Happy Gilmore 2 (3/5 Stars)

For those of us with memories of the 1980s and 1990s before streaming and really before the advent of Netflix DVDs, one’s experience of movies was influenced by what was a relatively limited supply. You either saw a movie in the theater, when it was on television cut up and divided by advertisements, or by renting/buying VHS. You generally bought less VHS movies then you rented, so you probably had a fairly limited number of movies that you could watch at will. As a result, those movies in your possession, well, you watched them alot. We watched Jurassic Park so much that my little brother (toddler age) would go around the house pretending he was a dinosaur. Happy Gilmore was another one of those movies that we had on VHS. I watched that movie many times, which clued me in on a lot of the call-backs in the sequel.

I like the sequel well enough and want to state that upfront because given how the rest of this review will go, I don’t want the reader to get the sense that I didn’t like the movie. The fact is, I like Adam Sandler and have no qualms with his type of comedy. I have no problem admitting that. The problem I have with him is that, well, the opportunity to turn in a superior product is there provided he just puts a little more effort into it. Everyone once in a while he does, and you get a glimpse of what he can do. But too often he doesn’t, and you leave a little disappointed and wonder what it would take to make him care enough to suffer just a little (just a little!) for his art.

Happy Gilmore, being a movie made before Sandler was an established star, does not have some of his trademark fat and happy bullshit. There isn’t an over-reliance on cameos by celebrities, mainly because celebrities wouldn’t have been drawn to the production of a relatively unknown comedian. There isn’t an overreliance on weirdos that Sandler, well ensconced in normality, merely chuckles and rolls his eyes at. In Happy Gilmore, Sandler is the odd man out, an unaccomplished hockey player who spills his rage onto polite golf courses. And Happy Gilmore has a particularly good antagonist, Shooter McGavin, (played by Christopher McDonald at his 1990s peak) who inhabits not only the smug country club class that looks down on the blue collar Gilmore, but also inhabits the critic that looks down on Sandler’s type of comedy. There is a sense of entitlement to McGavin that is earned. He has paid his dues, worked really hard, and is at the top of his game. He wants and (probably deserves) that gold jacket. And then Happy Gilmore comes over with a scientifically bullshit long drive. No doubt there were established comedians who looked upon Sandler’s comedy and his inexplicable success in the same way. Here was a guy who would go on the SNL Weekend Update Desk with characters such as Opera-Man (a Man who Sang Opera) and a guy with last-minute Halloween Costume Ideas (i.e. Sandler gives a big grin, calls himself Smiley-Man, and asks for candy) and somehow got consistent laughs. And then he became a big movie star. It feels unfair and McGavin, in one way or another, represents all of us who don’t find this sort of thing funny.

The sequel’s plot is derivative of the first. It should be mentioned that it feels that way on purpose in order to capitalize on nostalgia, not simply out of a lack of creativity. Gilmore kills his wife with an errant golf drive (a similar joke occurs in the first movie when Gilmore kills with his father with a slap-shot at a hockey game) and Gilmore gives up golf and starts drinking. Along the way he loses all his money because someone he beats up sues him for assault and battery (why didn’t anybody else think of that?), so now he needs money to support his daughter’s higher education bill. Hung over and desperate, he turns back to golf.

In the first movie, he was trying to buy back his grandmother’s house from foreclosure, which is a relatively good reason to raise money. Here, his daughter (Sandler’s actual daughter in a cameo) is a talented ballerina whose teacher recommends sending her to Paris Ballet College which costs $75,000 in tuition a year. That is a relatively stupid reason to raise money. With $300,000, you don’t need to go to a fancy school to establish your career. Just start your own company and fund your own shows. (Adam Sandler and Tim Herlihy, writers of the original are back as the writers of the sequel, except now thirty years of making Sandler comedies, I bet they are much richer than they were. That might explain this out-of-touch premise). What is better is Sandler’s four idiot sons who take after their dad. They are much funnier and are gainfully employed with careers that didn’t drive their parents into six figures of higher education debt.

After many decently funny montages in which Happy Gilmore realizes his lost golf game (getting sober helps), he attends a gold jacket dinner which epitomizes one of the problems with sequels to successful comedies in general. This dinner is attended by many many actual golf legends who sit there content to get credit for being themselves. Comedy is better told from the outside and though the makers of the sequel may pat themselves on the back for having the type of pull that gets Jack Nicklaus' onscreen participation, it doesn’t make the movie any funnier.

The golf world has a problem which has provoked this dinner of gold jackets. There is a new startup league called Maxi-Golf which promises to make golf more exciting. This gives the movie the convenience of defending traditional golf (now that Sandler is a secure incumbent) while also making the climax of the movie far more cinematic than traditional golf (i.e. the competition takes place in the new and exciting golf tournament space). One of the new Maxi-golfers carries around a working chainsaw as part of his persona. The only thing missing is Norm Macdonald as a commentator musing that it is Ridiculous.

Cameos are one thing. The movie includes such non-Hollywood types as Travis Kelce (football player) and a host of musicians in small roles (Bad Bunny, Post Malone, and Eminem). These are generally neutral developments though I did like Eminem’s short bit a decent amount. What is actively detrimental to the movie is the re-telling of jokes from the original movie. This clearly is purposeful, the movie wants you to remember the old movie for nostalgia purposes, but it is antithetical to comedy, which abhors the telling of the same joke twice.

The frustrating thing is that the movie doesn’t really have to rely on these nostalgia traps. It has enough new things to explore, and with a little more effort could have explored them more. Here are two story ideas that would have helped the movie: 1) It is revealed that Shooter McGavin has spent the last 30 years in a mental institution because he couldn’t get over the events of the first movie. Why? Wouldn’t it be funnier if Shooter McGavin had spent the last 30 years trying but continually failing to win a gold jacket for various reasons? 2) It is revealed that the Maxi-Golf people are enhancing their golfers via experimental surgery which enables longer drives. Why not reveal that Happy Gilmore suffered a hockey injury way back in the day that had the same effect? That would go a long way in justifying his unscientific golf drive. And it would bring up a conflict about what truly counts as performance enhancement that is natural as opposed to deliberate.

The movie is good enough to the point where I can see these improvements as possibilities of where it could have gone had it put in the effort. But the movie is just content enough to be mediocre, to get all of Adam Sandler’s friends onscreen and paid, and to have several obvious product placements before Sandler moves onto the next film. You could say this about Adam Sandler’s career in general. Every five or six years, he shows us how good he can be, which is why the vast majority of his work product, which revels in mediocrity, is such a continual disappointment. If only this movie could have positioned Shooter McGavin in such a way that the main conflict was a comment on Sandler's career, just like it was in the original movie. If only.

Eddington (4/5 Stars)

There is an old story, I believe I heard it first in the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately sense the danger and jump out to escape. If you put a frog into a pot of tepid water, and slowly bring up the temperature, the frog will sink into a languid stupor and unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

In preparation for this review, I looked up that story on Wikipedia to see if it was true or not. I thought it may be a good metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. But apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, it isn’t true. In fact, it could not be further from the truth. Instead, Wikipedia cites more modern day scientists who argue that a frog placed in tepid water that is gradually heated will notice the increase in temperature and almost certainly try to escape, whereas a frog that is placed in boiling water will very likely die immediately before it can escape.

Somehow, the fact that this widely known metaphor is completely wrong makes it an even better metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. I mean, I saw it first in An Inconvenient Truth wherein Al Gore used it to shame people’s supposed ignorance of the science behind global warming. You think Al Gore would have fact checked that part. And if Wikipedia is wrong and you can boil a frog by slow and steady manipulation, that too would be a good metaphor for Eddington, which is about the small rural town of Eddington, New Mexico where everybody and nobody seems to know what is going on and is very angry about it.

There is a general lag in what goes on in the world and what shows up in movies. Unlike television shows or other media that have production timelines which allow it to be topical, it takes a relatively long time for a movie to be greenlit, produced, edited, and then released. I believe Eddington would be the first movie that takes place in the time of COVID-19 (Spring and Summer 2020) and is specifically about what was happening during that time. And boy does this movie have everything, and how. Mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, bitcoin, false flag conspiracies, pedophilia conspiracies, Antifa, etc., all of which is experienced within the context of forced social isolation. Never have I seen a movie with so much social media doomscrolling.

Because of certain coincidences, COVID-19 had less of a dramatic impact on my life than the rest of the country. I had not taken a vacation in a long time and both deserved and could afford an elongated one. I had just married my wife and was literally in the honeymoon phase of the same. We did not yet have any kids that could be kept home from school. Heck, I never even worked from home. All the other companies in our shared office space evacuated, so my law firm just spaced itself out and I biked to work instead of taking the subway. I dipped into my savings, finished my last screenplay, read War and Peace, and played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom.

Still, I had the vague sense that although the restrictions that were put into place in New York City made sense in New York City (after all, in March 2020, NYC experienced a very real surge in hospitalizations, the numbers of which inferred that hundreds of thousands of cases were going unreported), I did wonder whether it made sense to replicate those restrictions in the rest of the country. After all, why would you impose the same Spring 2020 lockdown in relatively dense New York City, which had experienced hundreds of thousands of cases, in relatively spaced-out Houston, Texas which maybe had hundreds of cases, if that.

Eddington takes place in a small town of the same name in New Mexico. In May 2020, the mayor (played by Pedro Pascal) has decided to lockdown the city, mandate masks and six feet of separation. There is not a single COVID-19 case in the entire county. This seems crazier to some people than others. The sheriff Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix) suffers from asthma and cannot breath in a mask. He openly wonders why he is being directed to wear one while he is alone in his car. There are some attempts at reasonable discussions, but these attempts are thwarted by actors on both sides recording everything on their smartphones. The practical effect of parties filming an argument/negotiation is that it removes the possibility of an engaged discussion. After all, the speaker is not interested in whether the other participant is listening. Instead, they are making a speech to their social media followers. The problem is one more removed than people not listening to each other. In effect, no one is even talking in the first place as the arguments are ranted into the social media ether. It is like the environment of Cable News has descended upon and engulfed the interactions of regular people. After a disappointing exchange with the mayor, Joe Cross decides to throw his hat in the ring for the upcoming mayoral election. He announces his candidacy on Instagram.

Then George Floyd was murdered and the idiocy of COVID-19 was amplified by galling hypocrisy. I certainly remember being informed many times about that notorious 1918 Parade in Philadelphia that kept on being cited as a prime example for why everyone should stay inside and avoid outside crowds in a pandemic. That analogy was completely forgotten in a space of day when it suddenly became okay to have large outside demonstrations. It was a huge gamble in public safety that browbeaten and timid health officials had no balls to criticize. But then we learned that it wasn’t actually a big deal. Large outside gatherings did not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases. That was reality. So why then were the public officials who okayed the demonstrations still shaming people into staying inside and wearing masks. The lockdowns and school closings just went on forever.

Eddington is notable in that Ari Aster doesn’t appear to be putting too much of the blame on either side of the political polarization. Indeed, it does not appear that Ari Aster is interested in the politics of the period. What interests him about the COVID-19 pandemic is what interests him as a director of great horror movies (Heriditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid). There is an extreme of human emotions in his films that reminds one of Scorsese and a gleefulness in purposefully triggering such emotions that reminds one of Hitchcock. Ari Aster has taken the trauma of the pandemic and has exploited it into yet another emotionally manipulative (i.e. frightening) movie. That bastard, he is arguably the best director to come onto the scene in the past 10 years.

The location of the movie is important. And to someone like me who believes that the nationalization of politics is an exceptionally bad thing, Eddington is instructive to that end. Eddington, the place, does not have a COVID-19 problem and yet the streets are locked down and masks are mandated because of what is happening in New York City. Eddington, the place, does not have a police brutality problem and yet street protests erupt which naturally morph into rioting because of what is happening in Minnesota. The citizens of Eddington have gathered on the streets to yell at each other over issues that do not affect or concern their community. What a nightmare.

About halfway through the movie, Joe Cross is visited at his home by some kind of nutty preacher (played by Austin Butler) who tells him of a story about being an orphan, getting kidnapped by a society of super-rich weirdos in Northern California (sounds like the Bohemian Grove), and being hunted down in the woods as part of some rich super-rich weirdo game. Joe’s wife (played by Amy Adams) brought this guy home for dinner and takes him seriously. You want Joe to explain to the guy that he is nuts, but how is that possible when the world is so crazy. I was thinking about that frog that gets slowly boiled to death without realizing it. Extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other. When neither side has a stable ground to make a sound argument from, it is impossible to defend reason. And no, simply arguing that you support science or scientific authorities is not a replacement for actually understanding the scientific basis of something.

I am 38 turning 39, and I look back on my youth and thank my lucky stars that there was no social media. There are next to no pictures of me in grade school and high school and those that exist cannot be found online. Facebook came to my college in my Freshman year, but more importantly, the Facebook wall wasn’t implemented until,, I think, after I graduated. That Facebook wall, it is an evil thing. It makes it seem like every last thing you have ever posted has the thought and attention paid to it as if you decided to publish it in an established newspaper. It doesn’t even allow you to slur your words so that everyone knows you were drunk when you posted. This is an important thing in real life interactions that is sorely missing in online communications.

Eddington has several teenage characters and I shudder to think that there was in actuality a generation of kids that lived through COVID-19 that went through a very important stage in their social development almost entirely online (or in gatherings on the remote edge of town where they illegally gathered to drink sad beers). At one point, one sorry boy (who reminds me of J.D. Vance for some reason) tries to explain to his parents what the goals of Anti-Racism are and why they are important. This releases the largest laugh of the movie when, after a comic pause, his father erupts: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” If you know a kid that went through that phase, try not to hold them to it or remind them of that period of time. They were just trying to fit in.

In Ari Aster’s last movie, Beau is Afraid, I wondered what the movie would be like if Ari Aster had tried to land the plane and not pulled up at the last second for his ending. I think it is fair to say that in Eddington, he does not pull up and that the landing is not successful. This movie crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Playing it safe may have just resulted in Joe Cross being hospitalized and dying of COVID-19. Instead, Antifa gets involved and the streets of the town experience a hail of machine gun fire.

There is something else not really mentioned here. The movie begins and ends with a conspiracy that is just hinted at. It includes a tech giant that wants to build a large data center right outside of town, which may or may not guzzle up the town’s limited supply of water and energy. This is a local issue that actually affects the residents of Eddington. And yet, there isn’t much controversy about it as the citizens' attention spans are being focused on national problems elsewhere. Indeed, and I am just theorizing here, Mayor Garcia may have locked down the town when he did because he wanted to avoid a civic discussion that would inhibit his ability to push through the development. Is that what the community leaders were discussing in Mayor Garcia’s empty bar that one night when this whole thing started?