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I am so used to working or being supposed to be working that I feel a but guilty when I have a couple of days off. But I managed to overcome the guilt, put AIOTM writing on the back burner and have a second consecutive day of relaxing. Catie took Phoebe on a play date in the afternoon, so with the house to myself I did what every father does when he gets some me time. I watched an Adam Sandler film on Netflix. I believe this is what they mean when they say “Netflix and chill”. It’s about watching a bad film on your own on purpose, when you know that’s a waste of the valuable remaining minutes of your life.
In the days before I had a baby and certainly the days before I had a partner I could enjoy the moral superiority of watching terrible films any time I wanted. And I have always done my best to keep up with the awful work of Adam Sandler, but he churns these things out at such a speed that there are perversely more minutes of bad Adam Sandler films than there are in the average human life time. Perhaps what keeps the oldest people in the world alive is the hope that one day they can catch up and have seen them all. But somehow Sandler manages to keep ahead of the game - He must somehow shoot two films at once and do them in real time. I wonder if he gets his twin sister from Jack and Jill to drag up as a man and do some of the films for him.
Perhaps today’s film “The Cobbler’ goes some way to explaining how he does it. In this one he is a cobbler who has a magic machine which means that after he’s repaired someone’s shoes, if he puts them on, he turns into an exact copy of that person. Which means for much of the film Adam Sandler is played by someone else.
As fucking useless as this concept initially seems, for the first thirty minutes of the movie I did fear that it might be actually quite good. There’s a great cast and no Rob Schneider for starters. Dustin Hoffman and Steve Buscemi both decided to take the money (although the “twist" that - spoiler alert- Buscemi was his dad, who for some reason never told his family his secret even though his wife was dying, could be seen coming a mile off and apparently the time was right to tell the son at the end of the film, just days after the mother’s death). But the adventures a man could get up to wearing the shoes of someone who luckily had the same sized feet as him, did seem like they might be diverting. Luckily Sandler was prevented from raping a beautiful woman whilst he was in the shoes of her boyfriend because she wanted to have sex in the shower and it would have been weird for him to keep his shoes on (though any self-respecting shape shifting rapist would just have insisted that it would be fun for them to have sex with her naked and his clothes on - Sandler once again let’s down the shape-shifting rapists with his stupidity). In the movie world it is always fun to trick women into having sex by pretending to be someone else (cf The Boat That Rocked And Was Also Shit, which was all harmless near rape fun until Operation Yew Tree ruined it all with its boring enforcement of the law), as long as you are prevented from doing it, even though you wanted to.
Anyway, luckily the promising Groundhog Day crossed with Vice Versa premise goes terribly wrong when Sandler gets caught up in a ludicrous underworld criminal situation which spirals out of control and departs from any attempt to examine what you would do if you were able to become any other person who had the same sized feet as yours and was stupid enough to let you get hold of their shoes.
And the predictability of who the overly concerned neighbouring barber really is is blown out of the water by the revelation that he’s part of some massive undercover system of magical tradesmen with untold wealth and power.
So it was worth 90 minutes of my life to watch this rubbish film by a man who is allowed to keep making rubbish films and barely act his way through them, presumably because they are enjoyed by people like me who marvel at the lack of effort that has gone into them and the waste of resources to make them.
When people don’t like my comedy and think I am useless I like to argue that it would be more impressive for me to have made a career out of this for all this time if I was as talentless as they claimed. But then I look at Adam Sandler, a man who is not untalented but who just usually chooses not to bother to use those talents, and the success he makes of churning out pap and have to think again. Most people in show business are charlatans really.
But what I find fascinating about Sandler is that he clearly has the chops and must already have more money than he needs, but he keeps going for the money and rarely for something of artistic worth. Which is fine. In reality I think the job is mainly about entertainment and escapism and clearly enough people are happy to watch his films either ironically or unironically for the money men to keep wanting to make them. But for a man who makes so many films about how family is more important than work and money, it’s strange that he seems so determined to keep making money. His twin sister must have some real shit on him and be blackmailing him to continue.
I am delighted he keeps doing it though, because watching him makes me very happy. And aside from the near-rape and a mildly dodgy take on a transexual and a somewhat cliched black criminal, there was hardly anything morally repugnant in this one.
I then thought about watching the Ridiculous Six, but even I have my limits and I couldn’t stomach more than 90 seconds of it. We will never catch up with his output. In that, at least, I am happy to emulate Sandler. I don’t think there’s a person in the world who has ingested all the material I have put out there and imagine coming to me new today and trying to catch up. It doesn’t bare thinking about. For so many reasons. Not just because those people are right about my lack of talent.
Three Happy Now? gigs this week - Thursday in Chelmsford (SOLD OUT), Friday in Cambridge (not many tickets left), Saturday in Didcot (usually sells out, but a good chunk of seats left at the moment). Details of the last seven gigs here.
