Film Babble Blog's Top 10 Movies of 2019

Usually I post these picks before the Oscar nominations are announced - which happened earlier this week – but things have been nuts lately. 2019 hasn’t been the greatest year for film, but any year that boasts two stellar Martin Scorsese movies shouldn’t be dismissed. So here’s my top 10 films with what I think are some of their crucial lines.

10. AMAZING GRACE (Dirs. Alan Elliott, Sydney Pollack) 

Reverend James Cleveland: “Many of you who never had the opportunity to hear Aretha sing Gospel, you’re in tonight for a great thrill. She can sing anything!”

9. DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (Dir. Craig Brewer) 

Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy): “Dolemite is my name, and fuckin’ up motherfuckers is my game!”

8. MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
(Dir. Edward Norton)

Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton): “Okay, listen. I got something wrong with me. That’s the first thing to know. I twitch and shout a lot. It makes me look like a damn freak show. But inside my head is an even bigger mess. I can’t stop twisting things around, words and sounds especially. I have to keep playing with them until they come out right.”

7. JOJO RABBIT

(Dir. Taika Waititi)

“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

6. US (Dir. Jordan Peele)

Jason Wilson (Evan Alex): There’s a Family in our driveway!

5. MARRIAGE STORY (Dir. Noah Baumbach)

Charlie (Adam Driver): “You were happy, you just decided you weren’t now”

4. UNCUT GEMS (Dirs. Josh and Benny Safdie)

Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler): “That’s a million-dollar opal you’re holding. Straight from the Ethiopian Jewish tribe. I mean this is old-school, Middle-earth shit.”

3. PARASITE (Dir. Bong Joon-ho)

Kang Ho Song (Kim Ki-taek):“So, there’s no need for a plan. You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn't matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?”
2. 1917 (Dir. Sam Mendes)

General Erinmore (Colin Firth): “They’re walking into a trap. Your orders are to deliver a message calling off tomorrow mornings attack, if you fail, it will be a massacre.”

1. THE IRISHMAN (Dir. Martin Scorsese)

Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro): “Whenever anybody says they’re a little concerned, they’re very concerned.”

Spillover:

THE LIGHTHOUSE (Dir. Robert Eggers)

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (Dir. Joe Talbot)

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE (Dir. Martin Scorsese)

LITTLE WOMEN (Dir. Greta Gerwig)

KNIVES OUT (Dir. Rian Johnson)

THE TWO POPES (Dir. Fernando Meirelles)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)

FORD V FERRARI (Dir. James Mangold)

THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY (Dir. Petra Costa)

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PIXELS Is Lame, But Doesn’t Suck As Much As You’ve Heard

Opening today at a multiplex near all of us:

PIXELS (Dir. Chris Columbus, 2015)

So, PIXELS, the latest in a long line of crass comedies from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, is a typically lame offering, but it really doesn't suck as much as the majority of critics are saying.

I mean, it currently holds an awful 12% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. C’mon! It deserves at least 30-something percent. *

PIXELS scores a few points by trying a little harder than Sandler’s largely crappy output of late (the GROWN UP series, THAT’S MY BOY, BLENDED, etc.) and it has a pretty promising premise – aliens attack earth in the form of ‘80s video games – which does at times add up into some genuinely enjoyable dumb fun.

There may be dragging stretches between those instances of amusement, and tons of lame jokes litter the landscape along with the pixilated carnage, but as a throwaway summer popcorn picture it’s actually almost passable.

Sandler, Josh Gad, and Peter Dinklage play former ‘80s arcade champions, who we meet as kids played by the well cast Anthony Ippolito, Jacob Shinder and Andrew Bambridge, in an opening flashback set in 1982. We also meet Jared Riley as the kid version of Kevin James’ character, who’s not a great gamer but is able to score a Chewbacca mask from the Claw Game.

In the intervening years, Sandler’s Sam Brenner grows up to be a schlubby Geek Squad-style media center installation guy, while his best friend, James’ Will Cooper (or “Chewie” to his friends) has gone on to be elected President of the United States.

When Austrialia gets invaded by an alien force resembling the game Galaga™, James recruits Sandler to use his gaming skills, which involve recognizing patterns, to help the army defeat the 8-bit menace. Gad, now a conspiracy theory buff, and a mulleted Dinklage, in prison for criminal hacking, are also called upon and before long they’re all wearing uniforms identified as “Arcaders.”

Michelle Monaghan as Lt. Colonel Violet van Patten, Sandler’s obvious love interest from the get go, is skeptical of the crew until they take down Centipede® in a battle in London’s Hyde Park.

The big showpiece is the showdown with Pac-Man™ in New York City. The Arcaders take on the role of the ghosts via brightly colored cars with their names (Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde) on their license plates. Pac-Man is his old yellow, recognizable self, albeit ginormous, who shocks Sandler and his creator, Denis Akiyama as Toru Iwatani (the real Iwatani has a cameo as a repairman), by being “a bad guy.”

PIXELS takes the aliens recreating our old pop culture premise from GALAXY QUEST mixes it with the satirical yet nostalgic take on arcade classics from the Reagan era of WRECK-IT RALPH, and then wraps it all up in GHOST BUSTERS packing of having lovable, schlubby underdogs overcoming supernatural odds to save the world from a dangerously silly threat. Oh, and there’s an added splash of THE KING OF KONG in there too – the posturing of Dinklage’s Donkey Kong champion more than a little resembles the arrogant Billy Mitchell in that compelling gaming doc.

It should also be mentioned that there’s an episode of Futurama, “Raiders of the Lost Arcade,” that shares the same premise, but the real inspiration, which is credited, is the French animated short “Pixels.” Nearly every visual gag in the short is redone in the movie – watch it here.

Scripted by longtime Sandler screenwriting pal Tim Herlihy, PIXELS has a decently dopey tone to it. It doesn’t care whether its jokes land, or its plot mechanics are transparent, it just wants to fuck around on its huge playset with all the props and memories of the overgrown man-children in its audience.

Unfortunately there are so many missed opportunities with this material that it’s a shame that like somebody like the retro-meta-mastermind team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the 21 JUMP STREET movies, THE LEGO MOVIE) wasn’t hired to touch up the screenplay.

Like I said before, it’s pretty close to crappy (which could be said also of its cluttered cinematography), but not as interminable, soul crushing, or as painful as many critics are saying. It’s a mediocre attempt at a crowd pleaser that actually has some amusing moments. It just fits better into the “Sandler is so over” narrative that so many pop culture pundits have been selling lately to paint it as a big, stinky dud.

I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone who’s not a big Sandler fan, or somebody who doesn’t say upfront that they like big, stupid movies, but if I were using a star rating system I’d give it two stars out of five for “doesn’t completely suck” (the other stars for the record: 1 star = “sucks,” 3 stars = “good,” 4 stars = “almost awesome,” and 5 stars = of course, “awesome”).

Oh, and I enjoyed the Q-Bert, and Max Headroom cameos too.

* The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 12% was what it was at when I originally wrote this review. It's now at 20%, so it's slowly inching it's way up as more reviews are posted. Maybe it'll make 30-something % yet.

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TOP FIVE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

TOP FIVE (Dir. Chris Rock, 2014)

Finally, a good Chris Rock movie!

Yes, the third time is definitely the charm in the actor/comedian’s latest directorial effort after the critical and commercial flops that were HEAD OF STATE (2003) and I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE (2007).

In the semi-autobiographical TOP FIVE, Rock portrays movie star funnyman Andre Allen, who just like Rock’s idol Woody Allen in STARDUST MEMORIES, repeatedly says “I don’t want to make funny movies anymore.”

Rock’s Allen wants to hang up the bear costume he wore in the “Hammy the Bear” comedy buddy-cop franchise and be taken seriously in a historical drama about Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman called “Uprize,” which looks like a boring piece of Oscar bait.

Shades of TROPIC THUNDER, shades of Entourage, shades of every movie satirizing celebrity, but that’s so not a bad thing in these capable hands.

The film centers around Rock doing publicity for “Uprize” on its opening day, which is on the eve of his much hyped wedding to Gabrielle Union as socialite/reality TV star Erica Long.

In one of her most appealing performances, Rosario Dawson plays a New York Times reporter doing a profile on Rock, which he has mixed feelings about because the Times film critic, the fictitious James Nielson, has panned all his previous output.

With Rock and Dawson tooling around New York conversing about everything from PLANET OF THE APES to appraising favorite comic icons (Rock calls Charlie Chaplin “the KRS-One of comedy”), TOP FIVE can been seen as a “hangout movie.” Especially in a scene in which they visit Rock’s childhood home and chill with his family and childhood friends, mostly made up of SNL alumni including Jay Pharoah, Leslie Jones, and most hilariously, yet also sadly, a pre-accident Tracy Morgan, in which they discuss their individual top five rappers of all-time.

The laughs are consistent throughout, though some of the less successful bits concern relationship stuff. When Dawson catches her boyfriend cheating with another man and recounts via flashbacks how she should’ve known he was gay because of his anal fixation, it comes across like a throwaway joke sequence on the sitcom The Mindy Project, and not just because Dawson’s boyfriend is played by Anders Holm, who had an arc as one of Mindy Kaling’s suitors.

Otherwise, Rock, who unlike on his other films as director wrote this without a co-writer, has constructed a solid, thoughtful comedy that gives a bunch of his talented friends a chance to shine. 

An extended strip club scene, another of the many points in which the movie earns its hard R-rating, has funny turns by Jerry Seinfeld (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Seinfeld make it rain at a strip club), Whoopi Goldberg, and Adam Sandler (funnier than he's been in a while on the big screen) playing themselves, and in another laugh out loud bit set in a jail cellblock, DMX sings and somehow nails Chaplin’s “Smile” in an unironic manner. J.B. Smoove and Cedric the Entertainer also amuse in their sideline roles. If you're a comedy fan at all, you won't want to miss this movie.

Resembling a hip (or hip hop) take on prime period Woody Allen, TOP FIVE is a bit uneven, and it won’t make my actual top 5 (or top 10) of movies of the year, but it’s an immensely enjoyable and heartfelt project that’s a big leap forward for Rock. Here’s hoping he builds on it – i.e. makes more ambitious and worthwhile work – instead of going back to the same ole crap.

In other words, I hope he makes like his character turning down another Hammy movie, and doesn’t take the call asking him to appear in GROWN UPS 3.

While movies like GROWN UPS and the assorted rom coms and animated films that have dominated his career of late have made me forget how crucial Rock can be, TOP FIVE really reminded me big time.

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Jason Reitman's Misguided And Meaningless MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

Opening today at an indie art house near me…

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

(Dir. Jason Reitman, 2014)

Jason Reitman’s (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR, YOUNG ADULT) latest film, a comedy drama (I hate the word “dramedy”) examination of relationships in the age of the internet based on a 2011 novel by Chad Kultgen, is easily his worst film. It’s even worse than LABOR DAY, and I hated LABOR DAY.

Just about every bit of it is misguided and poorly written, a pretentious attempt at cultural commentary that comes off like a guy complaining about everybody being addicted to screens and social media, but has nothing to say about it to say but ‘look at all these people on their devices, it’s awful.’ A rant by Bobby Moynihan’s SNL character Drunk Uncle is more profound than this.

It starts with voice-over narration by Emma Thompson telling us that while the Voyager satellite, which we see via CGI, is venturing through space carrying international music, pictures and greetings to extraterrestrial life, back on Earth, Adam Sandler is having trouble masturbating to internet porn.

Sandler, following the Robin Williams handbook by having grown a beard for this dramatic role, is an unhappily married family man who has to use his son’s computer because his computer is too infected with malware to use. Finding that his son has his own secret sex site fetish, Sandler reminiscences about how he discovered porn in his youth. Yeah, pretty creepy so far.

From there we head to the local high school (the film was shot in Austin, Texas) where we meet Kaitlyn Dever, whose mother (Jennifer Garner) obsessively monitors every instance of activity on her phone and PC, Elena Kampouris an anorexic high-school girl pining to be popular, Olivia Crocicchia, whose mother (Judy Greer) is always taking pictures and videos of in hopes of making her a star, and Ansel Elgort who gave up football for online gaming (in particular, the game “Guild Wars,” which I hadn’t heard of before).

Garner’s character is the film’s heavy, a cold, self righteous control freak who hosts an Internet Safety Parent group meeting in her home and deletes messages on her daughters account before she can see them.

While these threads weave in and out of each other, Sandler and his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), both inspired by a commercial for AshleyMadison.com that turns their heads away from their laptops in bed, begin affairs at exactly the same time, but luckily at different hotels. While Sandler hires a high price escort (Shane Lynch), DeWitt arranges a date with Dennis Haysbert, credited only as “Secretluvur.”

Meanwhile, Sandler’s son (Travis Tope) is itching to have sex with Crocicchia, who’s his partner on a class project about 9/11 (yep, they went there too), while a relationship blooms between Dever and Elgort, who’s dealing with learning (from a social networking site, of course) that his mother is remarrying. But that’s good news for Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris as Elgort’s father, who begins dating Greer. Reitman regular J.K. Simmons is also on hand as the anorexic girl's kindly father.

There’s a lot of internet meddling by parents – Greer decides that selling soft-core pictures of her daughter online isn’t such a good idea after it gets them rejected by a reality show, Norris cancels his credit card so Elgort can’t play “Guild Wars” anymore, and Garner freaks out when she finds the one site that Dever had secret (Tumblr), ransacks her room, and drives Elgort to suicide by intercepting his messages to Dever and telling him she’ll block him if he texts again.

It’s all so heavy handed and incredibly cringeworthy in its whole ‘internet bad’ statement, and overuse of bubbles for texts (or sexts), and blocks of chat cluttering up the screen. Yeah, I get that its point is that these things are cluttering up our lives, but with its flashy aesthetics and Voyager imagery, something seems off in its thematic ideal that too much technology is threatening our interactions with other people.

And Thompson’s narration so much recalls her writer role in STRANGER THAN FICTION, that I wanted the characters to yell to the heavens for her to shut up.

The film seems to oddly elaborate on a joke in Woody Allen’s 1977 Oscar winning classic ANNIE HALL in which a flashback has the 9-year old version of Allen’s character Alvy Singer explaining to his physician and mother that “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” His mother says that because of this, “He’s even stopped doing his homework,” to which the young Alvy replies “What's the point?”

Blending that cosmic comic comment on insignificance with Carl Sagan’s “Tiny Blue Dot,” which both Elgort and Thompson quote in the film, must’ve seemed like a poetic notion to Reitman, but his awful, drawn out, and uninspired execution here makes for an excruciating experience. Come back, Diablo Cody! Everything is forgiven. (YOUNG ADULT, which I was a bit mixed on initially is looking better and better every day).

In its wanting so desperately to be a movie of the moment, as well as an ensemble rom com, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is a dreadful mash-up of AMERICAN BEAUTY and CRAZY STUPID LOVE. It’s for sure, the most meaningless and hard to stomach 119 minutes I’ve spent in a theater this year. 

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As Dracula, Adam Sandler Is Required To Suck

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 

(Dir. Genndy Tartakovsky, 2012)

Those who have been waiting for a new fix of animated Adam Sandler hi-jinks - it’s been ten years since EIGHT CRAZY NIGHTS after all - will surely overdose on his hammy take on Dracula in HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, the new 3D CGI spectacle from the studio that brought you THE SMURFS.

Sandler, who also executive produced, does the typical Bela Lugosi impression for the voice of the famous vampire, except that he denies ever saying “bleh-bleh-bleh,” plays the ukulele, and can bust out a rhyme, you know, if the occasion calls for MC Dracula.

As the owner and creator of the lavish Hotel Transylvania, a vacation place only for monsters, Sandler’s Dracula is preparing for the 118th birthday of his precocious daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), when trouble arrives in the form of an airheaded backpacking teenager named Jonathan (SNL's Andy Samberg).

Dracula does what he can as an overprotective father to shield Mavis from the intruding human, but she feels what screenwriters Peter Baynham, Robert Smigel (a Sandler collaborator since their SNL days), along with director Genndy Tartakovsky who did a re-write, insist on calling a “zing” (love at first site) for the wacky kid. Not sure why, she’s a hundred years older than him and should know better than to fall for such a doofus, but, oh well.

The huge cast of supporting celebrity voices features Frankenstein's Monster (Kevin James) and his wife Eunice (a more annoying than usual Fran Drescher, but that description fits almost everybody here), Wayne and Wanda Werewolf (Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon), and the party-monster Murray the Mummy (Cee Lo Green).

There’s also Griffin the Invisible Man, voiced by Sandler’s old fellow SNL buddy David Spade, who is a good example of how each of the classic creatures are just one joke characters, and the joke isn’t funny in the first place.

In fact none of HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is funny, despite how energetic and over-the-top it is. It could have something to do with the sizable percentage of pee, poop, and fart jokes that take the place of wit. At least there’s only a few pop culture references, but the ones that are there (a Dave Matthews mention, a viewing of TWILIGHT on an iPad) are huge groaners.

The animation is fine but not especially inspired, and there’s no sense of stakes (I’m not making a vampire joke here) in the story-line, since we know Samberg’s Jonathan is no threat to anybody, and Sandler’s Dracula is really a good guy with a big heart who will see the light. Yawn.

By the way isn’t natural light supposed to kill vampires? The big over-caffeinated chase scene finale takes place in the pure sunlight of the morning, and Dracula only gets a little singed.

The ending has Samberg and Sandler show off their rap skills to a big obnoxious auto-tuned pop song, capping 90 minutes of crap aptly. My nephews (ages 8, 14, and 15), who I took to the screening, said they liked it, but I seriously doubt it will take up much space in their memory.

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FUNNY PEOPLE: The Film Babble Blog Review

FUNNY PEOPLE (Dir. Judd Apatow, 2009)



This movie is further proof of my theory that Judd Apatow wants to be a scatological James L. Brooks. 

Despite his raunchy bad boy comedy pedigree, Apatow seems, to me, to be emulating the oeuvre of the writer/director/producer famous for classic TV comedy staples like Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi (not to mention extensive work on The Simpsons) and films such as BROADCAST NEWS and AS GOOD AS IT GETS. 

In other words Apatow wants to make his own TERMS OF ENDEARMENT with dick jokes. 

Inching closer to that goal is FUNNY PEOPLE, Apatow's 3rd film as director, which may look from the marketing to be a comedy that takes dramatic turns but it is really a drama sprinkled with a lot of comic asides. Adam Sandler, Apatow's former '80's room-mate, plays a famous comedian named George Simmons who has made a lot of Adam Sandler-like stupid movies with names like "Mer-man" and "Re-do." 

Sandler lives alone in a huge mansion by the beach decorated with posters from his films and his looming loneliness. A young comic, the increasingly skinny Seth Rogen, goes quickly from a brush with celebrity moment with his idol Sandler to being his assistant and joke writer. You could be forgiven for thinking this is just another crude yet tender bromance (brom-com?) in the vein of SUPERBAD or I LOVE YOU, MAN. 

A James L. Brookian factor in this is that Sandler is diagnosed with a potentially fatal blood disorder. Rogen is the only one he's told and the tears start flowing (onscreen that is) when the comic upstart implores his mentor to tell the world of his sickness. There's also the matter of, as Sandler says onstage: "There is always the one girl out there that got away...the one that got away. Guys have that and serial killers have that." 

That comes in the form of former flame (Apatow's wife Leslie Mann) that our ill protagonist obviously still pines for. She's married (Eric Bana plays her amusing Australian husband) with children (Apatow and Mann's daughters Iris and Maude) but she still holds a candle for Sandler. The film then goes from the more interesting world of stand-up comedy, to a less interesting near farce in a Marin County suburban home-set, and in the process, loses its ground.



There are many laughs and genuinely funny people (including Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, and cameos from just about every working comedian in LA) in FUNNY PEOPLE but at 2 hours 26 minutes its way too long with a dragging 3rd act. That's another reason it's not a comedy; the unwritten rule that comedies should be around 90 minutes. As such, I could've done with more of the backstabbing egos backstage at comedy clubs crux than the 'will they/won't they get back together' relationship rigmarole overall.

There's also that long running complaint with comedies about all the best jokes being in the trailers and commercials and that's all too true here. The drama is what's left, and there's a lot of it so take note. Still, I bet it'll be an appealing DVD down the road with an unrated cut, tons of outtakes, extended scenes that are funnier that what's in the movie, and a crowded cut loose commentary like all Apatow productions have. So even as a mixed bag of a dramedy (or whatever you want to call it) Apatow still makes with the yuk yuks - I just hope next time he gives us more laughs and less pathos. 

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A Couple Of New Release DVDs: SECRET WINDOW, BAD SANTA, & 50 FIRST DATES

Now out on DVD:

SECRET WINDOW
(Dir. David Koepp, 2004)

Johnny Depp plays a tortured suspense novelist named Mort Rainey (credit there for having a protagonist named Mort) accused of plagiarism in this adaptation of a Stephen King short story. 

A strange hillbilly character (John Turturro) shows up at Depp's door claiming that Mort stole his story and threatens Mort's and his love one's lives if he doesn't change the ending and give him proper credit. Mort (sorry I just love typing that name) is tortured because his wife of 10 years (Maria Bello) left him for a straight laced never smiling Timothy Hutton who himself played a tortured writer in King's THE DARK HALF but I digress.

So Mort's dog is found dead and he goes to the local police who of course are ineffective and he wanders around his cabin in the woods overreacting and over-acting to every startling sound. I'm not going to give anything away but the resolution of this is so contrived and ridiculous that it brought back memories of IDENTITY or as I like to call it, A NIGHT AT THE RED HERRING MOTEL.

It's getting harder and harder to accept movie premises in which any given character may be a figment of someone's imagination and that certain incidents may never have occured at all. "The ending is the most important part" Mort says at one point and he's he right - it surely was important to me when this piece of derivative doggerel was going to end.

Special Features: Commentary by Director Koepp, trailers, deleted scenes, a few featurettes, and storyboards.

BAD SANTA
(Dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2003)

Director Zwigoff and star Billy Bob Thornton are slumming it here, but, oh, what a glorious slum it is. 

Thornton plays a boozing foul-mouthed department store Santa who with his little person partner in crime (Tony Cox) have a consistent seasonal scam going in which they break into the safes of the stores that employ them. When Thornton befriends a chubby brain-dead rich kid (Brett Kelly out credited as "The Kid") who believes he's the real Kris Kringle, our perpetually pissed-off title character finds that his heart grows a half a size bigger.

John Ritter, Bernie Mac, Lauren Graham, and an un-credited Cloris Leachman provide ample comic support, in this funny film that shows that Twigoff's  first foray into more commercial territory has just as much edge as his earlier artsier efforts (CRUMB, GHOST WORLD). No doubt the Coen brothers, who executive produced and reportedly did some script doctoring, helped with that transition.

BAD SANTA is good crude stuff that brings to mind other enjoyable lowbrow fare like SHAKES THE CLOWN and RUTHLESS PEOPLE. It's a future cult movie if there ever was one.

The bonus material on the DVD is basic but welcome: a behind-the-scenes feature, deleted & alternate scenes, and outtakes. An "Unrated Edition" is also available.

50 FIRST DATES
(Dir. Peter Segel, 2003)

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore try to work their WEDDING SINGER-style magic in this tropical romantic comedy about a guy having to re-win the heart of his love every day as her memory is erased every night while she sleeps. It's a convoluted premise with very little imagination and the usual cheap humor (sloppy scatalogical gags, strained physical antics, Rob Schneider, etc.) found in a Sandler flick. It does have some genuine heart to it so there are people who may like it but to most film buff folks it will be erased from memory while they sleep.

Special features: Gag reel, deleted scenes, "Making of" featurette, music videos, and Talkin' Pidgin featurette (whatever that is).

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