Adam Sandler is a fucking legend.
I had been eagerly awaiting Sandler’s next stand-up instalment, Love You after recently discovering 100% Fresh. Albeit arriving at the party somewhat late given it was released on Netflix in autumn 2018.
Sandler is a legend, and his latest effort only enforces this fact. He is very unique; there’s no one like him. He has breadth of ability which in my mind is unrivalled.
Some, especially haters seem to focus on an individual’s weaker productions rather than looking at one’s work as a whole and a person who can go from Happy Gilmore to Reign Over Me to Noah Baumbach’s masterpiece The Meyerowitz Stories is a special guy.
But hey this is coming from a person who almost without exception loves everything the Sandman has produced. Bulletproof (a movie only worthy of 8% apparently by rotten tomatoes) is a classic in my book.
It is a crying shame that gone are the days of Blockbuster. Where one picked up an empty VHS case that looked entertaining and you rented the movie.
Instead, now we get stuck in analysis paralysis googling which is the most highly rated. Not noticing the 30-45 mins that’s passed. During this activity, you could’ve just watched half a movie where you would have at least learned something. The only thing to be scrutinised was the A4 sleeve wrapped around the VHS.
Preference is obviously highly subjective too!
As an example, I loved the movie The Only Living Boy In New York and according to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s garbage. To be fair it does seem recently the rating has improved. Alas, maybe people are beginning to realise I was indeed right all along.
On the other hand, after enduring There Will Be Blood which seems to be widely accepted as a fantastic movie. I thought it was absolutely terrible and long. 2 things that do not go well together unlike ‘’lamb and tuna fish’’.
Anyway, back to Love You.
Given 100% Fresh had a certain optimism and Hollywood-esque feel to it along with a paradigm that not only is Sandler hilarious. But of course, his life too is probably great and let’s all move there. In the way his earlier movies just made me want to go to America to eat Subway, Popeye’s Chicken and guzzle root beer at Hooters. It’s then unsurprising that I was expecting more of the same.
So, I was fairly shocked to be greeted with the initial heaviness, an underlying darkness during the opening scenes to signal that things were to be different this time around. To me, it’s clearly scripted but reviews I read seemed to not be so sure. I felt there was a definite indication that lets you know something has changed. It feels much more like a movie than Fresh, or at least the beginning does.
The shift in gears between the 2 productions is further emphasised by the choice of directors Fresh is a collaboration between Steven Brill and Nicholaus Goossen who brought you movies such as Little Nicky and Grandma’s Boy. Whereas the latest effort is directed by Josh Safdie the director of Uncut Gems and generally much darker affairs.
It represents life to some extent. A nod to how things don’t always go to plan. I believe it tries to give you some artificial reality of what his life is like. The opposite of the social media type lives a lot of people in both public and non-public roles seem to try to portray. That there are ups and downs.
Sandler’s life like anyone else’s isn’t a fairy tale, shit happens to everyone. This is a fairly modest thing to portray considering that he seems to have lost more friends than most to the struggles that can be our modern-day worlds.
There seems to be a general feeling that this special almost starts with darkness but ends with light. A reminder to us all as Gary Hayden would write in Walking with Plato that bad times never last and neither do good ones.
I sure loved 100% Fresh, but there was very much a celebrity to it. Just like regular folks dressed up for a wedding, that isn’t the real them.
The king of ‘’dad attire’’ looked fresh and had the clothes to match ‘’Happy Gilmore’’ somewhere in there. He looked trim and almost swathe. There was an optimism and hype that carried one all the way through giggling. But this isn’t really representative of real life for anybody, even the Sandman.
Love You has a very different feel. He looks like you or me at the supermarket a normal fucking guy ‘’Happy’’ is back. I think this is the point.
Surely some of the difficulties encountered must be staged but it represents a more connected experience. A show that things can and will go wrong for everyone!
But we will get through them and most importantly, that comedy can be a helping hand.
I think the self-awareness to create this piece of art is special and unfortunately unrivalled by both today’s “A-listers” and regular folks (on social media). It is very clever and very well done production. One of many from a heavily underrated and seriously deep guy.