Best of DVDs...with M.V. Moorhead
8 Crazy NightsIt’s holiday movie time once again, but one major holiday has been scanted: Hanukkah hasn’t been the basis for much movie and TV entertainment.
If there’s been a feature film about Hanukkah prior to Adam Sandler’s 2002 8 Crazy Nights I’m not aware of it. Sadly, 8 Crazy Nights makes an appalling movie debut for the noble holiday.
Sandler’s fans will recognize the title from his Chanukah Song: “Chanukah is the Festival of Lights/Instead of one day of presents, we have eight crazy nights.”
In this animated tale, one more variation on the Scrooge theme, Sandler provides the voice of Davey Stone, sort of a dark version of his recent Mr. Deeds: a drunken, vandalistic 33-year-old ruffian in the small New England town of Dukesberry.
Davey, who’s Jewish, particularly hates the holiday season, and becomes even more abusive than usual during December. When his latest outrage, committed on the eve of Hannukah, gets him in trouble with the law, he’s sentenced to community service coaching youth basketball.
He’s trained for this work by the diminutive Whitey (also voiced by Sandler), a screechy-voiced, odd-jobbing old man with a clubfoot who lives with his eccentric fraternal-twin sister Eleanor (Sandler again).
Before long, Davey is living in their house, and we learn about the tragedy that wounded Davey’s Hannukah spirit and turned him into a bitter loser. We also see Whitey and Eleanor’s sunny dispositions rubbing off on him.
Not an especially original premise, but nothing necessarily wrong with it, you might say, and you’d be right. What makes 8 Crazy Nights so abysmal isn’t the mechanically executed plotline but the interminable, digressive, tasteless gags with which it’s padded out, in an apparent (and maybe shrewd) attempt to pander to Sandler’s teenage audience.
The basic comic strategy of 8 Crazy Nights is to present extremely crude gross-out comedy—a man made to eat a jock-strap, for instance, or a porta-potty rolling down a hill with somebody inside it, or a herd of cute little deer laughing so hard at a joke that they defecate—in the style of a traditional animated holiday musical.
There’s even a running gag about Whitey’s tendency to have seizures. It’s all just about as big a laugh-riot as it sounds—these gags aren’t imaginative or even well-timed, so they just lie there on screen like what the deer leave behind.
And though the animation isn’t without some visual charm, the story never rises, in terms of either sentimental warmth or manipulative skill, to the level of that which it parodies.
Make no mistake—Sandler is a talent. He was brilliant in last year’s Punch-Drunk Love, and his romantic comedy The Wedding Singer is a real gem. And even 8 Crazy Nights showcases more of his strengths than his odious 2002 hit Mr. Deeds. Let’s just hope that both Sandler and Hannukah do better in their subsequent movies.
THE DVD—Okay, so if the movie stinks so bad, why am I writing about it? Two reasons: First, 8 Crazy Nights is packaged like any cute cartoon, and somehow managed to land a PG-13, and would thus be easy to pick as family entertainment. When I rented the DVD recently, the woman behind the counter said, “You know who Adam Sandler is, right? You know that this isn’t for kids?” She said that a lady had rented it, shown it to her kids and returned it furious.
Secondly, in perfect fairness, I should say that the teen kids in the theater when I saw 8 Crazy Nights seemed to love it, and the DVD, which includes widescreen and full-screen versions of the film, is loaded with extras that will undoubtedly appeal to these fans—numerous deleted scenes, commentary tracks, documentary featurettes, a Sandler short subject called A Day With the Meatball.
I chuckled myself at the skewed songs Sandler gets to perform in his fine, lusty voice, including a wonderful live version of The Chanukah Song.
There’s also a hilarious tune, from Whitey, called In the Mall, which was deleted from the finished film. Couldn’t they have cut a few gross-out gags to make room for it?