Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Tuesday October 15, 2019
Where ‘Grease’ Isn't the Word
Another odd “known for” anomaly from IMDb:
I‘ll cut to the chase: It’s Randal Kleiser, who was a talking head in the documentary on John Milius I just watched, so I went to see what else he'd done after “Grease” in 1978. Turns out a lot, just nothing I'd heard of. Or stuff I'd heard of but didn't know he did—like “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” the sequel to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” He seemed to do a few of those types of sequels. Not the original, just the less-successful sequel. Not “Pee Wee's Big Adventure” but “Big Top Pee Wee.” Like that.
Anyway, I know him for directing “Grease,” which was the No. 1 movie of 1978, and, if you adjust for inflation, the 28th-biggest movie domestically of all time—just ahead of Marvel's “The Avengers.” It's also part of kitschy revivals, and there was a live musical on TV a few years back. It's still in the conversation. But for some reason, by IMDb's algorithms, you have three better reasons to know Kleiser.