Neil Machlis Movies
Michael Keaton stars as a wheeler-dealer who hopes to save a failing Pennsylvania automobile-assembly factory from having to close its doors. Keaton persuades a Japanese auto firm to reopen the factory, retrain its staff, and streamline the operation. It isn't long before the American-born workers grow to resent the disciplinary demands of their new Japanese bosses, setting the stage for a comic clash of cultures. The day is saved when it turns out that the poker-faced owner of the auto company possesses a really strange sense of humor. Gung Ho was later spun off into a short-lived TV sitcom, starring Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michael Keaton, Gedde Watanabe, (more)
This belated sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is directed by Peter Hyams. Roy Scheider plays the astronaut/skipper of a U.S.-Soviet space mission, sent to find out what happened to the missing Discovery flight that carried Keir Dullea into the beyond in the original 2001. Scheider's polyglot crew includes Americans John Lithgow and Bob Balaban (the latter a computer whiz, responsible for the notorious HAL 9000) and Russians Helen Mirren, Elya Baskin and Natasha Schneider. The reason for this international mixture is that the world is on the brink of nuclear war, and it is hoped that the space mission will assure east-west solidarity (in this respect, 2010 dates far more than 2001, given the collapse of the Iron Curtain). When the astronauts catch up with Dullea, still in orbit around Jupiter, producer/director/writer Hyams attempts to demystify the enigmatic climax of 2001. Arthur C. Clarke, author of the story upon which 2001 was based, appears in 2010 as a man on a park bench. Incidentally, the voice-over credited to Olga Mallsnerd is actually Candice Bergen. (The name Mallsnerd is a play on the name of one of the characters created by her ventriloquist father Edgar.) ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, (more)
This spoof of the 1930s and '40s crime stories ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime as it tells the story of Johnny Dangerously (Byron Thames as the young Johnny, Michael Keaton as the older), a devoted son to his ailing mother (Maureen Stapleton), so ill that she needs money for several operations. Johnny has nowhere to turn, and because gangsters tend to flourish in his neighborhood he goes to work for Dundee, a benevolent godfather-gangster type, in order to cover his mother's medical bills. Johnny hides his association with Dundee from his younger brother Tommy (Griffin Dunne) and goes so far as to pay for Tommy's law school fees -- supporting him until Tommy joins the staff of the local (and corrupt) district attorney's office for Burr (Danny DeVito). When Johnny starts working for Dundee, he clashes with the evil Vermin (Joe Piscopo) right from the beginning, but things only get worse. After Dundee decides to retire, Johnny ascends to the helm, and it does not look like Vermin is going to take that sitting down. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michael Keaton, Joe Piscopo, (more)
Based on a Stephen King novel, Cujo is not as menacing or as frightening as other film adaptations of King's popular stories and especially cannot compare to the 1976 Carrie. Cujo is a happy St. Bernard until he is bitten on the nose by a rabid bat and slowly begins manifesting the symptoms of his fatal illness. His condition deteriorates as he attacks people again and again, until finally, mom Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro) are trapped inside the family car with Cujo lurking nearby, set to kill them any way he can. A showdown is inevitable but is as predictable as the rest of the film. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, (more)
Given the runaway success of Grease, which became the biggest-grossing movie musical of all time, it was all but inevitable that there would be a sequel, and four years later this follow-up brought a new group of kids back to Rydell High. It's 1961, and Stephanie Zinone (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the tough leader of the Pink Ladies, while Michael Carrington (Maxwell Caulfield) is a clean-cut British exchange student. Michael likes Stephanie, but the Pink Ladies' by-laws prevent her from dating guys who aren't members of the T-Birds, their affiliated male gang. However, when a Zorro-like masked avenger on a motorcycle rescues Stephanie from a gang of ill-mannered toughs, she's eager to get to know the hero with the cool wheels. Any guesses as to who he might be? Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, and Dody Goodman return from the first film as members of the Rydell High faculty, while actual '50s teen icons Tab Hunter and Connie Stevens are on board as new members of the staff; Didi Conn as Frenchy is the only one of the students to appear in both movies. Patricia Birch, who served as choreographer on Grease, made her debut as a director on Grease 2; while she's remained active as a choreographer, she hasn't directed again since. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Maxwell Caulfield, Michelle Pfeiffer, (more)
When her adoptive mother Joan Crawford died in 1977, erstwhile actress/author Christina Crawford and her brother Christopher were left out of Joan Crawford's will, "for reasons which are well known to them." Industryites have suggested that it may have been this posthumous act of rejection rather than an alleged lifetime of parental abuse that inspired Christina Crawford to pen her scathing autobiography Mommie Dearest. The 1981 film version of this tome was evidently meant to be taken seriously, but the operatic direction by Frank Perry and the over-the-top portrayal of Joan Crawford by Faye Dunaway (whose makeup is remarkable) has always seemed to inspire loud laughter whenever and where-ever the film is shown. According to the film (and the book that preceded it), Joan Crawford was a licentious, child-beating behemoth, who stalked and postured through life as though it was one of her own pictures-more Strait-jacket than Mildred Pierce. This is the film with the notorious "wire coat hanger" scene, just in case you need a reminder. Surprisingly, one emerges from Mommie Dearest with more sympathy for the monstrous but intensely vulnerable Crawford than for her whining daughter (played as an adult by Diana Scarwid, and as a child by Mara Hobel). Our favorite scene: Joan Crawford dazedly replacing her ailing daughter in the cast of a daytime TV soap opera. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Faye Dunaway, Diana Scarwid, (more)
Glitz producer Allan Carr tries to cash in on the late-'70s disco boom with Can't Stop the Music -- a film of such Brobdingnagian banality that it almost in itself stopped the disco movement cold. Comedienne Nancy Walker directed this musical chronicle, purporting to relate the legend of the formation of the disco group The Village People. Valerie Perrine is Samantha Simpson, a helpful ex-model who attempts to get her roommate, Jack Morrell's (Steve Guttenberg), songwriting career off the ground by assembling a motley group of her Greenwich Village friends (The Village People) together to cut a demo tape of Jack's ditties. All Samantha has to do is charm the square lawyer Ron White (Bruce Jenner) in order to get him to listen to The Village People's scintillating disco strains. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Valerie Perrine, Ray Simpson, (more)
