Adam Sandler Film Festival

Movie Review: Eight Crazy Nights (2002)
Adam Sandler's animated Christmas/Chanukah adventure. Sandler voices Davey, a drunken misfit who always seems to be on the wrong side of the law. Juvenile basketball referee and volunteer extraordinaire Whitey (also voiced by Sandler) offers Davey one last chance to avoid jail time. Apart from a few scenes, this movie is relatively unfunny. The musical numbers are alright but the lyrics seem awfully forced. Finding rhyming words isn't always that easy I guess. Most annoying to me was Whitey's voice. This is a character that Sandler has used before on his comedy CD's and is apparently based on someone he knew in his youth. But this high pitched voice is like thousands of alley cats simultaneously dragging their claws across miles and miles of chalkboard. It's hard to endure for an entire movie. This is a below average holiday movie that is probably a little too crude for young kids. 4/10

Movie Review: 50 First Dates (2004)
Next to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore must be the best onscreen couple. Reuniting after the success of The Wedding Singer the two are again an irrisistibly cute couple. The situation this time, however, is that Barrymore's character has suffered a serious head injury in a car crash years earlier. She cannot remember anything that happens to her, or has happened to her since the day of the crash. Every morning she wakes up without any memories of the previous day. Enter Sandler's character, a womanizing aquarium doctor (typical eh?) who tries to make Barrymore fall in love with him each and every day as she continually forgets who he is. The result is that we get scene after scene of Sandler trying to be super cute and funny to impress her. The notion of Sandler as a petty womanizer is introduced at the beginning of the film but then completely forgotten. He is the most dedicated boyfriend I've ever seen. Sandler's congenital twin Rob Schneider is also along for the ride of course. With a dash of tanning cream he is supposed to be a native Hawaiin. As per usual, he has no real purpose in the movie other than to say a few stupid lines here and there, take the occasional beating, and make Sandler look less creepy than Schneider is. The ending of the film cheats somewhat by skipping over obvious difficulties. Still, it's a nice romantic comedy. 7/10

Movie Review: Spanglish (2004)
Coming on the heels of my linguistics program I expected this film to showcase a lot of linguistic borrowing, code-switching and interference. This was not the case though. I also expected this to be a light romantic comedy in the vein of Sandler's other movies. This was also not the case. Sandler, Tea Leoni and Paz Vega (the beautiful star of Sex and Lucia) form an uneasy love triangle in this drama. Sandler is a renowned chef but passive husband. His wife, Leoni, is a domineering wife and mother who is highly competetive. Vega is their smart and down-to-earth housekeeper who only speaks Spanish. They each have children who bring further complications to the party. I was very impressed with this movie, I think of it a as a slightly watered down version of American Beauty. However here, Sandler doesn't want to sleep with any of the kids. 8/10