#245: Mac and Me

Release Date: August 12th, 1988

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Steve Feke and Stewart Raffill

Directed by: Stewart Raffill

2.5 Stars

For those not familiar with the film Mac and Me, it’s basically a shameless E.T. ripoff adorned with equally shameless product placements, that includes a full-blown Ronald McDonald-led song-and-dance number that takes place inside of a McDonalds.

Just typing that gets me excited.

Unlike the Spielbergian classic, though, which ends with the beloved E.T. returning to his home planet to be with his family, writer/director Stewart Raffill’s film ends with Mac and his alien family becoming American citizens and driving down a California highway in a cotton candy pink convertible Cadillac.

You can see where the movie’s notoriety comes from.

There are other examples of delightful absurdism in the movie - my favorite is when the little alien, Mac, hijacks one of those drivable battery-operated cars for young children and guns it down residential streets while being chased by a pack of neighborhood dogs. It’s pretty damn funny, but when Mac crashes his tiny car and goes flying into a tree and gets stuck, all while Bobby Caldwell’s passionate ballad “Take Me, I’ll Follow You” washes over the visuals, the movie ascends to a higher plane.

Of course there’s also Paul Rudd’s favorite scene, when our protagonist, Eric, loses control of his wheelchair and careens down a steep hill and off of a cliff into a river - at least a 50 foot drop it seems. The moment is so unexpected and blatantly reckless for what’s supposed to be a light-hearted kid’s movie, you can’t help but laugh.

Some people genuinely love Mac and Me for its strange mixture of crass commercialism with bizarre sentimentality. While I’m not ready to say that I love it, I will say that I enjoy it more than I’d like to admit.