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Together, Eric and MAC try to find MAC's family, from whom he has been separated. Starring Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, and Tina Caspary alongside Lauren Stanley and Jade Calegory, the film centers on a "Mysterious Alien Creature" (MAC) that escapes from nefarious NASA agents and befriends a wheelchair-using boy named Eric Cruise. That energy defies the movie’s product-placement neatness, and all too gently subverts its happy vision of a world of corporate ambassadors.Mac and Me is a 1988 American comic science fiction film co-written (with Steve Feke) and directed by Stewart Raffill. The uneven screenplay is strongest in its throwaway lines, such as mention of a Bad Bunny performance in a walk-in refrigerator and Rita’s preference for “red wine with ice cubes.” When it insists on telling us what’s important (being yourself!), as it does in a final summing-up, whatever energy has built up deflates. Rom-com beats notwithstanding, female friendship is at the heart of the film, with only two significant male characters onscreen and Carla’s fiancé a nonentity. Paige’s natural warmth as Carla, the only person Mack/Rita confides in about her unusual situation, grounds the often flimsy material with a firm sense of a lifelong bond. A sequence set at a beachside influencer event teeters between overkill and just-right, with Nicole Byer injecting the perfect touch of oomph. Far better on that front is a delightful sequence in which Rita blisses out to shrooms (a voice performance by Keaton’s Father of the Bride co-star Martin Short is the scene’s bonus or a step too far, depending on your Martin Short tolerance level). The latter bit aims to showcase Keaton’s undeniable physical comedy skills but aches for modulation and rhythm.
#Mack and me cast movie
The movie could have used more of their exchanges with Rita, and less of such strained slapstick as Rita’s Pilates misadventure.
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Mack & Rita offers the exquisitely mouthy and irrepressible Loretta Devine as Carla’s mother, and a comic Greek chorus in her “wine club” - i.e., her perpetually drinking friends - played by Lois Smith, Amy Hill and Wendie Malick. Within its PG-13 borders and a general American squeamishness about aging (aka the process every human being is undergoing from the moment they’re born), the movie questions generational clichés, with the older actors for the most part rising above them. In the movie’s most nuanced angle, she lets the sparks fly with smitten neighbor and occasional dog-sitter Jack ( Schitt’s Creek regular Dustin Milligan, evincing full-on charm and unforced chemistry with Keaton). Where Mack was tentative and shy, Rita, presto-change-o, is assertive and soaks up attention, embracing her role as an in-demand “glammy grammie” influencer. Keaton puts her signature spin on in-the-moment dissembling, and on Rita’s clothing ensembles (pieces from her personal wardrobe made it into the movie). Initially freaked out over becoming her inner “old gal,” Mack quickly gets into the swing of things, calling herself Mack’s aunt Rita, with a story about a house swap that involves Scottsdale, Arizona, perhaps a nod to Keaton’s Book Club character. And, à la Big, when she later returns to the site of her hocus-pocus transformation, his tent is nowhere to be found.
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Mack exits his tanning-bed “regression pod” in the throes of a future-life progression, her hair gray and her body older. He’s played by Red Rocket’s Simon Rex in flowy robes and with the perfect blend of distracted cluelessness and hucksterism. And so while Carla and two of her bridesmaids (Addie Weyrich and Aimee Carrero) head off to a pop-up concert, Mack follows her yearning to just sit or, better yet, lie down, and enters the tent of Luka, who promises the experience of a past-life regression. Its ideas about ageism can be cutesy or vague or sharp, but the screenplay effortlessly nabs the idea of an old soul in a young body, and the strain of pretending to your peers that you want nothing more than to see and be seen on the party circuit. (The pre-nuptial celebrations are curiously underpopulated, probably a reflection of COVID restrictions on the production.) Mack’s best friend, Carla ( Taylour Paige, of Zola, making an impression within the constraints of the role), is about to be married, and her bachelorette weekend offers Aselton and DP Sean McElwee a chance to revel in Palm Springs’ midcentury glamour for a minute before the movie returns to a basic celebration of L.A.’s eastern stretches and downtown, old-school as well as gentrified.