At least Keri Russell and Sandler are good together. Pirates of the Caribbean could never. Martin Scorsese called this "the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies," which cannot be improved upon.
It hasn't aged well Hitler jokes, a terrible talking dog, that particularly awful Sandler haircut but personal bias requires me to show it some affection. Harvey Keitel as the Devil? The concept of Brendan Fraser , Adam Sandler, and Steve Buscemi in a rock band together exudes a powerful chaotic energy. Contains a through-line about how American pharmaceutical companies conspire to keep effective drugs off the market if they threaten profits, which is a wild plot point for a Sandler movie, but one I totally respect.
Adam Sandler and Chris Rock team up for this low-key culture-clash comedy, playing the fathers of a young couple about to get married. I very much enjoyed seeing Sandler and Rachel Dratch yell at each other for two hours. James L. Brooks cast Sandler in this romantic drama about literal and metaphorical failure to communicate after watching him in Punch-Drunk Love. Bruce absolutely shines in a scene where she has to act as a translator for her mother and John during an argument.
I particularly enjoy Steve Buscemi as perpetually harried werewolf Wayne. A stellar cast, quick-fire pace and sense of self-awareness about Top Five make it a genuinely great film, meditative on the nature of fame, love, and selling out without being self-indulgent.
The popular critique of Click upon release was that it was emotionally manipulative. They were just mad Adam Sandler made them cry. Murder on the Orient Express wants what Murder Mystery has.
Glamorous location? Beautiful, terrible characters being dicks to each other? Jennifer Aniston in a red dress and Adam Sandler with a tiny mustache, riffing on all the classic tropes of Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock? Kenneth Branagh could never. All the small details you only really notice when you care about someone. It also features Nicole Kidman doing a hula dance, which is a delightful sight. Plenty of Sandler skeptics find it difficult to believe any of his films contain an ounce of social commentary, but Mr.
Cupcake Wars. The Haney Project: Ray Romano. Sesame Street. American Idol. How to Build the Perfect Grown Up. Spike Guys Choice I Am Chris Farley. The Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards. Comedy Club Greats. Funny People: Max Final Cut. Actor 71 Credits. Kevin Can Wait. The Goldbergs. The King of Queens. The Larry Sanders Show.
The Cosby Show. You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Bedtime Stories. That's My Boy. Dirty Work. Just Go With It. Sesame Street: Singing With the Stars. Hotel Transylvania 2. Grown Ups. Reign Over Me. Jack and Jill. Here Comes the Boom. Grown Ups 2. Paul Blart: Mall Cop. The Cobbler. Top Five. The Ridiculous 6. The Do-Over. The Meyerowitz Stories New and Selected.
The Week Of. Uncut Gems. Murder Mystery. No Te Metas Con Zohan. Hubie Halloween. Happy Gilmore. The Wedding Singer. He sees an inflatable vampire out his windows, he screams and breaks the window with his trusty thermos.
This is where it gets interesting, maybe. Now Sandler just wants people to be kind. While Sandler, as a maker of movies for teens, always has problems with bullies, here bullying is portrayed as a townwide, societal problem. Not to spoil anything, but the message is that the only cure for cruelty is not revenge, but decency.
Come on! Sandler has never felt less antagonistic. Hubie Halloween , which honestly is tonally closer to a Christmas movie than a horror flick, may or may not have been made for this moment, but it proved to be perfect for it. A rare creative power struggle for Sandler leads to the surprisingly delightful, tremendously successful trilogy. In his dramatic work, Sandler consistently pushes himself to work with visionaries; in his comedies, he instead works with friends who function more as collaborators.
The exception is the Hotel Transylvania series, which quietly has grown into a box-office behemoth at a time when live-action Sandler has faltered. At the time, Sandler was still the comedy king of Sony, the studio behind the project, so it threw him in.
Simply, Tartakovsky wanted to make a movie showcasing his impressionistic visual style and Sandler wanted to make one with a bunch of dumb bits aimed at an audience too young to care about what a critic would think is good. In spite of this clash, or maybe because of it, all of these movies are, frankly, great! Whatever power struggle may have happened behind the scenes, the product was not infected with any bad vibes.
The Ur- Hotel Translyvania , despite being co-written by Robert Smigel though clearly all these movies have been written and rewritten by a number of people , feels most like a Tartakovsky movie.
The pacing is the more deliberate and dynamic than the other two, and there are just way fewer bits. The plot feels Sandlerian, with the story playing out somewhat like The Waterboy : A parent selfishly cloisters a child so as to not lose the child. However, much of the comedy comes from the animation rather than scripted jokes and vocal performances.
The third one, which was the highest grossing of the series, makes the least sense — why would they need to go on a vacation from being a hotel? Yet, it somehow works. It just has everything. Still, this is a list about the Adam Sandler—ness of Adam Sandler movies, which is why Hotel Transylvania 2 comes out on top.
Sandler is credited for co-writing this installment with Smigel, and it plays like the old SNL friends deciding to turn the film into an animated, monster-themed sketch show. A perfect setup for one of the funniest movies in the canon. In it, he plays a seemingly mild-mannered, repressed man forced to go through a one-on-one anger-management program, with Jack Nicholson as the therapist who finds every way possible to push his buttons and let his anger out.
It also features this scene, one of the most fun things Sandler has ever filmed:. Will Adam Sandler win an Oscar one day?
Watching The Meyerowitz Stories , it sure seems possible. In my estimation, one of the biggest things standing in his way is his disinterest in doing press and dressing up, yet you saw him wearing a suit more on this press tour and doing some things like the Variety Actors on Actors interview. Others might be more consistent actors, but Sandler has another level, where in the right role he can find something deeper. He just needs his Lost in Translation , something that can play to all his comedic strengths while also giving him room to look sad and alone.
The result will be a lot like his The Meyerowitz Stories role. The seeds of this project were planted by Sandler, who wrote Noah Baumbach a letter asking the writer-director to consider him for something. For Baumbach, it was a no-brainer. It was clear to me how good he is. Also, as a student of Sandler, Baumbach knew nothing brings up his pathos like making him a parent. At this point in his career, this is arguably his best character performance, with Sandler finally figuring out in large part thanks to a good script how to play a regular New York guy.
Adam Sandler is a good actor. Just friends hanging out; exactly as imagined. Grown Ups failed by trying to orchestrate a plot to justify why a bunch of people would hang out, whereas Grown Ups 2 is just a celebration of hanging out. At times it feels like a mumblecore sketch show — just a bunch of two-person scenes of funny people riffing and vaguely playing characters. This will give you an example:.
Adam Sandler movies are often escapist. He creates movies where you wish you were Sandler getting to make the movie in the first place. He gets to shoot in exotic locations, with his best friends in the world, and wear the most comfortable clothes possible to work. In that regard, the film is a tremendous success. Animation and singing free Sandler to be grosser and more self-loathing than ever before. The exception, of course, is his take on a holiday movie, Eight Crazy Nights , which features seven original songs co-written by Sandler.
Animation obviously allowed him to push some disgusting-ness boundaries in the film, but I am more interested in how he used it to further flesh out his man-child persona. Throw in musical numbers, which are literally shouting your feelings, and you get Sandler being more upfront about the self-loathing that lies underneath all his characters.
The open-hearted simplicity of animation and musicals — not to mention animated musicals that are also holiday movies — is a nice fit for Sandler schmaltz. Rewatching the films in order, it was the first to make me cry. Sandler finds some of his best comedy in specificity.
Subsequently, Sandler has a freaking blast, being so secure in his masculinity, dancing into and out of every scene, shaking his little butt cheeks, and telling some of the best jokes of his film career.
In which he uses all the tools in his acting tool belt to condemn the idea of Adam Sandler. Well, maybe not evil — but at least cynical where he would normally be idealistic. And, fuck, Sandler is so good at all of it. Besides being his best character performance, Sandler has never seemed more natural in a role.
In his Variety Actor on Actors conversation with Brad Pitt this award season , Sandler talked about how this is the most comfortable he felt acting in a film like this. I worked hard at this character, knowing the way he thinks and where he goes. I knew the guy. Through the prism of the Safdie brothers, the desire to be better, which I offer is the fundamental Sandlerian motivation, becomes the desire to want better.
Which brings us again to what Sandler represents to American Jewry, as the Safdies clearly knew the Sandman could serve as a sort of idol of Jewish Assimilation whom they could ceremonially question and destroy the myth of. What is the price of assimilation, both in terms of the literal suffering of people and the figurative suffering of the soul of Jewish people at large? Upon watching, the title seems to be a clear wink to the loss of Jewish identity in the hope as passing as regular, wealthy white Americans.
Uncut Gems is an incredibly rich, thematically ambitious movie that is able to be told deftly, at a breakneck pace, because of Adam Sandler and the magnitude of both his performance and what he represents. A very sweet tribute to getting to make entertainment with your friends. There is a lovely section in the recent New York Times Magazine profile of Sandler , in which writer Jamie Lauren Keiles just lists all the secondary quotes they received:.
Having fun with friends — his loyalty to them — is one of the main creative drives of his career. Terry Crews is particularly funny as a professional wrestler who rocks his opponents to sleep.
A career-spanning partnership that reflects maturing ideas of love. Three days before 50 First Dates premiered in thousands of theaters across the U. The plots are different, but the way both deal with the relationship between love and time both textually and metatextually is similar. With the context of seeing Sandler and Barrymore together again, but now a bit older, the plot of 50 First Dates itself plays with time. Sandler has to then convince Barrymore to fall in love with him every day and it is all really cute and charming and they are so lovely together.
Barrymore is especially winning playing a character who falls in love 50 times in the same movie. Both the Before series and the Sandler-Barrymore series look at love and marriage through the lens of a generation who grew up in a time of increased divorce rates. Sandler, possibly because his parents remained together, approaches this from a much more traditionalist point of view. Though Barrymore originally found the script and sent it to Sandler, saying it should be their next movie together, Sandler rewrote the drama into, well, an Adam Sandler movie.
Love is no longer a thing you work toward but something you work at. Sure, it sounds cheesy, but Adam Sandler is cheesy. Through SNL which is like clown-finding bootcamp and his albums, Sandler had a good sense of who he was by the time he made Billy Madison. In basically every movie that follows, Sandler would expand upon his comedic rage, but in Gilmore it is front and center.
And while Sandler is clearly not totally comfortable on-camera yet, he is at least a present and compelling to watch. There is, however, more to it. This moment, though not the most iconic scene in a particularly quotable movie, is a bit of a Rosetta stone for understanding the characters Sandler plays.
But it also deepens him. Happy grows up relatively little for a Sandler character, with him not learning to not be angry anymore but rather to control it long enough to play golf. Sandler became a better actor right after Happy Gilmore. He just needed a movie where he could get it all out. Adam Sandler had to turn down a role in Inglourious Basterds , playing the Bear Jew, because he was already committed to shooting Funny People.
What Sandler got instead was the chance to work with a director who really knows him. To his credit, if you read interviews with the more auteur-leaning directors he once worked with, you get a sense that Sandler works hard, listens to direction, and trusts his collaborators fully.
Apatow just knew what Sandler could do, and the result is one of the richest performances of his career. What performance? The irony being that that very feeling is proof of how good Sandler is in this movie. Similarly, some people saw Funny People as a rare bit of self-awareness from Sandler, showing that he also knows his movies suck. Yes, there was a degree of self-awareness here, but of a different sort. Anyway, the point is they are different. But what is exceptional here is how Sandler and Apatow pull from their real lives to give the performance verisimilitude.
To achieve this, the smartest decision Apatow made was having him do stand-up — like really do it in front of real audiences, not just shoot some cutaways and add the laughs in post. In the same way that in Punch-Drunk Love , Paul Thomas Anderson, as a great filmmaker, is able to convey to the audience what it was like for him to fall in love with Adam Sandler as an actor, watching Funny People you feel how Apatow felt when he would see Adam Sandler do stand-up when they were coming up together.
He seems more vulnerable, more present, more connected. Not only was Sandler not really doing stand-up before shooting Funny People , he admitted being nervous about sharing that side of himself with his audience.
For followers of his work, it was just so exciting to get to see more of him, to get to fill out the picture of who he is and the character he has been playing. Sandler masters Dad-Adam in one of his most ambitious pictures. There seems to be a perception that they are the tossed-off victory lap of a washed up, finally failed movie star. However, apparently another legendary director was the touchstone. Director Robert Smigel, who co-wrote the movie with Sandler, is quite cute talking to the L.
He wanted it to feel like a naturalistic ensemble movie, and we even talked about directors like [John] Cassavetes. The Week Of is the purest essence of the new older Adam Sandler, and the result is the most understated, naturalistic film in the Happy Madison—verse. And in terms of pathos, Sandler brings more than he has in any movie of his own movies since Click.
In many ways, The Week Of is a fully formed vision of late-career Sandler. Sandler has slowly but ever increasingly moved from playing to man-children to dads. Not dad-children; just dads. Dads that are equal parts sweet and heavyhearted. Dads just trying to do their best and, in turn, failing at it for laughs for the first two acts.
And all of this went into The Week Of. Similarly, how his movies are produced reflect the themes of the movies themselves. From looking at his work, from the point he married Jacqueline Titone in and especially after they started having kids, the only thing Sandler seemed more driven and inspired by than friends is family. Also, as the Times profile noted, he created a schedule to take and pick up his children from school.
Onscreen, his characters have had to figure out how to reconcile the men that they are with their duties as a husband and father. Providing became a prominent theme — not just about the anxiety to make enough money to give your kids a good life, but also the anxiety of giving them too much. Adam Sandler at his funniest. After, earlier that year, Wedding Singer proved that Sandler could be a leading man, The Waterboy proved he was a movie star.
0コメント