Salon.com > Adam Sandler

Adam Sandler hates you

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Having recently endured "That's My Boy," Adam Sandler's sudden swerve into post-Apatow, hard-R comic raunch, I have a strange but undeniable reaction: I kind of feel bad for the guy. That's clearly an inappropriate emotion to direct at someone who is rich and famous and has been able to write his own ticket in Hollywood for many years, but I can't quite help it. Sandler's certainly not the only comedy star who has tried and failed to make the Tom Hanks/Robin Williams transition to A-list leading man -- see also Carrey, Jim, career of -- but I detect a distinctive mixture of anger and pathos in his case. We didn't go to see "Punch-Drunk Love" or "Spanglish" or the 153-minute Apatow-Sandler mess-bomb "Funny People" in sufficient numbers to rescue Sandler from doing gags about barf and semen on a wedding dress, and now he's gonna make us freakin' pay.

Hollywood’s worst screenwriter strikes again

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:02:00 +0000

The man behind "Click" and "Jack and Jill" also wrote Eddie Murphy's latest bomb.

The tragedy of Adam Sandler

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:40:00 +0000

If you’re someone close to Adam Sandler, there’s a 99 percent chance you’ll be starting a sentence this week with “Well, uh, at least it made $26 million ...” and ending it with some sort of forced positive spin. That’s because Sandler’s twins comedy "Jack and Jill" received some of the worst reviews of any movie ever on Friday.

"As for Mr. Sandler, I have always been interested in what he would do next, and I suppose I still am, especially if what he does next is retire," wrote A.O. Scott in the New York Times. Added Time: "More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie 'Jack and Jill' and I am still dead inside." Its Rotten Tomatoes score is a 3. Out of 100.

Does Sandler even care? He got paid a ton for the film ($20 million according to IMDb), got his usual stable of actor-friends roles in it, and all he had to do was wear a wig and some prosthetic boobs. Maybe that’s not so bad. After all, comedies aren’t supposed to be highbrow social commentaries. They’re just supposed to be funny, right?