It seems that every comedian really wants to be taken seriously. Everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Jim Carrey has tried to put the clown face in storage from time to time in favor of something more dramatic. I’m sure even The Three Stooges would have liked to have had a go at The Three Musketeers instead of The Three Sew and Sews if only typecasting hadn’t had it’s cruel way with them.
In Reign Over Me Adam Sandler leaves goofballs Happy Gilmour and Billy Madison behind, instead choosing to take on a serious role as a heartbroken man having trouble dealing with tragedy.
As Charlie Fineman Sandler (who is looking more like Bob Dylan every day) convincingly plays a man who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome after he lost his wife and three daughters in 9/11. He spends his days and nights in a fog, trying desperately to bury the memories of his lost family. A chance encounter with his old college roommate (Don Cheadle) begins his painful trip back to the real world.
The Wedding Singer this isn’t. This is Sandler’s first real adult role. As Fineman he displays the kind of mood swings and anger that is part of his comedic book of tricks, but here there is more depth than he’s ever offered up before. The way he slowly re-enters the normal world is subtle and effective.
Also effective is the relationship between Cheadle and Sandler. Cheadle’s character is also at a cross roads, although for exactly the opposite reasons that Sandler has withdrawn from life. The two actors play off one another with an unforced intimacy that really sells the idea that they have a history and therefore have a reason to be invested in one another.
Reign Over Me loses some of its momentum in its final moments. Director and writer Mike Binder seems intent in wrapping up all loose ends, making the third act seem a bit too pat. It’s a shame because up until the last ten minutes Reign Over Me doesn’t take the easy route. Tacking on a happy (or at least an implied happy) ending mars what up until then is one of the best films of the year.
At the screening of the new R-rated—for raunchy and redundant, no doubt–movie “That’s My Boy” I felt like I witnessed something special. But not special in a good way. I can’t help but think that what we saw wasn’t so much a movie, but more some kind of performance art where people who should know better do awful things and charge you ten buck to watch. I hope this is some kind of postmodern art project, ‘cuz a comedy it ain’t.
Sandler plays Donny Berger, a party animal who, at age thirteen, engaged in extracurricular activities with his homeroom teacher (Eva Amurri). When their lovemaking interrupted the graduation ceremony, she was sent to jail, and he was left to raise their baby Han Solo Berger (Andy Samberg), with disastrous results. Cut to present day. Father and son are estranged, and Donnie glory days are behind him. He needs $43,000 to pay off back taxes or he’s going to jail. He turns to the one person he knows might have the money, his son, now a wealthy businessman on the eve of getting married.
With the release of “That’s My Boy” Adam Sandler turns the corner from tiresome to embarrassing. It’s hard to image a lazier rehashing of all the man-children he has played in the past. There’s shades of Mr. Deeds, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmour here, all topped off with a grating New England character voice that sounds like a cross between a can opener opening a can of Boston Baked Beans and screeching tires. By the time Sandler trades lines with a dirty old oven mitt, you realize his performance makes The Three Stooges look refined.
Not that he’s got much to work with. The “script” is simply a collection of spit takes, curse words and an old dignified looking woman forced to do and say outrageous things. Instead of writing jokes screenwriter David Caspe has simply found the most inappropriate way to forward a scene and run with it.
There are a couple of giggles, although the ratio of laughs to awkward audience silence is low in this 114-minute movie. There’s a strip joint that serves breakfast called Bacon & Legs, a god Charlie Sheen line and (SPOILER ALERT) a good gag involving a couple of Sarandons, but many of the jokes are ruined by clumsy writing.
The tattoo gag in the trailer—Han shows off a now stretched New Kids on the Block back tat he got when he was in grade three—is a funny visual joke that is muted by Donnie’s yelping, “It’s all distorted! The heads are huge!” We get it. The joke is obvious and funny and doesn’t need to be explained, especially in that annoying voice.
Vanilla Ice, cast as Han’s uncle, is a novelty. He’s a porn movie level actor, which works well here because the movie has a porn movie twist. The less said about it the better. There will be no spoilers here.
If “Billy Madison” wasn’t immature enough for you, or you though “Happy Madison” should have been more infantile then “That’s My Boy” may be for you. All others beware.
Six years after 9/11 Hollywood has struggled to make films that deal with the fallout from that tragic day and still connect with audiences. Earnest films like Grace is Gone and Stop Loss have played to empty seats, while action oriented movies like United 93 and The Kingdom garnered good critic response but apathy from ticket buyers.
Considering the graveness of the subject matter it seems odd to report that in recent months a new genre of film has sprung up—the Post 9/11 Comedy. At the box office comedies have had a better run at tackling subjects like terrorism, racial profiling and how the war on terror has spiraled out of control.
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and War Inc were both darkly funny films that took on very serious subjects and skewered them with humor while attracting audiences. Now it’s Adam Sandler’s turn. Teaming up with comedy guru Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) Sandler has crafted a film about Israeli / Palestinian relations that is the silliest ode to tolerance to ever hit the big screen.
Sandler is Zohan, a hard partying Mossad counter terrorist agent—he’s like Rembrandt with a grenade his admirers say—who fakes his own death so he can leave the violence of his home country, move to America and follow his dream to become a hairstylist at the flagship Paul Mitchell Salon in Manhattan. Things don’t go quite as planned and when he instead ends up working with, and falling for Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui) a beautiful Palestinian woman his outlook on life is changed forever. Now if only Dalia’s race baiting landlord and some enemies from back home would leave them alone they could live happily ever after.
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is above all else an extremely harebrained comedy. For every reasonably clever line about Israeli / Palestinian relations like, “They’ve been fighting for two thousand years, it can’t last much longer,” there are five scenes that make earlier Sandler movies like Happy Gilmour look like Molière.
Although the jokes are written on the approximate level of a Carry On movie—apparently crotch humor is the new toilet joke—Sandler’s goofy charm carries the film. It takes considerable chutzpah to carry off a scene where a simple hair salon shampoo morphs into an unsexy take-off from 9 ½ Weeks, but Sandler is so guileless and has so much audience goodwill that the scene plays to big laughs.
One of the unexpected pleasures of You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is playing Spot the Cameo. The movie is packed with unexpected casting from the legendary 82-year-old comedian Shelley Berman (a candidate for the “I thought he was dead” file if there ever was one) to Star Trek’s George Takei having fun with his newly announced lifestyle choice to the prim and proper Mrs. Garrett from The Fact of Life, Charlotte Rae, as an elderly sex starved salon patron. Even musicians Dave Matthews and Mariah Carey pop up as a hillbilly racist-for-hire and pop diva respectively.
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan lags for a time in its middle section—the romance angle is as flavorless as Zohan’s ever present hummus without the garlic—but makes up for the dull spots with a mix of outrageous action sequences, bad one liners (“Are you bionic?” asks a bystander after witnessing one of Zohan’s incredible feats of strength. “No I only like the girls!” he says.) and a message of tolerance that would seem heavy-handed if it wasn’t so heartfelt.
It’s every coach potatoes dream—a universal remote that not only works the television and x-box but also can control real life. Don’t want to have an argument with your spouse? Just fast-forward through it. Are your neighbors being too noisy? That’s what the mute button is for.
In the new movie Click Adam Sandler plays an overworked architect with a demanding boss whose job leaves him no time for his wife and two cute kids. When he buys a magical remote from an eccentric clerk in the Beyond section of Bed, Bath and Beyond he soon learns that he essentially can turn his life into the equivalent of a director’s cut DVD. He can pause the action, fast forward through the bad bits and there’s even a commentary track by . It’s a universal remote that controls his universe. When the remote starts making choices for him he loses not only control, but his whole life. Instead of fast forwarding through a few minutes here and there it zips through years. He becomes successful, but misses out on the important parts of life. When he finally realizes what is happening it’s too late. He has fast-forwarded his entire life away.
Like all Adam Sandler movies Click is chock full of toilet humor and his trademark angry episodes, but also has a sweet side. It’s a lesson in the need to really appreciate life’s little moments and close friends and family more.
Click is It’s A Wonderful Life with better technology.
Once again Sandler rides a story arc familiar to fans of his movies—a short-tempered guy learns about love and life after overcoming some hardship. Somehow Sandler has managed to merge the on-screen personas of Jimmy Stewart and Sam Kinison blending the best of both into one character that he recycles from movie to movie. It’s effective in Click, but it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before from him.
More fun is the supporting work by Christopher Walken as the slightly sinister store clerk / master of time. His frizzed out mad scientist hair and quirky speech steal every scene he is in and provide many of the film’s laughs.
Click is that rare movie with both a moral and flatulence jokes.
Ben Affleck did it. So did Eddie Murphy and Charlie Chaplin. Heck, Alec Guinness did it eight times, including once as a woman.
This weekend in Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler adds his name to the list of actors who have played multiple roles in the same film.
“In Jack and Jill I play me,” says Sandler, “and I play my twin sister. The man version of me is doing OK; he has a family out in L.A. The twin-sister version of me lives out in the Bronx and comes out to L.A. for Thanksgiving and then refuses to leave.”
The idea of playing more than one role in a movie dates back to the Mary Pickford 1918 weepy Stella Maris.
In it she plays the wealthy title character and the uneducated orphan Unity Blake. The studio balked at her insistence on playing both roles, but Pickford insisted.
As Stella she was photographed like a glamorous movie star, but as Unity she wore unflattering makeup and was shot from her right, less photogenic, side. Scenes where the two characters shared the screen were achieved through double exposure.
Since then everyone from Mel Brooks (he was President Skroob and Yogurt in Spaceballs), to David Carradine (remember him in Circle of Iron as The Blind Man, Monkeyman, Death, and Changsha?) to Peter Sellers (who played as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) have taken on multi-roles.
Perhaps because of their sketch comedy backgrounds, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers often take on various roles in their films, but Alec Guinness, the actor best known in North America as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, must hold the record for character changes in one feature-length movie. In Kind Hearts and Coronets he plays no less than eight characters. In an acting tour de force he’s easily recognizable in each part, but doesn’t repeat himself from character to character. Instead he carefully constructs each, from the happy-go-lucky young photographer to the window-smashing suffragette Lady Agatha.
Rivaling Guinness’s achievement is Buster Keaton who played every part — including a stagehand, a dance troupe, a full band and every member in the audience — in the 1921 short film The Play House.
To top it off he also took credit for every crew job including editor, director, writer and cameraman.
Billy Madison was the first proper Adam Sandler movie. He made a handful of films before that, mostly supporting roles in forgettable comedies, but Billy Madison was the turning point. It made him a bankable movie star and established the formula for so many of his future films. If you’ve seen Billy Madison you’ve essentially seen Happy Gilmour, The Wedding Singer, Mr.Deeds and his new one, Bedtime Stories.
In many ways Sandler is the most ecological of movie stars for the way he recycles the same movie, only with different names, so many times. You know the drill: an angry downtrodden loser reaches deep down to prove himself, in the process winning the girl while also getting comeuppance against a smarmy rich guy who gets in his way. It’s been a winning formula… until now.
This time out Sandler is Skeeter Bronson, a handyman in a hotel formerly owned by his father. His dad (Jonathan Pryce) sold their failing family business to Barry Nottingham (Richard Griffiths) on the condition that one day his son would be promoted to general manager. Twenty five years later he’s still working as a handyman with little prospect of ever moving to the front office. When his sister (Courteney Cox), a school principal loses her job and is forced to go out of state to find another, she asks Skeeter to baby-sit her two kids. When the bedtime stories he tells the kids magically start top come true he tries to manipulate the stories for his own benefit.
Bedtime Stories is a big budget Disney fantasy with an all-starish cast of good actors that falls completely flat. It’s not simply that we’ve seen it all before—and we have—it’s that it isn’t funny. Doubt, the story of an accused pedophile priest that also opened on Christmas Day, has more laughs per minute than this poor excuse for a family comedy.
Where to start?
How about with Guy Pierce in the most obvious “I only did it for the money” performance of the year. Or seeing Jonathan Pryce wasted in a cameo only made me long for the glory days when he starred in interesting movies like Brazil. Or maybe with Richard Griffiths who seems to be channeling Benny Hill.
As for Sandler, well, I was put in the mind of Jerry Lewis, but the old Jerry Lewis who pathetically mugs for the camera and not the funny Jerry of Martin and Lewis. Sandler has proven that he is capable of much more than this. After seeing his work in Reign Over Me it’s disappointing to watch him revert back to his old habits—pulling faces and speaking in goofy voices—for an hour and a half.
Bedtime Stories goes where many Adam Sandler have gone before. Director Adam Shankman—the former choreographer and Hairspray helmer—thought he was making a fantasy for the whole family, but instead, has made an overly familiar film that succeeds only in being fantastically unfunny.
