Ten Statements About....HAPPY GILMORE (1996)

"I'm Adam Sandler...and I'm Product Placement's Little Bitch.."

"Just stay out of my way... or you'll pay! LISTEN to what I say!"
"Hey, why don't I just go eat some hay, make things out of clay, lay by the bay? I just may! What'd ya say?"

1) I think the saddest thing about this film isn't that it's arguably the best film Adam Sandler has done on his own (as opposed to those films, like Punch Drunk Love, where Sandler is an actor in a project conceived by someone else), but that the best film he did on his own was only his second film overall.

2) ...and another sad thing is how the Sandler formula is firmly in place this early. There's still some wiggle room, but all the earmarks of a 'classic' Sandler movie are there: the shameless product placement, the grotesque supporting characters (many played by his former peers on Saturday Night Live), the cameos by sports figures (what the Hell is rationale behind Lee Trevino sorta stalking Happy and shaking his head?), the awkward romantic arcs....

3) but one of the things that does make this film work is how Happy actually has a character arc that he completes. In the opening montage we are presented with his character flaw, a character virtue (his love of his grandmother), and a physical problem he needs to solve by overcoming his psychological problem (regaining his grandmother's house). We're also given small indicators that Happy has positive character traits, as when he sticks up for the homeless man at the country club and hiring him as his caddy. It's these things that are usually missing from present day Sandler films, and it give us identification with him and reasons to root for him.

Adam Sandler may be making all the cash...but the guy on
the left is the true star of this film

4) God bless Christopher MacDonald, who is to the 90's what William Atherton was to the 80's--namely the perfect asshole-as-comic-foil. His Shooter McGavin is so absolutely smarmy and nasty he actually invests us with even more of a desire to see Happy win. And even better, none of his plans to thwart Happy are unrealistic; because they're the sort of thing you imagine a golf pro would think of, it enforce the reality of the world, even with the unrealistic elements contained within.

5) ...and speaking of unrealistic elements, I have much love for Carl Weathers for taking a silly grotesque caricature in Chubs and making him into a three-dimensional human being that genuinely cares for Happy and his talent. Having him disappear about halfway through for the sake of another Lee Trevino gag (at a point where the non-sequitorial nature of Trevino stalking and disapproving of Happy has begun to wear) is a shame, but while we've got him he manages to help carry Sandler when he's clearly incapable of carrying a movie.

6) Man, is the product placement dripping off this film. Every single one of the stops of the tour is sponsored by a different company, whose symbol is plastered all over the place (I particularly cringed at the Pepsi ball that seems to have been placed for no reason whatsoever next to Happy and Bob Barker save to remind us who paid for this scene to be shot)...and then we get the insane Subway product placement, which includes not only a mock commercial, but actual lines of dialogue insisting that it's the one thing that makes Happy...well, happy, and an obtrusive t-shirt he wears throughout the third act.

I admit it...I post this picture because it makes me laugh
inappropriately...make up your own caption....

7) The main reason I decided to dig this out of my collection is the presence of Julie Bowen, who plays Happy's romantic interest Virginia. Bowen's still at the beginning of her career, where she has yet to grow into her face....and she has the weakest character arc. It's like the script sets up obstacles, yet doesn't figure out how Happy can overcome them--so they just gloss over them to move onto the next plot point. Bowen does what she can with this thankless role, although she can not hide its very artifice.

8) While I know Bob Barker's extended cameo is usually the one everyone remembers, the one I think works the best--to my surprise, given how much I disliked him when he was on SNL--is Kevin Nealon's new-age golf pro. Not only is the advice he gives genuinely amusing in its gobbley-gookiness, his supportive reaction to Happy's behavior adds as perfect punctuation to the scene itself. Why future cameos aren't nearly as effective in Sandler's films is baffling.

9) While I appreciate Joe Flaherty's presence in the film, his is another role where the script kind of doesn't know what to do with him after the initial sequence with him. When he does show up a second time, totaling his car in such a way that it sets up the final set piece, the script doesn't allow it to follow the character to his logical conclusion--namely Flaherty, either consciously or inadvertently, helping to confirm Shooter's duplicity.

10) While he does aquit himself well in the film, there's still a sadness at seeing Richard Keel in here playing one of Happy's former bosses. He looks pretty ragged even at this point, where he's still mobile...and knowing how his body was about to complete its rebellion against him, well....

Overall...it's aged a little badly, its adherence to what we now know is The Sandler Formula damns it a little bit more, and yet it still has a capacity to make me laugh at spots.

Ten Statements About....RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS (1994)

"Back off!  You may not realize this now, but the girl behind
me is going to be a comedy star in about fifteen years!"

"We should actually do this more often."

"What--get pregnant or steal a car?"

1) Dear Joe Dante--we get that this is set in the 50's, and you really dig the time period. We don't need to be reminded of that fact every five minutes.

2) Julie Bowen is one of those actors who seemed to need a couple of years to grow into her face. This is one of her first feature roles (albeit one made for Showtime as part of that weird package where Miramax took the names of famous American International films, gave them to popular film directors and asked them to build new movies around them), and the baby fat on her 24 year old form conceals the angularity that gives her a talent for physical comedy as she gets older. It also doesn't help that she should be playing Jenny Lewis' tough girl part, as her attempt at being the good girl who wants to be baaaad doesn't quite come off right.



3) I really wonder about Dick Miller's Roy Farrell. Miller plays the private eye extremely straight--and does so so well I almost regret his never having the chance to play serious roles in his later years. But the scenes themselves seem to play out as parodies. This creates a weird sense that Farrell is the only person who knows what's going on, which works in the context of the film...but I wonder if it would be more effective if Miller and Dante were on the same page.



"I get it...META!"

4) Seriously...did people really talk like this in the 50's, namechecking so many significant historical elements in that casual-but-not-really way? Maybe it's the actors involved, but some of these scene come off as so artificial it's wingeworthy, especially when Chris Young's Bob seduces Holly Field's Mary by feeding her a line about Sputnik. I've always heard stories similar to this (the incident involved was the Bay of Pigs Invasion, but the rest of it is unchanged), but wondered if they were apocryphal. So much of this film is composed of dialogue like this that seems written, and written by someone whose view of the 50's is filtered through 70's filtered nostalgia.

5) There's this very weird moment toward the end of the film where, after pretty much everything in the film is played for hijinks more or less, two men get accidentally slaughtered. And it gets even weirder when, after we've absorbed the fact that two friendly men who were helping our heroines have been shot, we're then treated to a scene of those same three girls whooping and hollering with joy because they find out the murdered men weren't killed because they were mistaken for kidnappers, but because they were actually 'mad dog killers'....what. the. fuck.

6) While some of the cameos are exceptionally, muggably silly (I think John Astin is a swell actor, but I can do without him literally bugging his eyes and chewing on his mustache while accusing our heroines of being communists), one I did enjoy was Cathy Moriarity's Marie. Whereas so many of the cameo performers here tend to head immediately for over-the-top territory, Moriarity underplays it and gives us a sensitive performance that makes you realize that she genuinely loves the goof we saw a few minutes before and sees herself as the guiding hand--allowing her husband to do what he wishes while gently steering him away from dangerous behavior. It's a wonderful scene, and one that drives home what a good actress Moriarity was.

"I thought I heard someone speaking French over there...

7) With the exception of Moriarity and Miller, the adults in this movie are thunderingly stupid. I know this is a commentary on how the parents behaved in those American International pictures, but given how so much of the film is couched in a realistic tone, the idiocy of the adult characters just doesn't make sense.

8) You'll notice I haven't brought up the big 'guy who would go on to be great' role...namely Paul Rudd's turn as Bowen's boyfriend. The weirdest thing about Rudd, who is very clearly a generic rebel without a clue, is how he seems to have wandered in from the western flick shooting across the street.

9) This is a very top heavy script by Charlie Haas. Once our heroic trio is on the road, the film gets very episodic (the girls are almost raped by idiotic deputies! The girls steal a car! The girls have to negotiate with a creepy fat guy to get a replacement car! The girls encounter survivalists!)....until everyone realizes they've only got a small handful of minutes left, resulting in an ending that seems so rushed it's running a 100 yard sprint.

10) I get it that Dante set this version in 1956 because the original film was set in 1956...but there's no reason for the film to be set therein. It seems to draw attention to the artifice of the plot and narrative--perhaps precisely because it's sold as an 'innocent' period piece when we know the 50's were not innocent at all.

Overall...a curio in the career of Dante that comes off as rather bland and uninteresting.