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 ..."

Australians never play Australians

It turns out, Australian actors can do really good Australian accents.

You wouldn't know it, because they are almost never called upon to use their regular speaking voice in Hollywood films. But it's true.

And it's darn fun to see sometimes.

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed the otherwise meandering final hour of Funny People, which we watched on Saturday night. Right around the time most comedies would be wrapping up, Aussie Eric Bana enters the story for the stretch run of the film's gargantuan 2-hour-and-26-minute running time. He plays the philandering Australian husband of Leslie Mann's character, who is trying not to fall back in love with her ex-boyfriend, the successful comic actor played by Adam Sandler as a version of himself.

I don't recall Bana being cast often, if ever, in comedies, but he was funny as hell -- in part because he was probably also playing a version of himself. Not to suggest that Eric Bana is a cheat, or particularly aggro -- though the fact that both of those characteristics describe what I understand to be the stereotypical Australian male certain doesn't hurt the chances. I loved the performance on face value, but was also judging it based on how much my wife was giggling next to me on the couch. Being an Australian and all, my wife was in a pretty good position to judge the truth of his performance -- and she founded it to be quite true indeed. The quintessentially Australian phrases -- "Are you taking the piss [out of me]?", for example -- and the quintessentially Australian male interests -- Australian rules football, or "footy," for example -- were all there. The charming braggadocio, the quickness to be convivial, the eagerness to tell stories, yet the readiness to fly into jealous rages at any moment -- Australian through and through. And Eric Bana through and through as well, probably.

Yet we never see it. In fact, hearing "Australian" coming out of his mouth was a strange sensation indeed.

Let's consider. If you were a consumer of world cinema, you might have known Eric Bana from the 2000 film Chopper, which I've always considered to be his Romper Stomper. Romper Stomper is one of the films that brought fellow countryman Russell Crowe to the attention of Hollywood, and besides, they've got similar titles and similar heavily violent subject matter. That's really all I can compare them on, actually, because I haven't seen Chopper yet. I know, some Australian-by-marriage I am.

But if you just started charting Bana when he broke into Hollywood movies, the only way you would have known (prior to Funny People) that he's Australian was reading a story about him. Black Hawk Down? Played an American soldier. The Hulk? Played an American scientist turned into an American superhero/mutated freak. Troy? Played a Trojan prince. Munich? Played an Istraeli intelligence agent. Lucky You? Played an American poker professional. The Other Boleyn Girl? Played the king of England. Star Trek? Played a Romulan supervillain -- which is funny, because he also appeared as a character named Romulus in an Australian film called Romulus, My Father. The Time Traveler's Wife? Played a librarian from Chicago.

So as you can see, only some of Bana's Hollywood roles have been Americans -- or even earthlings. None, until Funny People, had been Australians.

And this gets at a funny disconnect about Australians and Hollywood. Australia might be a huge mass of land, but its population is quite small relative to that, organized mostly around the big cities. Yet Australia has given us a number of iconic actors that's vastly disproportionate to its population. Of course, we have a huge number of Brits in Hollywood as well, but the difference there is that Brits sometimes play actual British people. (And England has a much larger population, 51 million to 22 million). There are a lot more British characters in Hollywood scripts than there are Australian characters, and because of that, we get to hear their regular speaking voices now and again. Not really so with Australians.

So let's take a look at some of the big Hollywood names we have Australia to thank for -- and how often we hear them "speaking Australian." Keep in mind that I have not seen all the films by these actors, so there could be examples of them appearing as Australians that I'm missing.

Mel Gibson. And I guess I'm starting off with the exception here. Gibson's an exception for a couple reasons: 1) The Mad Max movies, which made him famous, were popular Australian exports; 2) Gibson was born in New York and moved to Australia when he was 12, so while he does have something of an Australian accent, it's not the kind a native would have. Bad way to structure your argument, Vance -- let's move on to some better examples.

Russell Crowe. After he crossed over to the U.S., we've really only seen Crowe as an Australian in Proof of Life, in which his Australian-ness is not an essential plot detail, but a choice, perhaps made simply to let Crowe use his own voice for once. Of course, Crowe being who he is, we've heard his real voice in acceptance speeches and other moments of aggro self-embarrassment.

Nicole Kidman. Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm was popular enough over here that some people heard Kidman's real voice as long ago as 1989, but she wasn't NICOLE KIDMAN yet then. And despite a massive body of work, she hasn't played an Australian since. Ironically, when she appeared in last year's Australia, which would have seemed the perfect time, she played a Brit living in Australia. Which brings us naturally to ...

Hugh Jackman. Jackman did get to play an Australian in Australia, but that's his only such prominent work as an Australian since coming on our radar in X-Men. Wait, was Van Helsing Australian?

Naomi Watts. Like Kidman, she also appeared as a Brit in a movie set in Australia: Ned Kelly. Otherwise, most of us haven't seen her Australian speaking voice at all. She did play an Australian in a little movie called Ellie Parker, which is semi-autobiographical -- Watts plays a young Australian actress trying to make it in Hollywood. But as this was seen only by me, my wife and about 78 other people, it doesn't count. Which brings us to ...

Heath Ledger. Ledger was also in Ned Kelly, as the title character. Pretty much nothing Australian on his CV (to use an Australian term) after that.

Cate Blanchett. After breaking in as Queen Elizabeth, the luminous Blanchett has only been an Australian once -- and she had to play herself to do it. In fact, Blanchett plays both herself and her envious black-sheep cousin in a memorable scene in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes.

In the interest of trying to be a bit more concise, I'm going to halt the list there. But you see where it's going. Those are seven powerhouse names, and five of them can do whatever they want in Hollywood -- Ledger is, as you know, deceased, and Gibson's still picking up the pieces after his infamous anti-Semitic rant. Before then, he was obviously one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

It's as unclear what it is about being an Australian that makes a person a good actor, as it is unclear why more random Australian characters aren't written into more movies. Maybe Australians just have better teeth and bone structures than Brits, which is why these Australians have made it bigger than their similarly talented British counterparts. As to why there aren't more Australian characters written ... well, that's a mystery. Americans seem endlessly fascinated with Australia as a place, and the accents are fun to imitate.

Maybe Paul Hogan just ruined it for all of them.

The funniest person in Hollywood?

On the eve of the release of Funny People, I thought I'd ask a question that my more savvy readers will certainly know the answer to:

How many films do you think Judd Apatow has directed?

Ten? Fifteen?

How about three?

That's right, Funny People is only the third film directed by this comedy giant. For even casual fans, the other two should jump readily to mind: The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

Yet it feels like Apatow has had his distinctive stamp on almost every comedy released since 2005, when Virgin came out.

Truth be told, the list of films on which he received a writer or producer credit is a heckuva lot longer. Which goes to show, of course, that directing is not the be-all and end-all of cinematic achievement behind the camera.

But what really amazes me is not how few films he's directed, but how many films we feel like he's probably directed, or produced, or written, or in some way birthed into existence. In short, almost every comedy with a certain feel to it that comes out these days seems like it should be credited to him, even if his greatest contribution was watching a screener copy of it in his living room.

Strangely, though, of the list of films he's actually worked on, many of them are considered duds: The Cable Guy (producer), Celtic Pride (writer/executive producer), Kicking & Screaming (the Will Ferrell one -- executive producer), Fun With Dick and Jane (writer), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (writer/producer), Drillbit Taylor (producer), You Don't Mess With the Zohan (writer) and Year One (producer). (I have to add an asterisk on The Cable Guy, which is one of my all-time favorites -- but it's quite true that at the time of its release, it was considered a massive dud.)

If I'm going to list the duds, I should also list the movies that were mostly considered a success: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (producer), Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (producer), Superbad (producer), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (producer), Pineapple Express (story by/producer) and Step Brothers (producer).

There are a couple interesting things about these lists:

1) Other than the three movies he both wrote and directed, most of his actual screenwriting credits are sort of duds. Does that mean he's the only one who can translate his own vision, or were they just bad scripts?

2) Many of them do not feel like what we consider to be "Judd Apatow movies." Celtic Pride? You Don't Mess With the Zohan? Year One?

So what is a "Judd Apatow movie," anyway? It seems in his three directing hits (ha -- I'm already assuming Funny People will be a hit), he's established a certain template. Namely, ordinary shlubs get into generally ordinary jams that are made more funny by the extraordinary prism through which Apatow observes them. Funny People may diverge from that a bit -- Seth Rogen's character is ordinary, while Adam Sandler's is a famous comedian. But it's the Seth Rogen part that really feels like bona fide Apatow.

When Apatow goes high concept, on the other hand, he flames out. (I discussed this a bit here.)

Now let's look at another list, one that I've come up with, of movies that seem to owe their existence to Apatow, and we see how big the phenomenon really is. The Hangover. Observe and Report. The Promotion. Sex Drive. Tropic Thunder. I Love You, Man. Old School. Miss March. I'm probably missing a few obvious ones, but you get the idea.

Yeah, some of those are mostly because they feature Apatow regulars -- Rogen is the star of Observe and Report, Ferrell appears in Old School (though that was released before Apatow got big, so it's cheating to include it), and Tropic Thunder featured Apatow collaborator Ben Stiller as director and star. In fact, Tropic Thunder is kind of like the high-concept Apatow, only good -- and if we're going there, we could include films like Get Smart (featuring Virgin star Steve Carell) and Land of the Lost (featuring Ferrell).

But am I crazy, or do you automatically look for Apatow's name on IMDB when these films come out? Like only a handful of other creative talents of his time (such as Steven Soderbergh and, to a less interesting extent, Tim Burton), Apatow has developed a posse of actors with whom he regularly works, which we identify with him. And because that posse is both ever-expanding (in quantity) and extremely successful (in quality), Apatow's influence fans outward likewise.

I don't know if these scattered collection of thoughts have produced a coherent point. But if there is one, it's this: Apatow has reshaped comedy in his own image, and like no single person who's been working this decade, his very name gives a project instant credibility -- instant wanna-see-ability. And we tend to forget/overlook/forgive how many of them actually failed to deliver.

Sure enough, I wanna see Funny People.

Meet you in line this weekend?