Review: Hubie Halloween

 

Happy Halloween everybody!  So it goes without saying but this is going to be the most abnormal Halloween in recent memory and if you all don’t know why by now, you’ve been living under a rock for all of 2020 and do you have room for me to be spending the next couple of years with you?

But yeah, I’ll be surprised if there are ANY trick or treating going on out there as well as other old normal Halloween festivities.  I know I surely plan to spend my Halloween night playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons wishing I was living in that game instead.  And maybe watch a couple classic Halloween films with my wife.  Including the new Halloween classic from our dear friends at Happy Madison Pictures:

 

It was nearly a year ago that I saw Uncut Gems for the first time and it instantly became one of my favorite films of the past decade.  It was a nonstop thrill ride with Adam Sandler giving a career best performance that should have ended up with him taking home Best Actor at the Academy Awards.  Alas it was not meant to be as he wasn’t even nominated.  Adam Sandler was campaigning hard for a nomination including doing the talk show circuit.  Something he rarely ever does.  That’s how you know Adam Sandler really wanted recognition for his work because traditionally, Adam Sandler doesn’t really do self-promotion as much as other Hollywood big names.  Despite being one of the biggest comedy stars of the last thirty years, Adam Sandler tends to live a very anti-Hollywood star lifestyle.  Not saying he’s a bad guy, the complete opposite.  He has a reputation for being one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet.  His co-stars love working on Adam Sandler films.  That’s why you see so many of the same actors/actresses in his films.  That’s why basically every Adam Sandler movie is like a vacation for him and his buddies.

Anyway, Adam Sandler just is a lowkey good guy who likes to live a lowkey lifestyle.  That’s why it was so weird to see him doing the awards circuit and self-promoting himself like that.  Including this little number on Entertainment Tonight:

This interview really resonated with me more than any other he did in the last year.  Because for the last ten years or so, Adam Sandler’s comedies kept receiving critical panning after critical panning to the point that his box office returns were diminishing and then Happy Madison struck a deal with Netflix to send all future Adam Sandler movies straight to the streaming service; where even more Sandler films kept getting panned.  So if all those films were him trying, imagine what it would be like for him to make the worst movie ever on purpose?  He joked about it being Grown Ups 3: Fart Camp, but the idea of Sandler making a terrible movie on purpose is just fascinating to me.

Is that worst movie ever on purpose today’s selection, Hubie Halloween?  I’ll say this, it definitely is an Adam Sandler movie.  All of the usual suspects are there from Kevin James and Steve Buscemi to bit player Sandler regulars like Tim Meadows and Colin Quinn.  Look I’m just going to cut straight to the chase.  This movie was stupid.  Like incredibly stupid, even for Adam Sandler standards.  But….this might be the best Adam Sandler comedy in ten years.  I’m not kidding. 

I feel like a lot of my kindness for this has to do with the timeline we are living in with everything be depressing and the real world just being an absolute shit show with no end in sight.  2020 is a god awful year and it will be one for the history books when it is all said and done as the worst year of our lifetime.  But a stupid Adam Sandler comedy that actually made me laugh much more than I expected walking in clearly is doing something right to bring serotonin at a time when a lot of us could use some of it.  I’m not going to lie when I say there are plenty of juvenile jokes that even a preschooler would laugh at.  With some clever jokes thrown in there as well.  But you know what, I lost count at how many times I laughed at this movie.

This was just a fun movie to watch.  It’s definitely the first time in a long time where it felt nice to watch Sandler and company goof around for 90 minutes, where the many others felt like a chore to sit through.  But I liked a lot more of this movie than I was expecting.  The set design is just a pumpkin-spiced delight which really plays up to Sandler’s character Hubie Dubois being obsessed with the holiday.  I honestly did not expect the message to play as effectively as it turned out to be about bullying.  And hell, the Rob Schneider cameo reveal that everyone expects by now is his best since the late 90’s.  I actually got a genuine laugh out of a Rob Schneider cameo in an Adam Sandler movie in 2020.  What’s wrong with me?

https://movieweb.com/adam-sandler-iconic-characters-sandlerverse-movie/

And I don’t know if a lot of you saw this recent news, but Happy Madison and Netflix are in talks about setting up an Adam Sandler Cinematic Universe.  You have no idea how intrigued I am at the prospects of all these Sandman characters coming together.  Well maybe Hubie Halloween is the starting point of this happening intentionally or not?  Even if it isn’t, there are multiple previous Sandler movie callbacks that put a smile on my face.  Including an unexpected Happy Gilmore character cameo that even had me marking out.

Okay so that’s a lot of positives about this dumb movie.  The main negatives that I wasn’t so forgiving about were Sandler’s character basically being a poor man’s Bobby Boucher.  Just replacing stuttering with mumbling.  There were times I had to use captcha to figure out what the hell this guy was even saying.  Definitely intentional character design.  And a lot of these characters are fairly boring.  In another nice Sandler callback, Julie Bowen plays another Sandler love interest in Violet Valentine; continuing another Sandler callback of having a love interest with the initials V.V.  These two don’t really have the chemistry this time mainly due to these characters both being super flat.  I just wish more of these characters were the slightest bit memorable.  Kevin James’ character isn’t except for his over the top look.  Ray Liotta is basically playing Ray Liotta.  All of the younger characters aren’t really lighting it up either.  One of the few interesting characters in this movie is Steve Buscemi as the mysterious neighbor and June Squibb as Hubie’s mother.  And they are only interesting because of some forced twists that I didn’t expect that had me laughing at how dumb these twists were.

Look this isn’t going to light the world on fire, but I’m actually going to recommend this movie.  Especially if you are in need of some serotonin.  This stupid movie worked for me.  I told myself after watching Uncut Gems that I was never going to give Adam Sandler shit ever again.  Will I maintain that promise?  Who knows.  Was this the bad movie on purpose Sandler promised?  Who knows.  What I do know is that Sandler’s magic has been working on me for the past year again for the first time in a very long time.  Keep it up Sandman.

Final Grade: B

Yeah no regrets with this grade.  Is this a sign that comedies are coming back since we could all use some laughter at this time in our lives?  I hope so.

I know I apologized last post about the lack of content as of late and yeah I'm still working through a few things right now in my real life that have led to a lack of content on this blog as of late.  But I'm going to at least try to get three or four more posts out minimum before December comes and year-end list season will be upon us once more.  So until then, thank you all for reading and stay safe out there.

Review: Mulan (2020)

 So let's talk about the Disney live-action trend.

Honestly, that's what most of this post is going to be about because honestly, I have very little to say about Mulan (2020) itself.  You want my review of the movie in a nutshell?  I appreciate it for at least differentiating itself from the multiple other live-action material Disney has done of late.  It tries new things.  It tries to be different.  It's faithful to its lore while not being an absolute insult to the viewers to an extent...outside of some bizarre witchcraft nonsense that I still don't completely understand why they added it in the first place.  Which yeah, it's too bad the new spins this movie adds aren't interesting.  And most of the movie consists of VERY wooden acting, outside of Jet Li as The Emperor.  I'm very glad that Disney did not make this a shot for shot remake.  That is what makes this immediately better than most of the crap we've gotten from this trend in the last three years in particular.  But just because it's different doesn't mean this isn't interesting.

Final Grade: C-

Now that I got that out of the way, let's go ahead and talk about this trend and why it had potential to begin with...only to become as soulless of a cash grab as it has become.

I've been alive for thirty years now.  I grew up with Disney animation films when I was a kid just like many of you reading this probably have.  And you know what else I grew up with?  Many direct to video retellings of Disney animated films.  Do you know how many bad variations I had to sit through of Cinderella?  Snow White?  The Little Mermaid?  Peter Pan?  Pinocchio?  And many other film properties?  Countless.  And it's not just direct to video.  There have been MANY shitty theatrical films that Disney had no part of.

So when Disney decided ten years ago to make a live action version of Alice In Wonderland, I didn't blame them a single bit.  Why not make their own live-action adaptations of their movies?  After all, countless studios before them were doing it and still are today.  It's not like Disney isn't allowed to be like everyone else.  If it is making other studios money, why not capitalize?

And you know what?  It's not like all of them have been bad.  When this trend first started, Disney was making them different than their animated counterparts.  Alice in Wonderland may have more or less been trying to capitalize on the 3D trend of the 2010's. but I appreciated the fact they were trying to make it a sequel to the animated film.  Maleficent gave us an outsider's perspective to The Sleeping Beauty lore.  The Jungle Book at least experimented with new technology to make the animals as real as CGI can get away with and didn't completely stay true to the original.  And then there's Cinderella, which is honestly my favorite of the bunch for making all the characters three dimensional and not as wooden and hollow outside of the Wicked Stepmother from the cartoon.

But over the last three years, Disney has gotten lazy.  From Beauty and The Beast to Aladdin to The Lion King to even Disney+'s Lady and the Tramp, these were barely films and more like major theatrical stage productions of their respective counterparts.  Some of these films were shot for shot remakes.  Others had maybe five minutes of new material each that weren't worth the time and effort.  It's worth questioning if Disney was even trying anymore and became as complacent as the studios that remade their animated films before them?  Just solely trying to make hundreds of millions of dollars.  It's a fair question.  This isn't some D-level studio that would be lucky to make its money back.  This is the mega-conglomerate that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Am I a fan of this live-action trend?  At the very least, I understand it.  Like I said earlier, for years, their was proof that their was money to be made off of it.  But am I happy with the direction its headed?  No.  Because I completely expect the consumers to catch on at some point and expect more of Disney with these.  I'll give Mulan (2020) credit for at least not being as super faithful to the original animation.  This is what I want to an extent from future Disney live-action films.