Word: sandlers
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Understanding Adam is a tough task for those hobbled by age or taste. The typical Sandler comedy (not this year's amiable The Wedding Singer, in which he plays a borderline grownup, but Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and the new film) is about a nerdy sociopath who learns to channel his rage into an acceptable format: winning a spelling bee, playing golf or tackling football players. "You don't have what they call the social skills," he is told in The Waterboy; that is Sandler's gimmick and, for many, his charm. The plot is a competition for which...
...movies tend to remind us of being in sixth grade again," says Frank Coraci, director of The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy--and, like Sandler-film screenwriter Tim Herlihy, a pal of the star's since they were all at New York University a decade ago. That's exactly right. The films are full of preadolescent aggression, exaggerated for laughs. In Billy Madison, Sandler gets his kicks by leaving a bag of flaming feces at a neighbor's door, saying the F word in a roomful of first-graders, mocking a stuttering boy. As a clumsy hockey player in Happy...
...hear you saying, "but Jim Carrey is funny!" Yep. Sandler is Carrey or Jerry Lewis without the physical dexterity, Danny Kaye without the verbal grace, Steve Martin without the patrician veneer. In the longer movie view, he's Abbott without Costello. Moviemakers and critics were probably not thrilled that, in 1941, with a mediocre B movie called Buck Privates, Bud and Lou were briefly Hollywood's top stars. What can we say? People want to laugh--at anything. Sandler happens...
REAL NEWS STORIES THIS WEEK THAT COULD BECOME PLOTS FOR ADAM SANDLER'S NEXT MOVIE...
...Waterboy opened to a critical drubbing and the highest three-day box office of any nonsummer movie in history. It seems Sandler's films need neither credible plot, big-name co-stars nor production values. He just needs new ideas. Perhaps this week's headlines can help...