Ranking ten years of Happy Madison on Netflix

In writing my review of Happy Gilmore 2, which will be up tomorrow, I thought I'd mention the approximately decade-long deal Adam Sandler has had with Netflix. And then when I looked it up, I discovered it isn't approximately ten years, it's almost exactly ten years, give or take a couple months. 

The Ridiculous 6 -- which was the first movie in the deal between Netflix and Sandler's production company, Happy Madison -- hit the streamer on December 11, 2015. Since then, many if not most of Sandler's obligations have been Netflix-related, even if he himself hasn't appeared in all the movies. 

Yes he's gotten time out to do things like act for the Safdie brothers in Uncut Gems, and Benny Safdie returns the favor by appearing in HG 2. The Hotel Transylvania movies are also not related. 

For the most part, though, Sandler has been Netflix's bitch for ten years now, being involved in some way, shape or form with 16 movies released by his production company and distributed by Netflix.

Now typically, if I were going to rank a certain type of movie based on some sort of milestone -- I've most often done this with directors, but there have been other ways of lumping like things together -- the following two criteria would usually be met:

1) That I'm a completist on the movies that fit the description of whatever I'm ranking;

2) That the movies I'm ranking are, for the most part, good.

The Happy Madison movies with Netflix do not satisfy either criterion. However, I decided to write this post anyway.

But not before I took Saturday night to see where it all began.

Apparently, I was highly suspicious of these films, as I did not see any of the first five of them. Those are, including release dates:

The Ridiculous 6 - December 11, 2015
The Do-Over - May 27, 2016
Sandy Wexler - April 14, 2017
The Week Of - April 27, 2018
Father of the Year - July 20, 2018

Strangely, after whiffing on these first five, I have then seen every other movie the company has subsequently released to Netflix, 11 in total, up to and including Happy Gilmore 2. 

I figured, might as well make it an even dozen and see just how bad The Ridiculous 6 really is -- the film famously received a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, one of only a few films to do so -- which is what I did on Saturday night, having watched Happy 2 on Friday. 

I won't specifically set aside a section of this post to tell you my thoughts on that movie. Instead, I thought I would just touch on it during its blurb within my rankings, which are below.

I thought of going worst to best, to build toward the big reveal, but you know what? With these movies, which are not widely known for their quality, the thing you're building toward is really the worst one, not the best, am I right? 

So here they are, listed in order from best to 12th best: 

1. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023, Sammi Cohen) - Nepotism has been a major element of the Happy Madison movie, and usually a limiting part of the Happy Madison movie, ever since Sandler first cast his wife Jackie in The Benchwarmers in 2006, which appears to be her first role after they married in 2003. (The first role where she appeared as Jackie Sandler rather than Jackie Titone). So I was not expecting that a movie where all the major stars were his own family would be the best of these movies. YASNITMBM makes such good use of Sandler's daughter Sunny in the lead role that I was genuinely surprised when her role in Happy Gilmore 2 amounted to almost nothing, while her older sister has the larger role as Happy's AA sponsor. Anyway, Sunny Sandler is great in this smartly observed and executed coming of age story that made my top 30 of 2023, and I hope she'll get another chance to shine in one of the company's upcoming projects -- or even better, someone else's project.

2. Murder Mystery (2019, Kyle Newacheck) - It might have only been being on vacation in Hawaii that made watching this movie so intoxicating for my wife and me, but we were charmed as hell by Sandler and Jennifer Aniston -- and watching it on the lanai in the place were staying in Maui certainly did not hurt. I don't need to try to match the word count from my previous entry on this one. I'll just say that this movie really works for what it's trying to do and is fun and funny. 

3. Happy Gilmore 2 (2025, Kyle Newacheck) - This might be better than the other Kyle Newacheck film I just wrote about, but I'll push back against recency bias and give the nod to Murdery Mystery. In my not-yet-posted review I said that this repeats the shaggy charm of the original, and that's a good place for this movie to be. An old Happy Gilmore beaten down by life works for the ethos of what is now, I suppose, a franchise, and I'd more than welcome a Happy Gilmore 3. The cameos from real golfers are some of the funniest bits, and Scottie Scheffler might have a future in this business if he ever gets tired of being the best golfer in the world. 

4. Hustle (2022, Jeremiah Zagar) - The only Happy Madison film with Netflix (that I've seen anyway) that does not really profile as a comedy. This is a fairly mid sports movie as far as I'm concerned, but it's made well and has good performances, which easily elevates it above most of the rest of the crap I am about to talk about. 

5. The Ridiculous 6 (2015, Frank Coraci) - So if I had been a critic whose work is tabulated on Rotten Tomatoes and I had seen this in 2015, I would have broken its perfectly imperfect 0% score. Or maybe it takes being ten years removed in order to appreciate The Ridiculous 6. This is a very silly move, and that's the point. It's right there in the title. Ridiculous 6 gives me Mel Brooks vibes, and it's way better than the similarly themed A Million Ways to Die in the West. My star rating of three is the lowest you can give a movie and still recommend it, but it makes the cut. I'll be damned if I wasn't grinning through the whole scene where John Turturro as Abner Doubleday is making up the rules of baseball as he plays with our heroes, arbitrarily making choices because they benefit him in the moment, and Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain is oddly inspired. The movie has about two dozen funny people you like, even respectable ones like Will Forte, Steve Zahn and Terry Crews, and I just can't understand why a whole critical community was breathlessly offended by this movie.

6. Leo (2023, Robert Smigel, Robert Marianetti & David Wachtenheim) - Sandler's Hotel Transylvania movies don't have anything to do with Happy Madison, but the company has dabbled in animation, which is this film about a lizard and a turtle (voiced by Sandler and Bill Burr) who are the pets in an elementary school classroom. I had high hopes for this one but it just didn't work for me. It's not bad but it didn't give me all that much. The rest of the movies I'm going to discuss are actually bad. 

I should pause here to acknowledge the huge, huge dropoff in quality between #6 and #7. I pretty much hate the second half of this list.

7. Home Team (2022, Charles & Daniel Kinnane) - When a movie that lets former NFL coach Sean Payton off the hook for his participation in a real-world scheme to injure opposing players, and then even saves room for a tone-deaf cameo from him, is the best of the final six movies we're talking about, you know this is a bad group. There isn't much at all positive I can say about Home Team, only that I gave this movie a 3/10 when I reviewed it, and would not have been that kind to any of the remaining five -- and was not, for those that I actually did review.

8. The Wrong Missy (2022, Tyler Spindel) - What's the next least bad out of this truly rotten bunch? I guess the winner is The Wrong Missy, but that's primarily because I know a few people who like it and whatever brief words of praise they may have given it have rubbed off on me in some infinitesimal way. But I was really put off by both the way this movie makes the ancient David Spade the object of about three different attractive women's interests, and especially put off by the over-the-top performance of Lauren Lapkus. 

9. Kinda Pregnant (2025, Tyler Spindel) - I suppose there's a chance that Kinda Pregnant -- which also features Will Forte -- is better than The Wrong Missy. During the last third of this movie, I started to try to tell myself that it might be okay, or more okay than I was giving it credit for. I tend to give Amy Schumer the benefit of the doubt whenever I can. But when I think about this film now, I think "No, I don't like it." But it is definitely better than the last three I have yet to mention. 

10. Murder Mystery 2 (2023, Jeremy Garelick) - How do I know Murder Mystery 2 is better than the last two of the 12 Happy Madison Netflix movies I've seen? Because it finished only fifth from the bottom in my year-end rankings, while each of the other two finished dead last in their respective years. Since that is not perfectly an apples-to-apples comparison, it did give me pause for a moment. But then I realized that I still like the pairing of Sandler and Aniston enough that it earns the movie a few sympathy points just on that basis. Other than that, absolutely everything good about Murder Mystery gets frittered away here, rather quickly.

11. The Out-Laws (2022, Tyler Spindel). Ugh this movie. Ugh Tyler Spindel, who directed three of the last four movies I've mentioned, and would have been a lot lower in my director rankings in this post if I could have already tallied Kinda Pregnant as part of his total. Ugh also to Adam DeVine, who I adored in Modern Family, and then have pretty much hated ever since because he's been in so many movies like this one. (Dishonorable mentions: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates and Game Over, Man!, also a last-place finisher back in 2018.) DeVine robs a bank dressed in a Shrek costume in this movie. Need I say more?

12. Hubie Halloween (2020, Steven Brill) - Is Hubie Halloween really as bad as all this? It couldn't possibly be, I tell myself. Like The Ridiculous 6, it boasts a huge ensemble cast of funny people I basically like. But I'm just so dead-set against Sandler playing a simpleton, as he does in another of my least favorite Sandler movies, The Waterboy. Nothing about the conception or execution of this movie works in the slightest, and I felt terrible for all those members of that ensemble cast. A miss is a miss, a turd is a turd, and Hubie Halloween is both. 

So I've spent some time here shitting on some movies that starred Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and Jackie Sandler. And some others that didn't feature any of them. Some pot shots were definitely taken.

But you know what?

The good news about this is that I have just finished a weekend in which I watched two Happy Madison Netflix movies that I liked. In fact, I liked them enough that I am inspired to catch up with the other four, all from 2016 to 2018, that I haven't seen.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in 2025. But when I've just watched the one that, by all statistical measures, should have been the worst, and actually liked it, well then, what right do I have to prejudge The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler, The Week Of or Father of the Year?

After all, completism is completism. And I do likes me some completism. 

I may even come back and tell you what I think once I've watched them.

Only avoiding Sandler's Netflix deal for so long

I didn't see The Ridiculous Six.

I didn't see The Do Over.

I didn't see Sandy Wexler.

I didn't see The Week Of.

I didn't see Father of the Year.

I did see Murder Mystery, but since Jennifer Aniston was there classing up the joint, I didn't think of it as finally seeing my first movie produced by Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions under its many-film deal with Netflix.

That finally happened, undoubtedly and indubitably, when I pulled up on Wednesday night -- on "opening night," at that -- for The Wrong Missy.

Sandler's face does not appear in this movie, though the faces of all his cronies, as I wrote in my review, do. You've got your David Spade, you've got your Rob Schneider, you've got your Jonathan Loughran. (Look him up. You'll recognize him.) And of course then you've got Sandler's wife, Jackie, who has appeared in just about every single Happy Madison production ... and nothing else.

I could have kept the streak going, and in fact would have under normal times. But these are not normal times. I'm reviewing two out of every three new movies released to Netflix while there are no alternatives being released to movie theaters. In fact, the only reason I'm not reviewing all of them is if they get bunched up in a particular week and I just don't have time. I mean, I have to watch things other than just new Netflix movies, you know.

In a way, it has represented a kind of oversight, that I've been avoiding these Sandler movies. I make it sort of a mission as a film critic to sample and review a little bit of everything from every possible genre, subgenre, studio, budget level, or pocket of cinema, however you want to define that. Sandler's Happy Madison movies have certainly become a pocket of cinema unto themselves -- a largely disappointing pocket, but not exclusively disappointing, even recently. (In fact, I had a limited fondness for Murder Mystery.)

But I'll exchange my usual completist tendencies for having missed some of the most godawful filmmaking of the last five years. I assume, anyway.

The Wrong Missy reminded me what I've been, er, missying. I tried to give it the same benefit of the doubt any critic should, I really did. I thought, "I've enjoyed David Spade in things before" and I thought, "Lauren Lapkus can be a funny performer."

But no, this movie is just bad. It is kind of a poster child for what Happy Madison is: lazy, easy comedy meant to be filmed quickly in order to pocket the profits quickly. And since Sandler had already pocketed the profits, the quicker it could be filmed, the better. (I invite you to follow the above link to my review if you want a more detailed takedown.)

There are actually some films Sandler has made over the years that I've really liked, and not just the ones everybody else likes (Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems). I have a fondness for Click, for example. I'll also go to bat for the Hotel Transylvania movies.

But it seems like Sandler has been content for a long time to do the least possible, at the expense of his good name, or a name that used to be at least somewhat closer to good. He may be having a laugh at Netflix's expense, taking the money and running as an attempt to play the corporate giant for a fool. But he can't do so without it tarnishing whatever reputation he once had.

Well, there's always Hubie Halloween this autumn.

I probably won't see it.

But then again, if the theaters aren't open yet, maybe I'll be there on opening night.

Respecting the new distribution channels

It takes a lot for an old curmudgeon like me to change my ways/rules about something, especially when it comes to something as sacred as my year-end movie lists.

But even old fogeys sometimes have to wake up to the changing cinematic landscape and incorporate it into their manner of viewing the world.

Used to be -- in fact, it was up until now -- that I would only allow movies onto my year-end list if they played theatrically in the year in question. They didn't have to play theatrically in the United States -- that's a change I've also reluctantly made, since moving to Australia -- but they at least had to play theatrically somewhere. Festival environments don't count, unless it was me that saw it at that festival. Such as The Witch at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival. Even then, though, I knew The Witch would play theatrically, it just hadn't done so yet. So that made things easier.

So-called straight-to-video? It got left off my year-end list, if I even deigned to watch it at all.

But Netflix and other streaming services are changing how we think about the previously unbridgeable gap between cinematic releases and video releases. Twenty fifteen was a big year in that regard, as Netflix debuted its first film to which it had the exclusive distribution rights: Beasts of No Nation. Beasts threatened to cause me to have this internal discussion back then, but let me off the hook by actually getting a nominal theatrical release in order to qualify for awards consideration. (Which worked, as Idris Elba actually received a Golden Globe nomination.) But one of its next prominent exclusive releases, the Adam Sandler ensemble comedy The Ridiculous 6, received no such corresponding theatrical release (since, as might be assumed, no award nominations were expected for it, except possibly the Golden Raspberries). In large part because I didn't know what to do with that movie vis-a-vis my year-end list -- but also because I knew it probably sucked -- I just skipped it.

But it's a brand new year now, and Netflix figures to give us dozens of exclusive features this year, if its massive commitment to its own television shows is any indication. And Adam Sandler makes kind of an instructional case study in how we should start to consider this content, formerly stigmatized as merely straight-to-video. In the past there was the assumption that if something went straight to video, it was because there was not sufficient demand for it to get released theatrically, nor a sufficient assumed quality about it. Nowadays, though, big stars are committing to deals to have their movies released exclusively on the small screen. Not that Sandler is anyone's idea of a guy at the peak of his career, but his movies still generally make money at the box office, and you'd assume they'd continue to do so. Instead, Netflix snapped him up, meaning his next four movies would be exclusive to the streaming service, starting with Ridiculous 6 and continuing with The Do-Over, which is set to premiere a month from tomorrow.

So it seems useful to start thinking of Netflix as more than just a dumping ground for unwanted movies. I mean, I don't think anyone ever thought of it that way -- but they definitely thought of movies that didn't get theatrical releases as garbage looking for a dumping ground. Netflix has worked overtime to demonstrate that its content represents a certain level of prestige, even if Sandler himself has never had that word associated with him. He has been A-list, and that's what Netflix wants -- an A-list status.

That brings us to the movie I watched last night. Mike Flanagan's Hush played at this year's South by Southwest film festival, then was picked up by Netflix and debuted on the streaming service less than a month after its March 12th world premiere. It seems like this is going to be an increasingly common distribution model. The film has a 67 Metascore (though I didn't like it at all), so it's obviously not just somebody's trash being dumped as quickly as possible. In fact, the mere fact that it has a Metascore lends it a certain legitimacy in and of itself. Netflix looked at this movie and thought that it would work for their demographic (which is computed by all that metadata they get from their users), so they scooped it up and made it available to viewers as soon as possible.

In the olden days, I would have discounted this movie as straight-to-video and just never given it a second thought, much less a viewing. I mean, it definitely won't qualify for the Oscars this year, another loose determining factor in the films that qualify for my year-end list. But nowadays, I think I'm forced to accept it as just as legitimate as another trashy horror that plays in theaters for two weeks and slinks away with heaps of critical scorn and a 19 Metascore. Hush's director, Mike Flanagan, directed Oculus, a horror I loved from two years ago that definitely played theaters, and the film also features John Gallagher Jr., star of such mainstream films as Short Term 12 and 10 Cloverfield Lane. (He likes movies with numbers in the title, apparently.) If it walks like a duck, then gosh darn it, I guess it is one.

So you'll be seeing Hush on my 2016 year-end list. You won't see it very high on that list, but if you go down far enough, you'll find it.

I don't know that I'm swinging the gates open wide. Like, I still don't know if I'm going to watch any of Sandler's Netflix movies this year. But at least now I'm open to considering the applications of these movies for inclusion among the esteemed (or not so esteemed) ranks of the films I list from #1 to #whatever at the end of each year.

Whether that helps them or not is another question, but there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

I guess when you're a blog that reaches as few readers as mine does, there's no such thing as bad anything.

More bad movies by good directors

The second movie I watched in the past week for purely masochistic reasons was The Cobbler.

It was better than Accidental Love. But then again, the director of Accidental Love actually took his name off of it, which can't be said for this one.

I knew from the concept that the movie seemed ridiculous. The Cobbler stars Adam Sandler as a Brooklyn cobbler who discovers an old stitching machine in the basement of his shop, which was owned by his father. When a pair of shoes are stitched up with this machine, the person who wears them can temporarily transform, physically, into the owner of the shoes. So when Sandler for some reason tries on a pair of shoes he just stitched up for a gang banger, he discovers to his surprise that he turns into that gang banger -- appearance-wise -- for the period of time he's actually wearing the shoes.

Got it?

On the surface this sounds like some high concept comedy along the lines of what Sandler has made in the past, such as Click. However, learning who directed it, I realized it was likely to be far more of a misfire.

That's right, this film is directed by Thomas McCarthy, who I guess is now going by Tom McCarthy -- perhaps that's his version of David O. Russell calling himself Stephen Greene for Accidental Love. If that name doesn't ring a bell -- which wouldn't be entirely surprising, as it's a pretty generic name -- McCarthy is the critically acclaimed director of the features The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win. He originally made his name as an actor, appearing in the final season of The Wire among other projects, which also distinguishes him among today's field of working directors.

McCarthy is good at a lot of things -- I love both The Visitor and Win Win -- but I seriously doubted his ability to make a concept like The Cobbler work. Tom Shadyac, Dennis Dugan or Frank Coraci, maybe. McCarthy? No.

Indeed, it doesn't work, and indeed, I kind of knew that going in, as the film was basically dumped with little fanfare and had been greeted with howls by certain parts of the critical establishment. (Its Metascore is only 22.)

What I didn't know, and could never have guessed, was that it would be weirdly racist.

Just from watching it, I got that kind of itchy, icky feeling of racism, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I was more focused on the truly odd concept, especially when this film has kind of the surface appearance of one of Sandler's recent dramatic turns -- an idea supported by the guy directing the movie, whose funniest movies have still been only seriocomic in tone.

But a viewer on Metacritic who awarded it a zero crystallized that ickiness I felt in his own brief review. So, with compliments to TheRealMcCoy, let me explain how weirdly racist this movie is.

Some spoilers to follow.

Sandler has exactly three black customers bring him shoes.

The first is the aforementioned criminal -- who I'm calling a gang banger in what may be my own possible bit of accidental profiling, but who may just be your garden variety criminal. He's played by Method Man, and though he's got a big smile on his face in this picture, that's a decidedly less typical moment. Machismo and intimidation are his more familiar modes, and it turns out he's into some high-level stuff, as well as some good old spousal abuse. When Sandler is in the guise of this character, Leon Ludlow, he comes across a scene where Leon's cohorts are torturing a guy who ripped them off, and also comes home to the wife or girlfriend who accuses him of beating her. This is not great stuff, but what they do with it is even worse. As Leon, Sandler displays mercy on the tortured turncoat -- who, problematically, is also white -- as well as apologizing to the beaten spouse. The unfortunate suggestion is that only this white cobbler can countermand the criminal and violent instincts of this black thug.

The second is the guy you would cast specifically if you are trying to balance the borderline (or not so borderline) racist portrayal of your primary antagonist. It's this guy, a character actor named Wayne Wilderson, who I have seen plenty before (among other things, he was "the convict" in that great episode of The Office where Michael Scott profiles this clean-cut guy based on the fact that he spent some time in prison). Just to show you how opposite this guy is to Leon Ludlow, the never-named character is listed as "Young Preppy Guy" on IMDB. So what do they actually choose to do with this character? They have him go eat an expensive meal at a restaurant, then go to the bathroom and change out of his shoes, so he emerges as Sandler and can slip right out without paying. That's right, even though they had a half-dozen characters they could have chosen from based on the shoes Sandler had already stitched, most of the others of which are white, they chose this black character to skip out on a check at a restaurant. It's Sandler's character doing it, of course, but he as a character -- and by extension, the movie -- has chosen to reinforce a pernicious stereotype.

The last character is an unambiguously saintly boy, seen here. He's Miles J. Harvey, and he's fat. The character always claims that he's not fat, that he's just big-boned, but nonetheless, our takeaway is that he has bulked up on McDonald's fast food as a result of being unable to control his appetite. And progressiveness wins again.

The only other black characters in the film are Leon's cohorts (though some of them are other races, if I recall correctly).

Taken in combination, it just looks bad. And more than that it looks clueless. It's not like the film is not conscious of potential drawbacks to the way it portrays blacks. Rather, it's conscious of that possibility, but then tries to address it in moronic ways that makes the problem worse.

But really, to get hung up on the fact that The Cobbler is sort of racist overlooks the bigger problem that it's just a bad movie.

Let's hope McCarthy gets himself figured out next time. Sandler, on the other hand, will probably never figure it out.

Turn that expression back on thyself, Sandler

It's here. Today's the day.

The most notorious film of 2011 is hitting theaters.

That's right, if you are a self-hating masochist, you could actually go out to the movies this weekend and see Jack and Jill, in all its loathesomeness.

But just look into Adam Sandler's eyes. Is he trying to tell you not to?

I'd like to think that. But I don't, really. I think Adam Sandler has nothing but contempt for his audience, and the more tickets he sells to Jack and Jill, the more he will laugh at us.

I can just imagine the theoretical writer's room where this "idea" was hashed out. Imagine the following line of dialogue in Sandler's voice:

"Hey, I got this idea where I'll play twins. It doesn't really matter what happens, I'll just dress up in drag and I'll be my twin sister. It'll be funny. I'll do a funny woman's voice or something. We can call it, I don't know, Jack and Jill. Something like that. It writes itself."

Lazy, lazy, wretched, lazy.

There are lots of ways I could describe this awful train wreck, but today I'd like to focus on that facial expression the male Sandler wears in this poster above.

It's an expression that Sandler has kind of made his trademark. Let's call it the "Why I oughtta" expression. In the "Why I oughtta" expression, Sandler displays his bemused frustration with some kind of instigating factor -- most likely, a person who annoys him, and in this case, his twin sister Jill. He's had it up to here, and it's all he can do to keep himself from hauling off and cold-cocking that person. The "Why I oughtta" expression is usually followed by some kind of muttered threat that's tossed off rather lazily and not written very cleverly.

What's most insulting about this expression is that it seems to give Sandler the moral high ground. It implies that he, Sandler, is above the fray. He's not only the guy we identify with, because we would also be annoyed in that scenario, but he's even better than that guy. He's some cool customer who has the misfortune of being surrounded by idiots.

But Sandler, you're the idiot.

It's tempting to think that you have enough money to stop making the most obvious, uninspired dreck that occurs to you. Funny People was not a perfect film, but it had the benefit of seeming to apologize for your past choices that were beneath what you're capable of doing. And we've seen what you're capable of doing, in films like Funny People and Punch-Drunk Love. I don't recall the actual spoof films your Funny People character supposedly appeared in, but they're ridiculous, and are clearly meant to take yourself to task for your indiscriminate career choices.

By then proceeding to make Jack and Jill, it's the same as if Tracy Morgan actually made Who Dat Ninja? or Sherlock Homie. Those are the fake movie posters that hang on the dressing room wall of his 30 Rock alter ego, Tracy Jordan.

Now, there is one factor I'm not properly considering. It's possible that Sandler is laughing at us, but not in the way we think. It has been suggested that Jack and Jill could be an intentional case of self-parody -- one of those fake Sandler movies in Funny People actually come to life. This could be an Andy Kaufman moment for Sandler, where he is thumbing his nose at the entire film establishment. If so, it's brilliant, because he would have had to dupe a bunch of studio execs into thinking he legitimately wanted to make this movie. Otherwise, they'd never go for a concept that has every chance to make them looking like laughingstocks.

But I don't know, I kind of doubt it. With other recent films like Grown-Ups and Just Go With It under his belt, it's clear Sandler legitimately does not know how to pick 'em.

Still, it could end up being a win-win situation for Sandler, if he's able to write that narrative in retrospect. If Jack and Jill is a success -- and its 24 Metascore suggests it probably won't be -- he can just take credit. If it flops, he can say that it was intentional self-parody, and he'll still have the last laugh ... if people buy it.

Me, I guess I should thank Sandler for making Jack and Jill, because Jack and Jill is directly responsible for my new banner atop the page. About a month ago I put up a new banner, as you probably noticed, and I only know about this image of George C. Scott covering his eyes with disbelief because of Sandler's new movie. If you haven't already seen it -- and can stand to expose yourself to the trailer for Jack and Jill once more -- you should check out this great video of Scott watching the Jack and Jill trailer.



Of course, the actual footage of Scott is from a movie called Hardcore, which I haven't seen, but which I now must. By featuring a frustrated audience member, this still seemed perfect for my blog ... more perfect than a closeup of Ben Wishaw's nose from Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, anyway. (Aha! So that's what that was!)

For the sake of Sandler's soul -- which I really do want to like -- I hope that Jack and Jill is, in fact, self-parody.

Because if you're trying to play that scene with Jill riding a jet ski in a swimming pool for straight-faced laughs ... well, Sandler, all I can say is "Why I oughtta ..."