This weekend, for reasons still unclear to me, I watched Grown Ups, the movie featuring Adam Sandler, David Spade, Kevin James, Chris Rock, and Rob Schneider*, and it was as unfunny as advertised, and basically I’d say the equivalent to maybe Ocean’s 12 or Ocean’s 13 (not in quality–the Ocean movies are much, much better), but in terms of being a giant FU to the audience where you’re watching these actors screw around and joke with each other and wink at each other the whole time and you know they’re not even trying, which is a bummer when you’ve paid, in my case nothing, but in the theater a good $10-$14 to be entertained.
But that is not really the point.
The point is, while it’s hard to remember now, for a period of time Adam Sandler was a comedy machine, and even if you didn’t like him on SNL, or his comedy tapes, or even his first few movies up to Wedding Singer, you could acknowledge that he dominated the comedy landscape in a way that maybe the Apatow clan currently does. And the point is, these comedy empires (from Jim Carey to Adam Sandler to the Farley Brothers/Ben Stiller, to the Will Ferrell/Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn crew to the Apatows) are brief, and when they fall, for the most part, you get some pretty terrible stuff.
Like Blades of Glory or Couple’s Retreat or Bruce Almighty.
Meaning, if my calculations are correct, we could be in for a slate of horrible Apatow work in the next 12-72 months…or if not Apatow products exactly, a slew of imitations like say, this.
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*Side note: I met Rob Schneider once working at an ad agency. I was leaving for the night at like 10pm and it’s one of those offices where you take the elevator up to the floor your office is on, but after hours you need a key card to get in. So when I leave there are three guys standing on the other side of the door trying to get in. They ask me if I know where Becky Mason works, and because I’m a freelancer I don’t know anyone so I say no. Then they kind-of push their way in anyways and I see one of them, who is shorter than me, is Rob Schneider, and the other two guys who are I guess his handlers smile at me and say, as Rob disappears into the office, “Not everyday you meet Rob Schneider in the office, huh?” and I don’t have the heart to tell them that just the day before Donny Bonaduce was in the office plugging his new Radio shows and that for me, that was about as exciting as seeing Rob Schneider, which is to say that neither were very exciting at all and besides at 10 pm after working 14 hours, the most exciting thing to me is not being at work and not worrying about two strange men and Rob Schneider wandering through the office, possibly stealing office supplies. And in fact, when I came in the next day my stapler was mysteriously gone, and this was a pretty good stapler).
