Film snobs should thank Adam Sandler
OF ALL the internet Smart Set’s various deficiencies, the adolescent need to sneer at the impoverished taste of the masses is among the most grating. And nowhere is it more grating than when the works of Adam Sandler are under discussion.
For be clear, it’s not all Adam Sandler movies we are meant to mock. The critical corps and the movie bloggers have given us permission to praise Punch-Drunk Love (mostly because it’s directed by one of our darlings, Paul Thomas Anderson) and Spanglish; sometimes we can show our appreciation for Judd Apatow’s Funny People, so long as we note and approve of the fact that Sandler is mocking his own career and his penchant for doing high-concept crap while also highlighting Apatow’s sexism or selfcentredness, or some other deficiency.
While there’s some appreciation for his early outré oeuvre, especially among those of us who were in middle school when Happy
Gilmore and Billy Madison were hitting multiplexes, his later, sillier works – films such as Just Go With It, Click, Grown Ups,
Pixels and Blended – are, generally speaking, haughtily dismissed. Meanwhile, the films
that have come from the deal he made with Netflix to produce original content –
The Ridiculous Six,The Do-Over and Sandy Wexler, among others – are despised. Needless to say, there was outrage and horror when Netflix revealed just how much Sandler #content the rubes out there were consuming.
“Netflix accuses its users of watching 500 million hours of Adam Sandler films,” the Verge said in the funniest of the headlines about America’s Adam addiction. “Dear Lord, Netflix users have watched half a billion hours of Adam Sandler movies,” sputtered Vanity Fair. “People wasted 500 million hours watching Adam Sandler movies on Netflix,” lamented the Huffington Post. “Netflix users lost half a billion hours of their lives to Adam Sandler movies,” complained BuzzFeed, perhaps annoyed that people had spent their time watching his movies instead of trying to guess the colour of a dress or scrolling through 17 Photos Of Cats Doing Something Totally Weird You Guys OMG Better Click On It And See How Weird It Gets For Those 17 Photos LOL.
The most measured and the most ludicrous of these complaints came in the same piece from Dustin Rowles at Pajiba, one of my favourite pop culture sites. On the one hand, Rowles admitted, the bounty brought forth by Sandler had enabled Netflix to make heavy investments in all kinds of other, more serious fare. He cites indie flicks such as I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore and Beasts of No
Nation as indicative of the good work that Sandler has indirectly funded. On the other hand, however, Sandler is to blame for Donald Trump. Seriously.
“It’s not that Republicans spend a lot of time watching Adam Sandler movies, necessarily,” Rowles wrote. “It’s because 92 million people didn’t vote in 2016 because they were too f***ing busy watching Adam Sandler movies. The world’s gonna burn, but the silent white majority are going to be too busy watching
The Do Over to notice.” It’s certainly a theory.
Seriously, Rowles highlights one of the reasons that film snobs should be enthusiastic about Netflix’s efforts to foist late-Sandler on the masses: They “are at least helping to pay for some of the better, less popular movies and television series.” Nothing wrong with that.
There’s another reason for the highbrows to set aside their disdain for a moment and just be glad that Netflix has become the home base for Sandler and his pals: It means we don’t have to see any Adam Sandler content, ever, even accidentally.
The most horrifying part of any giant, bad movie’s release isn’t, necessarily, being forced to go see it in order to review it. No, the most terrifying aspect is the omnipresent ad campaigns – trailers, TV spots, billboards, magazine ads and so on. You can’t avoid a major release in theatres because they – the malicious marketing minds – won’t let you. You’ll absorb it by osmosis.
I’m by no means a reflexive Sandler hater, but I’m also not a fan of his later work. And yet, I could tell you 80% of the plot of Grown
Ups and Grown Ups 2 off the top of my head despite having never seen a second of either movie on purpose.
However, with his work relegated to Netflix, that danger vanishes. Your precious eyeballs will remain pristine in perpetuity.
So stop sneering at Netflix and its users, fellow snobs. They are performing a valuable public service by decontaminating our media ecosystem and allowing us to remain firmly ensconced in our bubble.