp and finds itself at Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941. Douglas is all for preventing the infamous Japanese attack by unleashing the 1980s technology at his disposal. But wait--if history is inviolate, what will happen to future events if the attack doesn't come off? For nearly two hours, pros and cons are volleyed back and forth by Douglas, by ambitious senator Charles Durning, and by concerned observer Martin Sheen. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With an unbilled Waylon Jennings providing verbal and musical punctuation throughout, the premiere episode of The Dukes of Hazzard chronicles the latest adventures of cousins Luke and Bo Duke (Tom Wopat, John Schneider), a pair of hot-roddin' Good Ole Boys living in Hazzard County ("East of the Mississippi and South of the Ohio") with their sensible Uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle) and their curvaceous female cousin Daisy (Catherine Bach). With their moonshine-running activities "officially" thwarted by the terms of their probation, Luke and Bo have to get their kicks flummoxing and outrunning the local corrupt authorities, rotund county boss Jefferson Davis Hogg (Sorrell Booke) and Hogg's brother-in-law, Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane (James Best, here playing his role along more embittered and less buffoonish lines than he would in future episodes). On this occasion, the Dukes thwart Roscoe's latest crooked enterprise, namely smuggling slot machines across the border, by hijacking the machines and giving the money therein to local orphanages and charities. Naturally, Roscoe tries to arrest the boys, only to find that he'll make a public fool of himself--and probably be voted out of office--if he takes any action at all! Ernie W. Brown, here cast as Dobro Dullyn, would later return in the semiregular role of L.B. Davenport. This is the first of five episodes filmed on location in Covington, Georgia. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Scandalizing historians with its blithe disregard for the historical record, this American Civil War docudrama poses the theory that President Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edward Stanton, was behind a plot to kill him at Ford's Theater. His motive was his opposition to Lincoln's adamant refusal to allow the North to punish the South for its actions. The "official" assassination goes awry when another would-be assassin, the second-rate actor John Wilkes Booth, learns of the plot and decides to beat the government to the punch, for reasons of his own. In the movie, it is Stanton's assassin who is mistakenly captured and killed, rather than Booth. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide