Men, Woman & Children

This is the same software I use to keep track of Ben

Grade: D +

Director: Jason Reitman

Starring: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer, Dean Norris, Emma Thompson (voice), Ansel Elgort and Kaitlyn Dever

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 59 min.

The recurring CGI imagery of the Voyager 1 space probe that serves as the visual and purported spiritual refrain to director Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is spot-on. No, not as a window into the cosmic insignificance of humankind and the Pale Blue Dot it occupies. Instead, the film drifts aimlessly through a cold, lifeless expanse, winding its way past constellations of bright ideas and dim execution until winding up in a narrative black hole.

The film is a screed against the dangers of our pervasive online society … except it’s not. It’s a cautionary tale about the fragility of life, marriage and familial relations … except it’s not. It’s an insight into modern teen angst … except that’s been done to death in films immensely better than this. Essentially, Men, Women & Children is a message in search of a movie.

Set in Austin, Texas, the screenplay by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson, adapted from a novel by Chad Kultgen, follows a web of interconnected storylines involving troubled teenagers attending the same local high school and their equally dysfunctional parents. Interspersed throughout is Dogville-style narration by Emma Thompson as the voice of, I dunno, God? Mother Earth? V’Ger?

The film’s apparent aim is illuminating how the insidiousness of the Internet has eroded our families, interpersonal relationships and even our self-worth. But the most fundamental mistake Men, Women & Children makes is treating these foibles as though they didn’t exist before the Internet.

The film opens with Don and Helen Truby (Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt), whose martial spark was doused after they happened to be having sex the morning of 9/11 (uh, OK). Now, Don frequents porn websites so often his desktop computer is clogged with malware and he has to sneak off to the PC in the bedroom of his son Chris (Travis Tope). Yet, Chris is also so addicted to hardcore porn that he can’t get an erection from anything less, even an actual randy and willing cheerleader in his bed.

To sate their arid need for intimacy, Don starts plunking down $500 an hour for the services of a voluptuous hooker. Meanwhile, Helen heads over to AshleyMadision.com and ends up bedding a series of strangers, starting with an African-American played by Dennis Hayspert. See, because the Internet caused infidelity and—gasp—apparently miscegenation, too, judging by the copious and conspicuous closeups of Haysbert's hand caressing Helen.

Meanwhile, Tim Mooney (Ansel Elgort) is the star quarterback who leaves the high school football team after his mother leaves he and his dad Kent (Dean Norris) to hunt fame in California. How, Tim wiles away his free time playing Guild Wars online, and consequently Kent and Tim don’t talk much anymore because football was their common bond—because that’s a much healthier basis for a father-son relationship.

Kent starts dating Donna Clint (Judy Greer), a single mom who posts (and sells from the “private” page) semi-racy pics she snaps of her daughter Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) and uploads to Hannah’s modeling/acting website. Hannah’s obsession with celebrity sounds obsessive and treacherous until you learn that her biological father is a Hollywood producer who knocked up Donna when she moved to California years ago in search of fame and ended up on the casting couch.

[Deep inhale …] Meanwhile, Tim befriends Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever), a loner who takes to Tim’s wounded, dark demeanor, and in no way his tall, athletic physique. Unfortunately, Patricia (Jennifer Garner), Brandy’s mommy dearest, keeps getting in the way of her daughter, along with everyone else in town with broadband access. Garner once again wears her countenance of pursed-lip petulance, except this time she also dons the dark-framed glasses of a tech-savvy school marm.

Patricia tracks Brandy’s online activity and computer keystrokes. She holds support group gatherings at her house where she scolds other parents on not “protecting” their children well enough. All because, well, teens never managed to get into trouble with other teens before the Web came along.

Finally there’s Allison (Elena Kampouris), another cheerleader and former fatty who began idolizing skinny online models and became bulimic over the summer in hopes of finally shagging the hunky footballer who never gives her the time of day. Because unreasonable and unhealthy body ideation is an Internet invention.

There’s little dispute that technology, particularly social media, have irrevocably altered the way we connect and relate with others. At its worst, the Internet serves as a faster and unfiltered portal for our appetites and addictions.

There are fleeting moments in Men, Women & Children that capture the effects of this societal shift. An overhead shot of a crowded school corridor shows every kid’s face buried in their smartphone, blind to everything around them except the social media screens Reitman superimposes like thought-bubbles above their heads. When Tim’s mom abruptly blocks him on Facebook, the tenor of her repudiation within our modern milieu seems to sting more than when she actually left her family. And when a misunderstood text leads to near-tragic consequences, it reminds us of the limited personal understanding actually afforded by our ubiquitous online connections.

But the film’s rapid, all-encompassing (and misogynistic, in the case of Don and Helen) resolutions belie its stance that our online ills are wide-reaching and intractable. Consequently, Men, Women & Children comes off as a moribund approximation of rambling Paul Haggis pap, and Reitman a codger howling at the evils conceived inside the Internets and its series of tubes.

Blended

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Randy Watson

and Sexual Chocolate

Grade: C

Director: Frank Coraci

Starring: Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Kevin Nealon, Terry Crews, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Bella Thorne and Joel McHale

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 57 min.

It’s progress of sorts that Adam Sandler’s latest comedy is merely vapid as opposed to another affront to the medium of cinema. It’s also cause for relief, since the South African setting of Blended could easily have proven dangerous mix with Sandler’s usual lowbrow antics. Make no mistake: the film isn’t a beacon of multiculti enlightenment. But it’s also not so offensive it sends you scampering for the exit door.

After Jim (Sandler) takes Lauren (Drew Barrymore) on a bad blind date at Hooters, contrivance devises a scheme wherein the two single parents and their respective children—him three girls; her two boys—are thrust together on vacation at an African resort for mixed families.

As regrettably expected, there’s plenty of questionable puerile, vulgar and ethnic humor. Much comes compliments of a vacationing May-December couple (played by Kevin Nealon and Jessica Lowe). More cringeworthy is Terry Crews’ role as the lead singer of a ubiquitous African Greek Chorus.

Yet there are also weighty issues at play, from adolescent maturation to dealing with a marriage destroyed by infidelity to the death of a parent/spouse. This unholy mix of serious and silly is epitomized in the character of Jim’s middle daughter (Emma Fuhrmann). Jim lost his wife to cancer years ago, yet his preteen continues to see and converse with her deceased mother. However, every poignant involving her lingering emotional trauma is undercut by the character’s name: Espn (pronounced S-pen), as in Jim’s favorite sports network.

There’s Jim’s androgynous daughter Hilary (Bella Thorne), sporting shorn locks and track suits, who transforms into a beautiful swan with the help of Lauren and Jake (Zak Henri), a brooding Edward Cullen wannabe. On the other hand, Lauren’s elder son Brendan (Braxton Beckham) harbors a creepy obsession with his teenage babysitter.

However, what keeps the film afloat are the shared scenes between Sandler and Barrymore, each never better than when cast opposite the other. They recapture the easy chemistry from their previous collaborations, The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. Together, they make Blended one of the few “comedies” which is better when the would-be yucks subside and the casual banter begins.

Ted

Ginger Spice sure has let herself go

Grade: B –

Director: Seth MacFarlane

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, Joel McHale and Giovanni Ribisi

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.

During one of many parties speckled throughout Ted, the titular teddy bear gets into a tussle with a feisty pet duck. Beyond the scene’s obvious inanity and sidelong racism directed at the bird’s histrionic Asian owner, there’s a subtle-as-an-anvil simile between writer-director Seth MacFarlane’s animatronic plush toy and Howard the Duck, Ted’s sarcastic, humanoid forerunner. And before you scoff at the notion anyone would pay homage to one of cinema’s most notorious flops, you should first know that the ultra-campy Dino De Laurentiis film version of Flash Gordon figures prominently throughout MacFarlane’s caustic comedy, down to casting Sam Jones, the original Flash, as himself.

Indeed, Ted is about a man who can’t bring himself to let go of childish things, made by a filmmaker gripped by the same affliction. The 38-year-old MacFarlane litters the film with his trademark non sequiturs and pop culture references (often occupying the same quip). He venerates Airplane, T.J. Hooker, Octopussy, and the aforementioned Savior of the Universe, whilst working in nasty jabs at Justin Beiber, Kate Perry, Taylor Lautner and Superman Returns. MacFarlane, who recorded a jazz album last year, both sets Ted to the big band score of frequent collaborator Walter Murphy and manages to ridicule the grunting diction of 1990s pop-rock.

Playing man-child John Bennett, Mark Wahlberg revives the underrated comic timing he exhibited in The Other Guys. As a tyke, the ostracized John spends a Christmas wish to will his favorite toy Teddy to life so they can become BFFs. As a 35-year-old car rental agent, John still lives with Ted, now a profane, pot-smoking, boorish bear with a bent for broads and bongs. John’s crippling arrested development, and Ted’s massive influence on it, meets with the dismay of John’s long-suffering girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis).

Ted is essentially a stuffed variation of Peter Griffin from MacFarlane’s Family Guy with a harder R-rating and thicker Bahston brogue. While I laughed along with its exercises in Gen X-themed frivolity, Ted still suffers from a sluggish narrative that lacks momentum or true tension. John, Lori and even Ted all realize that it’s high time for Ted—essentially a stand-in for the loutish movie roommate archetype—to go his separate way. The film spends 106 long minutes watching that process slowly come full circle. A third-act bear-napping plot turn involving a creepy loner (Giovanni Ribisi, natch) and his chubby son feels like filler, and by this time you’ve become so in tune to the pop power chords that you see an Aliens allusion coming about 30 seconds beforehand.

The ultimate irony of Ted, however, comes when it takes an otherwise deserved dig at the movie Jack and Jill, since an inordinate amount of MacFarlane’s gags tap the same scatological vein as Adam Sandler’s cruddy comedies, including plenty of race- and sex-baiting guffaws. Am I so fickle that I’ll favor one lowbrow laugher over another simply because it contains reverent references to James Bond and Star Wars? Perhaps, although that doesn’t make Ted very good…just more accessible.

Neil Morris

That's My Boy

Time to take those SNL training wheels off...

Grade: F

Director: Sean Anders

Starring: Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Leighton Meester, Vanilla Ice, James Caan, Milo Ventimiglia, Tony Orlando, Will Forte, Nick Swardson, Ciara and Peggy Stewart

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

The only thought-provoking part of an Adam Sandler comedy (applying that label very loosely) is deciphering the populist appeal of his vile, irksome blights on cinema. My working hypothesis is his most well-received films revel in skewering the privileged class while uplifting the masses and misfits. In That’s My Boy, the corporate and country club set catch Sandler’s ire (at one point, a character literally expels sundry bodily secretions on a Vera Wang wedding dress), while the heroes are beer-swilling ruffians, strippers and washed-up B-listers playing themselves. Todd Bridges? Like I said, misfits.

Unfortunately, it’s also a movie that opens by glorifying pedophilia for guffaws and ends by doing the same with incest. Years after fathering a child with his 8^th grade teacher when he was 13 year old, Donny Berger (Sandler), now an insolvent slob and bastardized Bahston caricature, tries to reconnect with his estranged son, the cartoonishly milquetoast Todd Peterson nee Han Solo Berger (Andy Samberg) on the eve of Todd’s wedding to Jamie (Leighton Meester), the requisite Sandler Movie Shrew™.

It’s all part of Donny’s contrived moneymaking scheme to get out of tax trouble, but in the cockeyed world of Sandler, gobs of carousing and inappropriate conduct somehow point to ill-fitting sentimentality. What’s more, the most slovenly, repugnant cretin is inexplicably welcomed with open arms by buttoned-down blowhards just waiting for someone to help release their inhibitions.

Chronicling the film’s many sins—and flat-lined follies—would require an R-rated review. Suffice it to say you know a script has problems when Vanilla Ice has the funniest lines. That’s My Boy levies a taxing onslaught of racist, sexist and scatological bile, laced with enough celebrity cameos to leave you pondering how many of them had access to the entire script (likely answer: none). If this is what passes for populism, consider me a one-percenter.

Neil Morris

Jack and Jill

Xenu said there'd be days like this

Grade: D –

Director: Dennis Dugan

Starring: Adam Sandler, Al Pacino,Katie Holmes, Nick Swardson and Eugenio Derbez

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 30 min.

At the heart of Adam Sandler’s latest comedic romp, Jack and Jill, are lessons about the extricable bonds of family and the existential duality of the human soul, encapsulated under the guise of…oh, who the heck am I kidding?

The degree of celebrity and financial success that Sandler continues to amass as aresult of films that are increasingly and resoundingly putrid is fascinating only if one day we learn that the entirety of Sandler’s career was one big lampoon of Hollywood: a marginally talented star spoon-feeds producers and moviegoers a steady diet of clichéd scripts, awful actors, lazy filmmaking and offensive material,and they keep coming back for more.

If this were somehow true, then Jack and Jill would represent Sandler’s attempt to see just how low his fans will go. The cross-dressing comedy hasn’t truly worked since Tootsie, but that doesn’t stop Sandler and the indefensible Dennis Dugan from slapping on a dress and foisting this affront to the medium. Set around the Thanksgiving and Hanukkah seasons, Los Angeles ad exec Jack Sadelstein (Sandler) ruefully awaits the annual arrival of Jill (Sandler in a wig, makeup, fat suit and grating accent), his identical twin sister. Jill is loud, needy, embarrassing and obnoxious – frankly, a scene in which she talks loudly on her cell phone in a movie theater make her fair game for ridicule. But, she’s still preferable to Jack, who is regularly and inexplicably cruel to Jill, giddy when his adopted son punches her in the face and when she crash-lands a jet ski outside his pool.

In other words, the audience isn’t given a reason to like either sibling or, for that matter, anyone else in this dumpster fire of a movie. Jack’s throwaway family includes dim bulb wife Erin (Katie Holmes, grinning mindlessly) and an adopted moppet from India who has a bizarre but pointless fetish for Scotch-taping objects, including animals, to his body.

The first fart joke comes during the opening credits, eventually metastasizing into a full-blown diarrhea gag after Jill scarfs down some chimichangas. And Sandler trots out his usual unholy triumvirate: choppy editing, useless celebrity cameos and casual racism. Famed Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez is ethnically emasculated, playing a gardener who cracks wise about crossing the border inside a car trunk and takes Jill to a gathering of la familia that features piñatas and an one-toothed old woman revived from unconsciousness by shoving red chili peppers in her mouth.

Playing himself, Al Pacino becomes infatuating with Jill after spying her at a Lakers basketball game and embarks on an extended, fanatical courtship. Rehashing lines from The Godfather and donning Tony Montana’s black suit from Scarface eventually devolves into watching the acting legend tickle-fight with the cross-dressing Sandler inside a medieval castle and perform a rap routine in a commercial for flavored coffee.

While Pacino’s presence here seemingly represents a new nadir in his career, he manages to turn this utter rubbish into something oddly satirical. He tackles each scene with such gusto that you soon realize that while Sandler is paying slapdash homage, Pacino has something more cunning in mind. He turns the film’s inanity to his advantage, spoofing his onscreen personas as a means toward skewering the entire Hollywood system. Jill consoles Pacino after smashing his Oscar statuette by reminding him that “you must have others.” “You’d think it,”he deadpans. “But no.” Later, Pacino longingly recalls his native New York City, lamenting L.A. as a place “where all the palm trees look the same” and productions of Richard III feature Bruce Jenner as Lord Hastings.

In spite of itself, Jack and Jill will likely fetch Sandler another big payday. Still, when Pacino appears in a NYC bar at film’s end dressed as Don Quixote and starts tilting a ceiling fan, it’s a joke that’s too smart for the room and more self-aware than a movie that’s (literally) full of shit deserves.

Neil Morris

Grown Ups

What are those video cameras doing here?

Grade: D +

Director: Dennis Dugan

Starring: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Salma Hayek, and Maria Bello

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

It is hard to tell whether the title to Grown Ups is ironic or just simply wrong-headed. While age figures into what passes for a plot in this cinematic equivalent of an induced coma, maturity – both onscreen and in the production room – certainly does not. Grown Ups is The Big Chill for imbeciles, starring a coterie of clowns that might fancy themselves as some comedic Rat Pack but are really just an ex-SNLers version of the Blue Collar Comedy troupe.

Then again, what else should you expect from Adam Sander’s increasingly irksome Happy Gilmore Productions and its hack director of choice, Dennis Dugan? There’s a hierarchy to the quintet of cronies starring here: Sandler and Chris Rock are top-rung moneymakers (Rock particularly ought to know better), Kevin James (blatantly subbing for the late Chris Farley) is the up-and-comer, while David Spade and Rob Schneider are hanging onto the caboose of this gravy train.

Together, they play childhood friends brought back together in their New England hometown (identified onscreen as “New England”) over Independence Day weekend upon the passing of their junior high school basketball coach. Spade is Marcus, the hopeless bachelor; Schneider plays the creatively named Rob, a New Ager on his third marriage to a granola granny wife; James is Eric, whose daughter has severe social dysfunctions and a wife (Maria Bello) still breastfeeding their four-year-old son; Rock plays house-husband Kurt to his thrice-pregnant and career-driven wife (Myra Rudolph); and Sandler is Lenny, a jet-setting Hollywood agent with a Chinese au pair, spoiled kids who order Voss water at greasy burger joints, and a fashion designer wife played by Salma Hayek. Uh, guess again which actor is also the film’s producer.

After their coach’s funeral, the five amigos plus families decide to spend a few days lounging around the lakeside lodge of their youth. Actually, they spend the time forcibly laughing at each other’s zingers, most of them thinly veiled jabs at their real-life personas – Spade is called “the third Olson twin”; the portly James is congratulated for finally reaching a B-cup. And, when they aren’t playfully jabbing each other, Sandler and Co. lean against the comic crutches they packed for the trip: children, old people, scantily-clad women, animals, white trash, and lots and lots of scatology. Of course there’s a trip to the water park, and of course there’s a gag revolving around the guys peeing in the kiddie pool. Tack on some half-written sideshow about a rematch against their basketball rivals from 30 years ago, and that’s it…that’s the “storyline.”

Even the usually reliable Rock is relegated to calling his annoying, bunion-afflicted mother-in-law names like “Toe-be Bryant” and “Toe-J Simpson.” Hardy, har, har. I did like the brief argument between Rock and opposing ex-baller Tim Meadows about who is the town’s black guy and which one is the town’s “other black guy,” a not-to-subtle reference to their erstwhile token status while cast members on SNL.

Otherwise, the jokes land with the nimbleness of lead weights. The whole sorry spectacle smacks of a money grab, with the actors getting both a paycheck and a subsidized Massachusetts vacation. Mostly, however, Grown Ups is a string of barely realized setups, with only a late, lazy stab at moralizing more infuriating than the truckload of stupid humor that precedes it. The film’s stars may be getting older, but their comedy remains as juvenile as ever.

Neil Morris

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Making Menudo

Grade: C +
Director: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Nick Swardson, and Rob Schneider
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

I may burn in some critics’ hell for writing this, but You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is not an unmitigated disaster. In fact, its “best” moments spent skewering the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the bigotry heaped toward both groups on the American home front, glimpse the same brand of irreverent lunacy that elevated the likes of Harold & Kumar, Team America: World Police, and, once upon a time, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. No, I have not lost my senses and equated a Chaplin classic with an Adam Sandler vehicle. But, beneath its lunk-head exterior lays a modicum of social satire that, in the hands of another star carrying less historically mediocre baggage, might not be so easily dismissed.

There are also obvious echoes of The Jazz Singer when Sandler’s Zohan, a superhuman Mossad agent and lascivious ladies’ man with a hummus addiction, defies the expectations of both his homeland and parents by faking his death in order to escape to New York City and realize his suppressed dream of becoming a Paul Mitchell hair designer protégée. Sporting an oversized cod piece, ‘80s style pompadour, and alter ego called Scrappy Coco (drawn from the names of his canine, fellow cargo-hold travelers), Zohan lands work in the heart of NYC’s Lower East Side where he is astounded to find Israeli and Palestinian expatriates living and working side-by-side in relative peace.

However, a movie that spotlights Rob Schneider in brown-face has a lot to overcome. The puerile humor mostly overwhelms the satire in a screenplay co-written by Sandler, Robert Smigel, and Judd Apatow (seriously, did this guy make some deal with the devil so he is credited in every movie comedy nowadays?). Matters quickly degenerate into barrage of bathroom humor, broad caricatures, and Zohan’s proclivity for schtupping his elderly salon clientele. There are the de rigueur gay gags, commonplace to any Sandler production. A scene in which a trio of terrorist wannabes plot a bombing in the heart of the Big Apple conjures a palpable discomfort only mildly assuaged by the payoff: a pharmacist misunderstands their broken English and provides them with “Neosporin” instead of “nitro glycerin.” And, there are scenes of just plain weirdness: Zohan presents a gaggle of streets kids with an animal sculpture cobbled from the rocks those same urchins had just hurled at him - for a moment, I felt the same sensation of enduring Life is Beautiful, or what it must have felt like for the few who have screened Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried.

The copious cameos generally fall flat, with the notable exception of Dave Matthews as a racist redneck. Subplots come and go like last year’s hair styles, significant for not only a lack of thematic cohesion but also as the main culprit in the film’s excessive 113-minute running time (which feels more like 213 minutes to anyone caught in a theater showing it). Unfortunately, for all its nascent potential, not messing with Zohan likely includes not watching it, either.

Neil Morris