The Blues Brothers (1980) Quotes

Elwood: [after crashing the Bluesmobile in a car dealership] The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year!

Mac and Me



Theatrical release poster

Mac and Me is a 1988 American science fiction adventure film co-written (with Steve Feke) and directed by Stewart Raffill. It is about a "Mysterious Alien Creature" (MAC) that escapes from nefarious NASA agents and is befriended by a wheelchair-using boy. Together, they try to find MAC's family, from whom he has been separated. It stars Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, and Tina Caspary, along with Lauren Stanley and Jade Calegory in their only film appearances.

Despite a measure of praise for Calegory's lead performance, the film met with widespread critical censure, and failed at the box office. Reviewers noted imitation of numerous concepts from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and excessive product placement (mainly of McDonald's and Coca-Cola), as its principal flaws. The film was nominated for four Golden Raspberry Awards, winning Worst Director and Worst New Star (for Ronald McDonald). On the other hand, it received four nominations from the Youth in Film Awards (now Young Artist Awards).
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Critical response

Upon release, the film was widely panned as a duplication of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Los Angeles Times critic Michael Wilmington wrote: "It's an amazingly bald-faced copy of E.T., even though this is E.T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long. Almost everything in the earlier movie has a double here." Richard Harrington of The Washington Post amended the famed "E.T., phone home" phrase to "E.T., call lawyer", and said: "Why is it so hard to like this film? Having seen it done so much better by Spielberg doesn't help, of course."

The contrivance of the "Mysterious Alien Creature" being referred to by the acronym "MAC" (the McDonald's Corporation's signature product is the Big Mac), a dance number in a McDonald's featuring Ronald McDonald, and characters' wearing of McDonald's clothing, prompted Deseret News journalist Chris Hicks to declare: "I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that is as crass a 90-minute commercial as Mac and Me." Hicks, along with Caryn James of The New York Times, observed additional promotion of Coca-Cola and Sears—the latter brand carried McKids, the McDonald's line of children's clothing. James also took exception to the "awfully irresponsible" treatment of wheelchair-using main character Eric Cruise, who is placed in potentially dangerous situations before MAC intervenes. Calegory's lead performance, however, was named as a highlight by several critics, and the filmmakers have garnered praise for their use of a disabled protagonist.

Common Sense Media's Brian Costello, in a retrospective review, noted the film's marketing of Skittles candy, and described its product placement as being "as obnoxious and tacky as you can get". He allowed, however, that the film is a "so-bad-it's-good E.T. rip-off". Based on 24 critical reviews, it holds a 0% approval rating at review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 2.7/10. The site's consensus reads: "Mac and Me is duly infamous: not only is it a pale imitation of E.T., it's also a thinly-veiled feature length commercial for McDonald's and Coca-Cola."

*The film is part of a running gag by actor Paul Rudd. When appearing as a guest on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and O'Brien's later show Conan, Rudd would perform a "bait-and-switch" by routinely showing the same clip from it (in which Eric Cruise, watched by MAC, loses control of his wheelchair and falls off a cliff into a lake) instead of showing clips from the actual films he was ostensibly promoting.