You don’t get invited to my bat mitzvah on Netflix like that
Forgive the first person, but when it’s necessary, it’s necessary. I do not hate anyone, but I have strong negative feelings towards many people. In particular, I am one of those who have spit venom at Adam Sandler and his stupid rom-coms, corny and cheesy, all my life, and regularly richer than I could ever dream of being in ten lifetimes in a row. To claim that his very existence was a problem, that his presence was enough to kill the film. Then I grew up, and at the same time, Sandler began to do other things more regularly. We are now on the eve of the release of one of his new films. You weren’t invited to my bat mitzvah, in which, as I am told, it is not he, but his daughters that overshadow everyone’s attention. So the next generation is coming. It’s time to make peace with the old woman and admit that I was always wrong and he was right.
I don’t know exactly when I decided that “Adam Sandler movie” became synonymous with “I have things to do, like put my knees on the stove.” I believe, however, that this happened sometime in 2004, and curiously for a film far less corny and rhetorical (no less silly) than your average Sandlerian rom-com: 50 first kiss, which masquerades as a light movie in which he loves her and she loves him, and instead crashes into your liver with the least happy “happy ending” in the history of happy endings. Perhaps he unconsciously came out of this experience thinking something along the lines of “Stay away from things that don’t belong to you, Adam Sandler!”
Already in 2004, I associated his name with some light and slightly banal cinema, the kind of cinema that is always associated with scary Italian films: Sooner or later I will get married, unpredictable guy, those formulas there, which seemed to come up with an old man who is trying to imagine how the youth speaks. Seeing his lead role in a film that left me with more than I expected (even if much of that legacy was pathetic and blind horror) took me by surprise, made me think that it’s possible to judge an actor only by films that he chooses is a limitation: there are also mortgages to pay, contingencies to take into account, and back then I could really afford to criticize Adam Sandler for his career choice when I was already Nicolas Cage’s number 1 fan, Hollywood Mr Mortgage?
It must be said that in the following years, Adam Sandler did everything to reject me again, as in the good old days, collecting an endless series of films that, for personal taste, but also for objective value, I only saw when I was required to. to work and always suffer like a vampire in a grocery store. Weekends for big kids, Zohan, I pronounce you husband and … husband, my fake wife!, where he met another absolute queen like Jennifer Aniston. Every time I saw a movie with Adam Sandler, I still got a little mad at him, at his choices, at his stories.
Even with his face: I’m convinced that one of the reasons so many people dislike Adam Sandler is that he’s nowhere near as handsome as one would expect by today’s Hollywood standards, which gives away his age a bit. but makes it a pioneer (It’s not easy being a rom-com king unless you look like you’re from a model catalog or you’re not Matthew McConaughey, which is pretty much the same thing), it subconsciously pisses you off a little because you spontaneously think, “Okay, but then I could do it too.” Which is obviously not true, because apart from any aesthetic assessment, Adam Sandler has the fact that he is a good actor and the reason why he is less liked than other good actors is because he was rarely in the right circles. .
It’s trite to say, but the moment when I finally realized that I needed to make amends with Adam Sandler came in 2019. Rough diamonds. Oh my god, this has been in the air for a few years now when Sandler started appearing in small art house films like Meyerowitz stories, where he is also paired with Ben Steeler, that is, with someone who is similar in many ways to him, but for mysterious reasons has never caused so much hatred. But the Safdie brothers’ film has brought it back to the attention, mine and all the people like me who tend to ignore its production because they don’t want to get bogged down in kissing and weddings and cheap humour.
And I caught myself thinking: Adam Sandler has never failed. Or rather, in several of his films it was, and sometimes not without reason, but could you say that, for example, Drunk on love Is Paul Thomas Anderson a bad movie just because it didn’t make a lot of money? There are failures and failures; and in general, when Adam Sandler decided to flex his muscles in a rom-com, he did it right, built a career, a small fortune and, above all, fans. People who watch his movies because they like them, just like I watch Jason Statham because I like him. Do I really have the right to feel superior just because what I like more than what others like? That would be idiotic.
I’m not saying that earning money is enough to justify all sorts of nonsense, but cinema, especially the more formulaic and decorated at the table, responds, of course, not only to internal creative needs, but also to external demands: there is nothing wrong with making art. to please the public, and when a phenomenon starts to regularly involve millions of people, ignoring it with an air of superiority does not make you smarter, just dumber. Adam Sandler is a phenomenon, it is objective, because it is objective that this is an undeniable, undeniable dignity. Building followers is not something everyone can do, often not even the best. When we’re one against tens of millions, where tens of millions of people rush to see every time an Adam Sandler movie comes out, is it possible that I’m perfectly right and tens of millions of people are completely right? wrong?
And then, yes, there is the fact that lately Sandler has started acting in films outside of his comfort zone. Rough diamonds, Hubie Halloweenbeauty Fuss. I don’t know if this is the beginning of a parable of redemption, at the end of which we will find him leading a band of marauders in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the next century. Crazy Max After fury road; but at least these films exist, and they will always remain a testament to the fact that Adam Sandler is a good actor, that he has more registers than he is usually credited with, and that, if he wanted to, he could have a career ahead of McConaughey. (imagine a new season True detective with him as the protagonist). He may not have it, but it’s a choice, not a limitation. And I’m not the one who can judge her choice. You will see that in the end the main character Spanglish – when the family talks too much he was right, I was always wrong.