Review – The Emperor Jones

Writer Eugene O’Neil and actor Paul Robeson combine to make a chilling commentary on the nature and consequence of blind ambition. Brutus Jones (Robeson) begins the picture as a Pullman porter, and by the end of the movie he’s done time on a chain gang, shoveled coal on a steamship, and become the dictator of a Caribbean island. The end of the movie – when the Emperor attempts to escape a coup by fleeing into the jungle – is not to be missed. Robeson’s emotive reactions to the ghosts and memories that haunt him are one of the great, overlooked moments of American film. Of course it’s been overlooked at least in part because the dialogue contains more uses of the N-word than a Tarantino movie. Also, it’s helpful to do some background reading before viewing this picture, as it was cut in places to avoid offending white audiences. This would make an interesting double feature with Cabin in the Sky, another predominantly African American movie that came out in 1943. Mildly amusing

Review – Cabin in the Sky

One could do an entire doctoral dissertation on the racial dynamics of this movie. This is a fascinating blend of an all-black cast, Hollywood’s 1940’s approach to black characters, theological twists in the plot and Vincente Minelli in the director’s chair (on his own for the first time). The story alone is worth a look. Little Joe (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) has a near-death experience and ends up in the middle of a battle between angels and demons for his soul. Lucky for him, his wife Petunia (Ethyl Waters) is so devout that her prayers buy him a little more time to prove that he’s basically a good person. Enter Lena Horne as one of Lucifer’s best temptresses, out to lead our hero astray. But the main attraction here is probably the music. Waters and Horne are terrific, and they’re accompanied by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong (who also has a supporting role as a devil) and plenty more. And although the dialects and a plot twist or two are very much creatures of their time, at least nobody in this movie picks cotton or works as a maid for white folks. Overall, then, this is a fun movie and historically at least a small step in the right direction. Mildly amusing

Review – Napoleon Dynamite

Ever wonder if those geeky kids in high school who always ate by themselves in the lunchroom actually had lives? Well, apparently they do. This is one of those movies that got so drastically over-sold that I was afraid that I’d end up hating it just because of the hype. But I didn’t hate it. Quite the opposite. The production is crammed with clever little moments, and as long as it keeps up its almost totally unselfconscious portrayal of the lives of high school outsiders it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in awhile. Trouble arises only when it attempts to sprout a plot, particularly in the all-too-MTV-Pictures ending. A couple of scenes also involve strangely callous treatment of animals. Otherwise the show would probably have ranked at least one ratings level higher, as overall it was genuinely entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – Cabin Fever

Once again a decent premise is ruined by squandering it on a juvenile splatter movie. Ever since reading The Hot Zone I’ve wondered if a flesh-eating virus could be spun out into a decent horror flick (and not some big-budget Robin Cook medical thriller, but a real genre piece). But if this effort is any indication then the answer is “no.” Of course by the time you’ve stirred in a handful of annoying 20-somethings, just about any premise is doomed from the start. Indeed, the acting and script here succeed only in causing me to lose interest in whether any of the characters live or die, and that makes it hard to get into the story at all. Thus I hope more skillful filmmakers will be willing to take a stab at making the premise work in the future. Flesh-eating viruses have a lot of potential, but not when they’re coupled with a run-of-the-mill slasher movie production. Oh, and the almost constant animal violence didn’t help. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony

The history of black resistance to the apartheid regime in South Africa is a fascinating subject all by itself, but it becomes even more interesting when the focus shifts to the role music played in the struggle for freedom. The thing I found most interesting was the often-sharp contrast between the sound of the music and the message it conveyed. For example, a song that might sound joyful and carefree when left untranslated takes on a whole new importance when the subtitles reveal that the lyrics are about killing people with machineguns. The production suffers from some technical difficulties – inconsistent sound quality and occasional lapses in the subtitles – that HBO’s money should have been able to correct. But overall this is a touching portrayal of artistic expression as a weapon against injustice. Worth seeing

Review – Grizzly Man

Not for the first time I found myself wondering what happened to Werner Herzog early in life that made him the way he is. Also not for the first time, the director’s obsession with grim, Germanic themes of chaos and death interferes with the movie he might otherwise have made. This time around the production could have been an interesting documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a mildly mentally ill man obsessed with grizzly bears. Treadwell produced hours and hours of video footage of himself in the wilderness observing and interacting with bears, not to mention constantly proclaiming his love for them. The Treadwell footage alone would have made an interesting movie, particularly in light of the fact that eventually one of them killed and ate him. But unfortunately Herzog felt the need to tack a bunch of interviews into the mix. Even that would have been okay, but he takes the further step of doing a lot of really dreadful narration about the wanton cruelty of the universe. We heard this already years ago in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, Werner. Leave it out. Mildly amusing

Review – The Kid from Brooklyn

As is typical with Danny Kaye movies, when the comedian is left alone to do physical comedy or one of his legendary musical numbers, this is an entertaining if not especially edifying production. But again as typical, the rest of the movie stinks. The story is some drivel about a ne’er-do-well milkman who accidentally helps knock out a prizefighter and thus – through the usual series of dumb twists – ends up becoming a boxer himself. Though Kaye fans will want to give it a look, this isn’t his finest moment. Indeed, even some of the funny parts keep going and going long after they’ve become completely predictable. The “Pavlova” number is also a poor relative of the Kaye solos from other movies. Overall I guess I’ve seen worse, but this isn’t one I want to watch over and over again. Mildly amusing

Review – One Crazy Summer

Remember when John Cusack was young enough to play a teenager? Remember when Demi Moore wasn’t a psycho train wreck? Remember when Bobcat Goldthwaite could still get work? Yeah, it’s been awhile. This goofy comedy is very 80’s, particularly in the notion that poor, clever people might ultimately get the better of greedy, rich people. You’ll need to be in the mood for some silly, simple-minded fun if you’re going to give this production a try. But if that mood does strike you, this is a fine way to scratch the itch. Mildly amusing

Review – When a Stranger Calls (2006)

Boy, if there’s one thing I really love, it’s listening to telephones ring. I hope they’ll make some sequels to this excellent picture, such as When a Stranger Hits the Snooze Button on Your Alarm Clock or When a Stranger’s Car Alarm Goes Off Over and Over Right Under Your Bedroom Window. The budget’s way bigger than the original’s, and as a result the production is a lot slicker. Otherwise, however, this is yet another dull slasher movie. See if desperate

Review – Crash (2005)

Question: how many race-related clichés can be crammed into one hour and 53 minutes? Answer: this movie. Ensemble piece. Lots of small stories, all related in some way to racial tension. The final impression is that all of Los Angeles has only a dozen or so people in it, and they keep running into each other. This is the sort of stiff, heavy-handed squandering of a big budget that must give hope to thousands of earnest but talentless film students. And I thought the Ballard Crash was bad. See if desperate

Review - Far from Heaven

And likewise far from good. The goal here seems to be to make a 50’s-style movie about problems that nobody in the 50’s would have made a movie about. A happy Connecticut housewife (Julianne Moore) discovers her successful businessman husband is gay. For solace she turns to her gardener, an educated black man relegated to menial tasks by the color of his skin. By the end of the picture everyone’s lives are ruined. Part of me wants to dish out some points for the guts it took to attempt such a strong re-creation of the era’s film-making style. Unfortunately, the points for intent are swiftly lost by the inept execution. The lighting and camerawork are terrible, and the script’s faithfulness to the decade that spawned it turns it into a stiff, cliché-ridden mess. This is how good ideas become bad movies. See if desperate

Review – Goldfinger

For my gold, this is the best of the Connery Bonds. It’s the one that gave us the Aston Martin, the flying bowler hat of death, the classic theme song, and of course “Do you expect me to talk?” In other words, this is early enough in the set that the stories, characters and so on haven’t gone stale, but it’s not so early that they’re still working out the kinks. Oh, and speaking of kinks: where else can you go for a movie with a character named Pussy Galore? If you hate James Bond movies, you’re really going to hate this one. But if you’re a fan of the series, you can’t go wrong here. Worth seeing

Review – Strange Brew

It’s Great White North: The Motion Picture. In all honesty, Bob and Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) were a lot funnier as a skit on SCTV. That isn’t to say that there aren’t entertaining moments here and there. It’s just that mustering a few funny moments works well for a short sketch but not for a feature-length production. And overall the story is much like the jokes: a lot depends on the audience being somewhere in the late teen or early 20’s bracket, and it probably helps to be drunk. Indeed, almost everything here is the sort of thing that seems hilarious when you’re intoxicated but doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re sober. For example, parts of this are a really strange reworking of Hamlet. They’re just sort of “oh, that’s kind of like Hamlet” if you’re straight, but if you’re wasted then Bob and Doug stumbling around the Elsinore Brewery is a feat of comic genius. So bear that in mind if you decide to take on this experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Sand Serpents

A Special Forces unit in Afghanistan discovers to their great dismay that the hills of Central Asia are infested with the same (or at least similar) worm monsters that inhabited America’s Southwest in Tremors. When the troops are fighting the worms, the production is occasionally entertaining. Unfortunately they also spend a lot of time fighting each other and the Taliban, making this largely a dull action movie with an occasional guest cameo by monsters. This is also the first movie I saw that was produced by the Sci Fi Channel under its new name, Syfy. Mildly amusing

Review – Salvador

Yes boys and girls, once upon a time this tiny Central American country was considered so important that they made a movie about it. Now I guess we’re so used to tyrannical dictatorships propped up by American cash that we don’t think twice about such a thing. But back in the Reagan 80s Watergate was still fresh enough that corruption was scandalous and journalists were still the heroes of movies. Or at least Oliver Stone movies. James Woods stars as a smarmy freelancer who drags buddy James Belushi into the sometimes-beautiful, sometimes-cruel, always unpredictable world of El Salvador in 1980. The story turns out to be roughly half human rights violations and half the protagonist’s personal problems, though of course the two intertwine. The show’s a bit dated, but interesting nonetheless. Mildly amusing

Review – Judge Priest

Thank goodness for the religious whacko channels in the upper reaches of the dish listings. If it wasn’t for such right-wing nutjob outlets, who would ever have the temerity to show racist garbage like this? Honestly, I don’t think I’d ever seen a movie with Stepin Fetchit in it before. Hattie McDaniel also puts in an appearance, suffering typical Hollywood humiliations such as singing a song in which she refers to herself as a “darkie.” And I honestly don’t even know what to say about Will Rogers’ appearance in such a spectacle. There’s a moment or two here and there, such as when Mr. Fetchit is asked to play “Dixie” on the harmonica and he offers to play “Marching Through Georgia” instead (after which Rogers threatens to lynch him). But for the most part this is a mixture of 30s-era romantic candy corn coated with a completely unpalatable slime of love for the glorious Confederacy. Wherever director John Ford is now, I hope he’s been brought to a state of contrition. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Blood from the Mummy's Tomb

Once again Stoker’s “Jewel of the Seven Stars” gets whipped out for another flogging. Ancient curses. Artifacts stolen from a tomb. Beautiful woman possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian princess. Blah blah blah. Some of the “scary” sequences are kinda fun in a creepy, Hammer sort of way. But most of the rest of the production moves between predictable plot points in a not particularly interesting path. Mildly amusing

Review – Mirrors

Kiefer Sutherland stars as a night watchman at a burned-out wreck of a department store. Just when he’s trying to get his life put back together, he runs afoul of the store’s haunted mirrors. It seems that unless he does their bidding, they have the power to strike at him and his family from any reflective surface anywhere. Things don’t get smarter from there. The picture supplies some fun effects work and a small handful of effective booga-booga shots, but otherwise there isn’t much to this. Mildly amusing

Review – Max

How might the world have been a different place if Hitler had made a success of himself as an artist after World War One? Though this production doesn’t exactly answer the question, it does at least pose the possibility. John Cusack stars a well-to-do Jewish art dealer who specializes in the avant garde (Max Ernst and the like). He takes an interest in fellow veteran Hitler, seeing potential in his mediocre work. But he finds nothing show-able in the young corporal’s art until Hitler starts sketching his vision for the Third Reich. The movie is full of little twists like the notion that Nazi Germany could have been an art show rather than a genocidal nightmare. Noah Taylor does a good job as Hitler, playing him as an egotistical yet fragile and not yet entirely evil young man. Cusack is good. The rest of the cast is good. However, the movie thrives mostly on its concept rather than its execution, which in places is lackluster. Mildly amusing

Review – Munich

Spielberg’s re-creation of the terrorist attack during the 1972 Olympics is the best film-making he’s done in years, arguably the most emotionally jarring thing he ever directed. Unfortunately, it only amounts to around ten minutes’ worth of the movie’s nearly three hours of running time (and is partially intercut with one of the most awkward sex scenes in cinema history). The rest of the movie is devoted to the tale of a Mossad agent heading up a hit team charged with the task of assassinating Black September members and associates in retaliation for Munich. Early on it becomes apparent that the violence is merely begetting more violence and that the mission is a good deal more morally ambiguous than it originally seemed. The point is valid enough, but it gets made over and over again so often that one starts to wonder if the storytellers are sure it’s true. Overall the material is strong, but particularly toward the end it becomes so full of intrigue that it ceases to be intriguing. Mildly amusing

Review – Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I was surprised by what a good movie this turned out to be. I know it’s one of the all-time classics of paranoid sci fi, but it’s a solid piece of film-making as well. Without recourse to big-name stars or expensive special effects, director Don Siegel creates a sense of profound wrong-ness using inventive camerawork, dramatic lighting and a reasonably good script. And that’s really all the production needs; the rest of the drama is carried solely by the idea of an alien invasion so subtle it’s almost over before anyone even finds out it’s happening. When you watch, try to imagine the movie without the prologue and the optimistic epilogue, which was Siegel’s original vision for the show. Even 50 years later, the moral is still oddly apt. Worth seeing

Review – A Bridge Too Far

And at least an hour too long to boot. Like The Longest Day, this is one of those ensemble war epics that feature just about every actor in Hollywood in the appropriate age bracket (in fact, at least one or two of these folks are veterans of the aforementioned picture). Unlike D-Day, however, here we have a tale with a much sadder ending. Rather than emphasizing the heroic nature of the Allied assault on Germany’s Fortress Europe, the main idea this time around is that the airborne attack on Holland in 1944 was at best poorly planned and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of a lot of men. So sing “war is hell” rather than “dulce et decorum est.” Even as long as the movie is, we never really seem to get enough of any one particular story to make the characters fully fleshed-out and sympathetic. Indeed, several of the many subplots seem almost beside the point. Still, if you like this approach to storytelling then you should walk away happy. This is a fine, well-made example of the type. Mildly amusing

Review – The House of Sand and Fog

This movie falls flat on so many levels. The first problem was the almost complete lack of sympathetic characters. The main plot is a conflict between an unstable woman (Jennifer Connelly) wrongly evicted from her house and an Iranian expatriate (Ben Kingsley) and his family who buy the house from the county and move in. Both the key characters are too petty and mean to evoke much feeling for either. Further, the story rests on an annoying legal error: anyone who’s ever tried to buy a house knows that the mere presence of a lawsuit filed against the legitimacy of a deed is enough to frighten away almost any potential buyer, so Kingsley’s character would in the real world have almost no ability to turn a profit by reselling the property. But the thing that really killed it for me was that every time things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, they did. By the end (actually considerably in advance of the end) the tragedy was being laid on so thick that it turned into a farce. The result was a lot of pretty cinematography slapped on top of something with all the emotional content of the “Gloom, despair and agony on me” sketch from Hee Haw. See if desperate

Review – Up in Arms

Danny Kaye turns in his first starring performance in this extremely uneven World War Two musical. When the film-makers just sit back and let Kaye do the manic musical comedy routines he perfected in front of Catskill audiences, this is a reasonably entertaining show. Trouble is, there’s a lot of plot and other nonsense woven around the routines, and almost none of it works. Much of it is that awful comedy-of-errors crud in which the characters end up in elaborate, tedious fixes from which even the smallest exercise of honesty or wit would have bailed them out. Then toward the end the flow of the story is interrupted by a dream sequence that turns into a blend of zoot suits, chorus girls and the “forest of suicides” passage from Dante’s Inferno. Oh, and Kaye singing scat with Dinah Shore. But the worst part of the production was the handling of Kaye’s character. One minute he’s a nerdy, nervous hypochondriac. And then the next thing we know he’s performing smooth, elaborate routines in front of audiences. And then he ends up being a war hero. I know the sudden advent of the war created some strange situations in Hollywood, but this has to be one of the strangest. Mildly amusing

Review – Quo Vadis

Did Nero’s actual reign last this long? Here we have the religious right’s wet dream: a story about real, genuine, actual persecution of Christians. It’s a very Hollywood production, with lavish sets and massive crowd scenes and a three-hour running time and the whole nine yards. Obviously one doesn’t turn to such a spectacle for an absolutely historically accurate recounting of the burning of Rome and the subsequent anti-Christian genocide. However, if you like this sort of thing then this is a fine example of it. Peter Ustinov in particular does an impressively hammy job as Nero. It was also strange to see Deborah Kerr in anything besides The King and I. Overall I thought it was over-long, but beyond that I had nothing against it beyond the violent death of a bull toward the end. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghost in the Machine

The title phrase could have been put to better use. Here it’s literally the plot of the movie: the disembodied soul of a serial killer is zapped into the cybernetic netherworld by a malfunctioning MRI machine. Having thus been enabled to travel through computer networks and household electrical wires, he is in an excellent position to resume where he left off, killing people in his victims’ address books. Karen Allen does her best as a single mom trying to save her friends and relatives from the bad guy. But she doesn’t have much to work with. Just about everything in this movie from the music to the visual effects to the technology references is dated to the early 90s, and just about everything has been done to better effect in other productions. Thus a decade later this as outdated as a ten-year-old computer, a historical curiosity but not much else. Mildly amusing

Review – Xtro

Wow. When my dad was kidnapped by aliens, all I got was a lousy T-shirt. In this production dad comes back via a most unusual route (the sort of thing you just have to see for yourself) and re-inserts himself into the lives of his wife and son. Alien possession high jinks ensue. Some of the gore is innovative if not actually clever, but as often as not it’s disgusting in a non-amusing way. And it almost goes without saying that there isn’t enough plot here to carry the production past the point of cheap showcase for the not-very-special effects. See if desperate

Review – Nightmare

I know Hammer was an English company and all, but usually the folks who worked for it didn’t produce horror movies with quite this much what-is-it-Sebastian-I’m-arranging-matches factor. The whole ninety minutes here are devoted to one of those who’s-trying-to-drive-whom-crazy things. So naturally the story doesn’t amount to much. The picture’s biggest plus is its atmosphere. This is one of those murky British black and white jobs with the wonderful use of deep focus and lots of shadows. However, this look and feel has been employed to better effect in other productions. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil's Rain

The B-List Actors’ Rain would have been more apt, as there’s certainly a deluge of them here. Some, like William Shatner, Eddie Albert and Ernest Borgnine, are on the down-swings of their careers. Others, such as Tom Skerritt and John Travolta (so new at this point that he has no lines) would later go on to bigger and better things. Even devil-cult-leader-to-the-stars Anton LaVey has a hand in this as a behind-the-scenes advisor. And his take on the whole Satan-worship thing is fairly evident throughout the production. The story is a half-baked Twilight Zone-esque tale of an evil cult that perpetuates itself by taking over people’s bodies and imprisoning their souls in a big deviled Faberge egg in which it rains all the time. But in the end the joke’s on them (or most of them anyway) in a vast festival of noise and melting. Though this isn’t exactly anyone’s finest hour (well, maybe LaVey’s), it has a few moments. Mildly amusing

Review – For Your Eyes Only

This Bond has kinda grown on me over the years. I remember not having much affection for it the first time around. But now that I watch it again, I like it better. Most of the comedy and gadgetry that damaged the previous couple of Roger Moore outings is gone here, leaving a much more traditional spy movie. I especially liked the Greek settings. The ski stuff was good as well, though my affection for biathlon might have left me a bit biased. There’s a villain reminiscent of Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love. And like an all-too-brief passage from Goldfinger, there’s a beautiful woman set on revenge. In many ways this is like the previous four Bonds were never made. Indeed, even Blofeld makes a brief appearance at the beginning. Of course after this one it was right back to the crap again, but at least they gave it a try. Mildly amusing

Review – One Day in September

Apparently when Palestinian terrorists take Israeli athletes hostage in the middle of the 1972 Munich Olympics, there’s a lot of film shot that can be used to make a documentary later. Fish-in-the-barrel aspects aside, the folks who put this together did get some solid human interest to accompany the archive footage, including an interview with the widow of one of the victims and the sole surviving terrorist. For the most part the power of the tragedy unfolding in front of the cameras offsets a few production weaknesses (such as flimsy computer simulations and the Michael Douglas narration). However, I was bothered by the less than probing analysis of the actions of the German government during and especially after the incident. The documentary touches on the incompetent handling of the attack at the airport and the all-too-rapid release of the three captured terrorists as part of a subsequent incident, but I left with the feeling that more digging could have been done to help answer the audience’s obvious questions without going completely into Jim Garrison territory. However, for coverage of the central events of the crisis this is a fine piece of work. Mildly amusing

Review – The Living Daylights

And so begins Timothy Dalton’s ill-favored tenure as Bond. To be fair, the problems here aren’t entirely his fault. He’s British. He’s handsome. He isn’t too old. The role doesn’t really require much beyond that. The real trouble is the weak script. There’s no villain to speak of, just three different guys working separate but related agendas, none of which seem likely to end life as we know it anytime soon. Ah, for the heady days of SPECTRE’s prime. The disarray in international politics left in the dying days of the Cold War are here evident in the ambiguous alliance between former Soviets and American mercenaries on one side and the English agent, his Russian defector girlfriend and a pack of heroin-smuggling Afghani freedom fighters on the other. Not as bad as License to Kill or the Moore efforts with all the comedic crap, but not Bond at his best either. See if desperate

Review – The Producers

Though it’s been years since the last time I watched this, I can still do big chunks of the dialogue in my head. It’s that good, that memorable a movie. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are one of the greatest pairings in the history of comedy. Without Mostel’s completely over-the-top hamming as a crooked Broadway producer and Wilder’s understated performance as his nerdy accountant partner, this would never have worked as well as it did. The rest of the cast does a solid job as well. But the real blessing here is the sheer absurdity of the story, a tale of two men who decide to make a bundle of money by over-selling interests in a show that’s guaranteed to flop (and thus most likely no audit of the books). Who would ever have guessed that “Springtime for Hitler” would turn out to be a hit? To be sure, this is a product of its age. Several of the jokes hinge on heterosexism or just regular sexism. Still, this remains one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Buy the disc

Review – The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

Oh, so close! Filmmaker Judy Irving makes it almost all the way to the end of this wildlife documentary without showing the violent death of any of her subjects. That shot of Connor dying was an automatic one-star deduction. Otherwise, however, this is a charming little movie about a colony of parrots that live in the wild in a neighborhood in San Francisco. Or to be more precise, this is a movie about Mark Bittner, a man obsessed with the birds. He has names for many of them, feeds them all and cares for the sick and injured. So during the course of the show we learn as much about Bittner as we do about the parrots he loves. Though Irving does a solid job capturing Bittner’s emotions, the best parts of the production are still those devoted to the birds themselves. I haven’t any particular interest in parrots, but I did find myself fascinated by the development of these non-native animals in an urban environment. Mildly amusing

Review – The Guru

This is a romantic comedy that works best when it isn’t trying to be a romantic comedy. The story is fairly simple: a young man (Jimi Mistry) comes to America from India seeking to become a famous actor. Through a series of misadventures he meets a rich woman (Marisa Tomei) who thinks he’s a guru and helps him promote himself as an expert in sexual healing. In the meantime, our hero falls in love with a porn actress (Heather Graham) from whom he gets all his “wisdom.” All that could have been made into a fairly terrible movie. What saves this production are the small moments of genuine humor that as often as not don’t have any direct relationship with the main plot. In particular the movie features several “Bollywood Shuffle” jokes about the ethnic stereotyping of Indian immigrants that’s still all too common in our society. The movie also does well when it employs absurd touches here and there, such as the dream sequence in which the actors are transformed into the cast of one of those bizarre Indian musicals, only they end up performing “You’re the One that I Want” from Grease. If only they’d done more of that sort of thing and less of the standard sitcom fare. Mildly amusing