A TUMBLE DOWN THE HILL, SANDLER-STYLE

NOTE: To those who are familiar with my way, you'll find I'm not rating this movie. How much I liked it isn't a reflection of how much I'm supposed to like it, where I liked it like one would like a very bad episode of their favourite TV series. Adam Sandler could've played his own Aunt as he remembers her, but he's good at it. The movie, an elaborate Al Pacino joke with the actor himself in the middle. And I liked it for what it was - a Break from my Oscar-viewing frenzy, with a determination to get my opinion out before the ultimate verdict. Please do not let yourself be influenced by what I say. Thanks.

DIRECTED BY DENNIS DUGAN

STARRING: ADAM SANDLER, ADAM SANDLER, KATIE HOLMES, ELODIE TOUGNE, ROHAN CHAND, NICK SWARDSON, TIM MEADOWS, GAD ELMALEH with JOHN McENROE, JOHNNY DEPP, SHAQUILLE O’NEAL, DREW CAREY and AL PACINO

Jill (Adam Sandler) meets Al Pacino at the Lakers’ game. She tells him she’s heard of him, but hasn’t quite watched his movies. She tells him though that she’s heard he’s quite serious. And then she asks him if he’s seen Ryan Seacrest around. Pacino, on his part, can’t even get his name right (as goes the cliché). But he’s excited to know that Jill’s from the Bronx. He buys her a hot-dog on which he writes his number in mustard and ketchup. Jill’s not that excited about calling him for a variety of reasons.

A problem that I’ve had with Pacino is that I’ve seen him in very little comedies. ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ can be counted. ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’, for that reason, was way up there on my performance charts. It’s a role of his I liked more than his ‘Godfather’s and ‘Scarface’s and ‘Devil’s Advocate’s. There’s nothing challenging, nothing really demanding about these roles that could give the actor the comfort of playing someone far from his territory, of escaping into an illusion that he could conveniently create instead of treading the fine line that separates one’s movie-self from his off-screen-self. It’s harder to be interesting when you’re being yourself, but I’ve always believed that that’s the only way to roll. There’s a guilty sort of pleasure in this pastiche called ‘stupid’ than the drawn-out humour in sensibility quite difficult to achieve.

Al Pacino, the actor, and Al Pacino, the fictionalized version, share idiosyncrasies and trivia that ring a bell every once in a while, but what excited me more was the fact that Pacino was actually doing this movie. ‘Jack and Jill’, surprisingly, has a lot of stars in a painted ceiling that never calls itself a sky. There’s Katie Holmes who plays a literal diaper-changer mom. There’s the Sandler usuals in Nick Swardson and David Spade, along with a haul of bigger cameos.

This is something that’s likeable about Sandler (Dennis Dugan, to some extent). They never outdo themselves. They don’t even try. It’s a double-edged weapon. In someone like Matthew Vaughn and the dwindling David Gordon Green, it’s exceptionally annoying. It’s a dog-cat thing. You don’t like your Dog lying around, but for your Cat, it’s sophistication. Same goes. Sandler, in his last five movies (‘Funny People’, through ‘Grown Ups’ and ‘Just Go with it’) has played filthy-rich. I admire that about him. I’ve found it preposterous for an A-List celebrity to play down-to-earth for the sake of a movie. On the one hand, there’s dedication and ability and on the other, there’s a John Lennon fakery, hinging on the illusion that the audience can break from. If they wanted to, that is.

‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ is an illusion that the ‘Ocean’s Trilogy’ never banked on. It’s a Golden stance. Never joke about yourself when in costume. That’s what I didn’t like about ‘Tangled.’ That’s why ‘Enchanted’, for me, failed to enchant in spite of Amy Adams. It doesn’t help your illusion if you’re going to break it. Not everyone can be Steve Martin.

And besides, there’s guilty pleasure in an actor-cameo. It’s like exhibitionism to the voyeur who keeps wanting more. It’s win-win. Like Bruce Willis when he says, “How come the movie made 600 Million Dollars, then?” in ‘Ocean’s Twelve.’ Like Slash when he turns the knob to ‘animate’ on his Amp in the ‘Phineas and Ferb’ movie. Like Johnny Depp in this movie when Jill asks him if he’s from ‘Duran Duran.’ He smiles. I laughed. It was a giant-killing moment for me. High-Five Adam Sandler!

A Funny man doesn’t make a Funny movie just by being in it. Like ‘the Green Hornet,’ for instance. But then, you like the Man, you excuse his movie. You might even have fun watching it. That’s how it’s been for me and every venture of Sandler’s ‘Happy Madison Productions.’ I like Adam Sandler like how a folk-lover would like Kimya Dawson. I think his movies are trash, but I know he doesn’t care. In fact, he even deliberates this thought of mine. It’s like how Ebert calls Nicolas Cage the King of Bad Action movies. Sandler is a comedy-equivalent. He’s painfully adequate and lazy with almost no ambition that you shake your head in disbelief, but when you do it, you do it with a chuckle. This guy’s impossible, but you know you like him. He knows you like him. It’s better to drop all pretence. 

WITH A FEW TO REMEMBER

DIRECTED BY PETER SEGAL

STARRING: DREW BARRYMORE, ADAM SANDLER, BLAKE CLARK, SEAN ASTIN, DAN AYKROYD and ROB SCHNEIDER

The premise is unreal, I’m told. There is no illness as this, something depicted to be a curious spot on the spectrum of anterograde amnesia. Sure enough, the situation is hard to fathom, perhaps laughably so – but it is clearly defined, nevertheless. The woman can’t distinguish today from yesterday; yesterday from the day before. Tomorrow would be no different, once she’s done living it. The father worries like any father should but trusts like a man, and the man in question has an expansive road ahead of him. The brother is for comic relief – a blotchy reminder that we’re still in Hollywood land. The starting point is clear, and the definitive factor for '50 First Dates' to work as a film would be down to a choice between making the two ends meet and letting them run parallel till their inks dry out. And there’d always be the question of ‘how?’

It’s needless to say that anyone can conceive the basic plotline of ’50 First Dates’. What would help distinguish prowess from prude is an acceptable end, not to mention a convincing route.

Now, I’m not going to lie about this – I liked the film more for what it could have been than just for the film it was, but I did like it for that reason as well. For one, I found the Hawaiian setup to be more convenient than convincing, the Walrus-trainer to be apt in patience, what with the remotest scope of an alter-ego neatly siphoned off. Lucy (Drew Barrymore) is no ‘sheep in a big city’ – she’s almost queen of the town, a wink-back at ‘the Truman Show’ and the then-yet-to-come ‘Lars and the Real Girl’, both featuring subtle discretion and cooperation from places frequented, if not the entire township. The ‘What if?’s are talked about, if not entirely ascertained and accounted for – the more sinister ones are better left untouched, for the Father doesn’t look like one to cross and our Hero himself is written out to have a heart and a head than just a working wiener. And as stated, his employment reflects on mental-makeup, the casting is appropriate and all that Adam Sandler has to do is read his lines out in an underplay, on the edge of emotion. Which he does fairly well.

But then, has the world come across an illness with such intricate functioning of the mind except for a tiny blot? Leonard Shelby remembers part of his trauma (or what he’s conceived to be so) in ‘Memento’, which in itself was overly fictionalized. And Lucy’s painting here is found flawless but with a hole. Can one forgive Hollywood for that, especially after this specific isolation of cause? For on the one hand, while we take a heavy blow as far as believability is concerned, we do find our tongues in our cheeks as the writer comes out in a confident tone with a happier happy ending than you’d ever conceive.

So yet again, it’s the package deal – while you get a good chunk of meat thrown in, you still get the irksome little bones, making it harder to chew on. ‘the Last First Kiss’ could have brought the ‘Nicholas Sparks’ out of the film and ‘the Last Kiss’ would have busted a further insubstantial Zach Braff. But titling it '50 First Dates' serves to be an unfair blemish to serious conception. Perhaps we could have gone even lesser on Sandlerification, but then that’s another story: A 51st date, perhaps.

PACKS A HEFTY PUNCH!

DIRECTED BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

STARRING: ADAM SANDLER, EMILY WATSON, LUIS GUZMAN, MARY LYNN RAJSKUB, LISA SPECTOR, JULIE HERMELIN, KAREN HERMELIN, HAZEL MAILLOUX, NICOLE GELBARD, MIA WEINBERG, DAVID STEVENS, JIMMY STEVENS, NATHAN STEVENS, MIKE D. STEVENS, ASHLEY CLARK and PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

The very idea of a romance comes with strangeness. It is the out-of-the-world feeling that your favourite characters inspire that which makes you like them so much. Perhaps Woody Allen deconstructed a little on that when he wrote his everyday ‘Annie Hall’ to counter the ‘Casablanca’s there were, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Punch-Drunk Love’, to me, seemed to be a memorable regression to the fantasy land of romance, a good nostalgic trip down lanes of ‘Before Sunrise’ except it’s Hawaii and not Vienna.

Adam Sandler’s Barry brings about a reminiscence of ‘A Serious Man’, except that it should be the opposite. A grown man who’s yet to come to peace with his surroundings, one who’s dissatisfied but doesn’t know what he wants. I draw resemblances not only with character but its progression as well, not to mention the scenario that grows in synchrony with him. It’s dull when he’s dull, it’s rattled when he is – a clear visual projection. Forty five minutes into the film and you barely know what’s going on, and as you reach the hour, so much had happened. It’s always a delight when you find the film to be organic than just a dead camera depending entirely on its performers. What’s best about ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ is that it doesn’t depend on Barry, it nurtures him and gets nurtured in return.

There is a sequence where the pair of them (Barry and Lena, played by a fairly-fitting Emily Watson) are in bed and exchanging sweet nothings, which progresses ahead into viciously sexual remarks and then we hear Barry remark in his own fashionable way that “this is funny” – yes it is! Adam Sandler actually being funny, can you believe that? That’s kind of why this film took its own sweet time to grow on me. But thankfully, it could catch up, what with the tension it built and the music score that undergoes a parallel and parasitic change. I was struck by the energy, that which is captured in two phases of our hero – one in the turmoil and the other in his retaliation. And that made me wonder whether this ‘love’ is just his excuse or vice-versa. Well, I just had to wait a while to have that answered.

This is an ‘in Repair’ film – something about a man who waits for things to fall in place before he evaluates himself. Barry doesn’t speak before he’s got a woman interested in him, before he gets her hurt that he simply has to strike back; before he gets his pudding secure. There is such freshness in this film, such innocence and yet such power that I can’t help but give it to Paul Thomas Anderson and his craft. I would go ahead and call him wizard, but I don’t know for sure if this is just his experiment or his best yet. A subtle mix of dark comedy and drama, with a toast of sheer physical energy – magic.

Well, at least it makes the blot of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s exciting but unwarranted cameo disappear.

A FILM THAT'S FUNNY AND A FILM THAT'S NOT

DIRECTED BY JUDD APATOW

STARRING: ADAM SANDLER, SETH ROGEN, JONAH HILL, JASON SCHWARTZMANN, LESLIE MANN, AUBREY PLAZA, IRIS APATOW, MAUDE APATOW with AZIZ ANSARI and ERIC BANA

It’s a typical dark-side-of-the-moon venture. Think of a Doctor who prescribes for anyone but himself or his family. Of an ascetic who draws sexual favours. Of a Peace-Corp representative goring it on ‘Battle Royale’. George Simmons (Adam Sandler), big time stand-up act and an A-list movie star – a life-sized replica of Sandler himself, in short – takes the stage on a nostalgia trip in the bar where he used to perform. “You people are so un-amusing that you have to pay another person to amuse you!” he says to an audience so quiet that you’d hear a clock ticking if there was one. The crowd is baffled – they don’t know if they’re supposed to laugh or feel offended. It’s the same with you. This is one among those people who have always derived humour from insults, so is it any different this time? Judd Apatow thus extracts the rudeness out of stand-up comedy and extends it at its rawest best. It’s bitter, but not distasteful. And the scene itself is key to a murky film that attempts to show what’s behind the poker-faces so reinforced to earn some laughs.

George Simmons is dying, or so he thinks. He has the wisdom of an aging man and yet the heart of a boy, for he looks for a shoulder to lean and a bedside conversation so he could talk himself to sleep. Adam Sandler loads him further with quirks of his own, particularly the determination to stay old-fashioned. “No one wants to hear about how you masturbate”, he counsels Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), his trainee-cum-creative-source. No ‘ASAP’. No ‘Just Chilling’. Sandler in the first hour of ‘Funny People’ gives a kingly performance in familiar territory, one that compares with the likes of Jack Nicholson (in ‘About Schmidt’) or Paul Giamatti (in films as ‘Sideways’ and ‘American Splendor’) except he’s not as down-to-earth. His purgatory is not devoid of perks, he still lives lavish, has his pick of women though he feels he’s got his heart out for none but one. He’s a satire on remorse, purely by virtue of unlikelihood. He wants to be sad, but he’s not. The closest he gets to sadness is dry irony, that which peaks in the song he renders at half-time – the point where the film peaks as well, only to fall back down to ‘usual’.

A biography on stand-up comedy as an organic whole diversifies into a less-impacting bonding venture that concludes that there can be none. Apatow’s super-saturated ‘family film’ turns to a moderately-convincing melodrama even though it doesn’t compromise on comic relief. It’s a lot of things, a lot of different kinds of things, different mindsets to laugh about, which is so taxing that I wished for a simpler, straighter sketch!

So ‘Funny People’, as I saw, was a patchwork of two films with George Simmons. In one, it’s a fame-crazy bunch of youngsters, the next generation that’s all about betrayal, lies and last laughs. In the other, he joins the crowd. Woody Allen as Harry Block in ‘Deconstructing Harry’ remarks, when on a road trip, that his immaturity gives him a boyish quality to match his girlfriend’s age. A similar trip in this film shows its two overgrown boys in Simmons and Wright, trying to reconcile with their own selves. And then it’s back to square one with nothing drastic having happened. It’s not a happy ending. It’s not sad either. It’s just real and inspires empathy, in which it leaves us strangely dissatisfied. The latter half of the film serves to make one forget the first, for the film is awfully long. And in its course, we find ourselves sodden with misery to be dried in indifference with a lean period in between that haunts too much.

For the first time, a mainstream Hollywood comedy shows us that the best of laughs is where you don’t try too hard. And it’s a shame that it had to turn defensive against its own discovery, resorting at times to instances for the sake of humour than vice-versa. Nevertheless, for Adam Sandler, it’s a revelation; a role where for once you take him  seriously. For Judd Apatow, this is yet another, but with a little more maturity than usual at the expense of some. A welcome change that gives reason to hope.