From a career point of view, Pixels may be the most important movie of Adam Sandler’s career. The big-budget action comedy sees the comedian help save the world from aliens who attack using classic video arcade games like PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong and Centipede as models for their assaults.
In real life, it’s not Donkey Kong Sandler needs to battle, but audience apathy. A string of box office flops, controversies and terrible reviews — critic Liam Maguren was so horrified by Sandler’s 2011 “comedy” Jack and Jill he wrote, “Burn this. This cannot be seen. By anyone” — have threatened to torpedo his career.
Even his own studio seemed to have turned against him. In last year’s Sony email hack, one employee complained, “we continue to be saddled with the mundane, formulaic Adam Sandler films.”
Movies like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmour and Big Daddy were hits that established his persona as the angry but sweet everyman, a misfit character he trotted out for two decades. Occasionally he’d get serious in pictures like Punch-Drunk Love or Reign Over Me and soak up some good reviews, but by and large, the Sandleronian oeuvre has been ripe with anger management issues and jokes of … how to put this delicately: a gastrointestinal nature.
Not highbrow, but that’s OK — not everything has to be Noel Coward — as long as audiences care.
But at some point, it seemed they stopped caring.
Perhaps it was the inconsistent nature of his movies. Just when you think he’s turned a corner with the excellent Reign Over Me into interesting adult roles he slaps you in the face with the zero-star rated follow-up I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
Or maybe it’s quality control issues. Last year Kevin Nealon told me about being offered a role in the Sandler-produced Grandma’s Boy.
“It was so lowball and crass,” said Nealon. “I thought it might be a little embarrassing to be in that one. So I told Sandler I’d probably pass on it and he called me and said, ‘I really hope you do this because if you don’t do it and it’s a big hit I’ll feel bad, but if you do it and it’s not a big hit, no one is going to see it anyway.’”
That attitude may be realistic but it doesn’t exactly speak to high standards. More than that, however, is the static nature of Sandler’s comedy. His everyman character hasn’t changed much throughout the years. Usually these days he lives in nicer houses or has more money but it’s the same old shtick.
The old saying, “He got bigger, but didn’t grow up,” perfectly applies to Sandler.
He may have matured (chronologically at least) but the urination gags and rageaholic jokes that characterize his comedy haven’t.
We don’t need to feel sorry for Adam Sandler. He has movies in the pipeline and a new deal with Netflix, but Pixels is still an important moment for him. Rolling Stone called his last film, The Cobbler, “beyond awful and beyond repair,” and it went on to become his biggest flop to date.
If Pixels is a hit, and it may be, the trailer generated 34.3 million views worldwide in its first 24 hours online, he will be redeemed — at least until his next movie’s new round of toilet humour and cleavage shots.
Imagine Donkey Kong meets “War of the Worlds” and you’ll get the idea behind the new Adam Sandler comedy. Question is, Will it be the end of the world or the end of Sandler’s career?
The “Billy Madison” star plays Sam, a Nerd Brigade television installer who, as a teen was part of a gang of video game obsessed kids, Will (Kevin James), Ludlow (Josh Gad). While Sam’s dreams of becoming an international gaming star were crushed when he lost the 1982 worldwide arcade game championships to Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant (Peter Dinklage), his best friend Will went on to become the President of the United States. “I’m just a loser who’s good at old videogames,” he says.
Now it looks like all those hours spent saving the world from Galaga and Centipede may finally have some real life application. An alien race has misinterpreted old arcade video game signals for a declaration of war from earth. In retaliation they have created an army of invaders based on1980s style characters like PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong and, of course, Space Invaders. Sam’s plans for world domination in his “sport” may have been pushed aside, but when he gets a call from the President, he and his friends use their skills to save the world from the pixelated predators.
There might be some 1980s “Pac Man Fever” nostalgia for those who came of age during the Reagan years but as good-natured as the movie is, there’s not much here to recommend it as a comedy. There are Donkey Kong games with more laughs than “Pixels.” Sandler’s man-child with a heart of gold character is now as creaky as an arcade game joystick after a Battlezone binge.
There is an interesting story in how pop culture can have a massive impact on people’s lives, but the movie is content to stick to the Sandler template, using the inventive premise as a frame for another of the comedian’s tired romantic hook-ups. Predictable and not nearly heart warming enough to make you care about the characters, “Pixels” feels lazy, as though it was too much work to make the video game warrior aspect anything more than a sentimental gimmick. It’s Game Over for “Pixels.”
Have you ever wondered what happens to old, unfunny Vince Vaughn scripts? They become new unfunny Kevin Hart movies.
“The Wedding Ringer,” the story of a well-to-do but socially awkward guy (“Frozen’s” Josh Gad) who hires a professional best man (Hart) to fool his bride-to-be, is a decade-and-a-half old idea originally intended for “The Wedding Crasher” star.
That script was mercifully abandoned around the time of Y2K only to be resurrected, “Walking Dead” style in 2015 with a new star, but no new laughs.
Gad is Doug Harris. He’s a loner who never had any luck with women until he met Gretchen (“Big Bang Theory’s” Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting), a beautiful woman who loves his bank account as much as she loves him. They plan a big wedding, but as his parents are dead and he has no siblings, his side of the wedding party is nonexistent. With just a week before the big day he hires Jimmy Callahan (Hart) to pretend to be his best man and supply seven groomsmen.
“This is strictly a business relationship,” says Jimmy, “you’re not buying a best friend, you’re buying a best man.”
Of course, this is a bromance, so Doug is actually buying a best friend. As the odd couple careens toward learning the value of real friendship they have many adventures, including lighting Gretchen’s grandmother on fire and indulging in a little bestiality at an out-of-control bachelor party.
“The Wedding Ringer” is an R-rated comedy so lowbrow it makes Adam Sandler’s oeuvre look like Noel Coward. Gad, who became a star on Broadway in “The Book of Mormon” and a hero to kids as Olaf in “Frozen,” and Hart, who’s a gifted stand-up and comic actor, are better than this. In fact, everybody is better than this.
Gad pulls faces, does funny voices and falls through the furniture while Hart does double-speak and slapstick, but “The Wedding Ringer” is a Laugh Free Zone.
I know it’s meant to be a screwball comedy but in order for it to be truly funny as it works its way to the inevitable sentimental climax, it has to have at least one foot planted in reality. A dollop of real human behavior or a tangential link to some earthbound experience would have made these characters human, and relatable, and not simply cardboard cutouts with loud voices and bad judgment.
“The Wedding Ringer” leaves the jokes at the altar.
In a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”
Neither is Zach Braff.
Both must be worth big bucks—Gibson from the movies, Braff from starring on 175 episodes of “Scrubs”—and could likely use some of their own capital to make their own movies but Gibson says he’s out of the game completely while Braff used the popular crowd sourcing site Kickstarter to raise money for his latest.
“Wish I Was Here” is part of the small—but growing—trend of celebrity driven films paid for by contributions from the general public. The almost-mid-life crisis story raised $2 million in just forty eight hours (ultimately procuring $3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget), attracted an all-star cast—Kate Hudson, “Frozen’s” Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parson—and some backlash from critics who felt that crowdsourcing should be left for artists who aren’t also starring in giant Disney movies.
Fact is, “Wish I Was Here’s” backstory is a bit more interesting than the story on the screen.
Braff plays Aidan, an underemployed actor whose life is unraveling. His kids are about to be kicked out of Hebrew school because his father (Patinkin), who has been paying the bills, has been diagnosed with cancer and can no longer afford the monthly payment. His wife Sarah (Hudson) is supportive of his acting dream but nearing the end of her tether. Brother Noah (Gadd) prefers cos play over actual emotions and his two kids (Joey King and Pierce Gagnon) are maturing faster than he is.
“Wish I Was Here” plays like two movies. The first forty-five minutes is a cleverly written comedic look at Aidan as a manboy with far more responsibility than he can handle. It’s ripe with gentle character based laughs that emerge from the situations and don’t feel forced.
It’s only in the second half when Braff (who co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) allows sentiment to get in the way of the movie’s momentum. Despite Patinkin’s line, “Eventually when things get tragic enough they circle back to comedy,” the final forty-five minutes, which deal with the loss of Aidan’s father, takes a darker tone. That’s OK, life sometimes changes on a dime, but the cleverness of the set-up is replaced with mawkishness.
Sometimes it works. Hudson’s heartfelt “tell your sons you love them” speech to her-father-in-law is shot simply with lingering close-ups on the actor’s faces. The scene has an intimate in-the-moment feel and is very moving.
Less so is Gadd’s big moment, (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT), a Comic Con sequence that is a bit too quirky to fit the tone of the film that surrounds it.
By the end credits the movie worked for me more often than not, but I wished that there were fewer clunky moments. For every scene that rings emotionally true—and there are quite a few of them—there is another that feels forced. The beauty of “Wish I Was Here” lies in the former, and certainly not in the passages that feel left over from another, lesser quirky indie comedy.
“I was sitting in a dark theatre watching Aladdin,” he says. “Robin Williams is playing this insane genie character. I’m on the floor, as is the rest of the audience, and I looked over at my mom and said, ‘I want to do that one day,’ meaning, I want to be the comedic relief sidekick in one of these Disney films.”
Cut to a decade later.
“I was about three years out of college and I called my mom up and said, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore.’ She started crying. I said, ‘I’m going to go to law school.’ I thought my mother was going to celebrate that she wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. But she was really disappointed. And I said, ‘Why are you disappointed?’
She said, ‘Because you’ve been dreaming about this for 15 years, but you are only allowing yourself to live out your dream for three years and I think that is unfair to yourself.’ It was very startling to hear her say that.”
“A week later I got my first big break on Broadway doing a show called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I guess it was at that time I realized I was going to be OK.
“Book of Mormon was the point at which I realized I had reached a new level. That I had made it. I wasn’t a working actor anymore, I was an actor who was a part of something very special and that would allow and afford me more opportunities to do what I had dreamed of.”
Those opportunities include starring in TV shows like 1600 Penn and movies like Jobs, and, of course, making his dream from 1993 come true with Frozen.
“To get that phone call, saying, you are that guy,” he says, “I had to hold the phone down because I was sobbing with joy.”
Olaf, his comedic sidekick snowman, already has at least one fan — Gad’s young daughter.
“She was two-and-a-half when I took her to see her very first movie in a movie theatre, which was Monster’s University. The teaser for Frozen, which featured just my laugh [played before the movie].
“Off of that laugh she turned to me and said, ‘More dada. I want more dada.’ I had to turn away from her because I was embarrassed by the tears.”
Don’t have time to see “Frozen,” the new animated Disney film, at the movies? Not to worry. The beautifully animated film takes Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and turns it into a blueprint for a Broadway show or maybe even an all-skating Ice Capades extravaganza that will soon be playing at a theatre or rink near you soon!
Frozen is the story of two royal sisters, the Princesses of Arendelle, Anna, a spirited adventurer (Kristen Bell) and Elsa, a cryokinetic queen (Idina Menzel) with the awesome power to manifest ice and snow. Like Carrie, but colder.
On the night of her coronation an emotional Elsa accidentally unveils her icy power, plunging her kingdom into an endless winter. Shunned by her people and called a “monster” by the haughty Duke of Weselton (Alan Tudyk) Elsa turns a cold shoulder and goes into hiding on the remote North Mountain.
To save the realm from the eternal cold snap Anna sets off with mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer and a sun-worshipping snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad). On the way the Elsa’s ice palace Anna discovers why her sister is cold-hearted, some magical trolls and the true meaning of love.
“Frozen” has all the elements of classic Disney. There are handsome princes, amusing animals, catchy songs and not one, but two princesses. All the fundamentals are in place and perhaps that’s part of the problem with the film. It feels like all these elements banged together to create one whole.
The music, by husband and wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (who also wrote “The Book of Mormon” and “Avenue Q”), are plentiful with Broadway style tunes popping up every couple of minutes. But the songs don’t feel like they fit together as a whole, almost as if they are from different shows. The Celine Dion style show-stopping pop of “Let It Go” is at odds with the goofy fun of “In Summer.”
The songs themselves are top notch, as is the animation and the most of the voice work—luckily Josh Gad spices things up with his unhinged Olaf voice—but the film as a whole doesn’t have the wit or the invention of “Get a Horse,” the short that is scheduled to precede “Frozen” in theatres. In this case the opening act freezes out the lukewarm main attraction.
