The Ridiculous Six

Adam Sandler has always been one of Hollywood’s laziest celebrities. Since his beginnings on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, Sandler’s work has rarely been anything but a collection of stupid accents, silly faces, and scripts seemingly cooked up by 14 year old boys. With a couple of minor exceptions when he ventured into dramatic acting in the early 2000s, Adam Sandler has just played the same low-achieving-but-still-secretly-awesome slacker for over twenty years. Admittedly, this formula has occasionally worked. Early on, Sandler made some dumb movies that were actually kind of funny. Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, and The Wedding Singer in particular were joyfully juvenile. They weren’t great movies, but they managed to get some humor out of their immaturity and vulgarity. Unfortunately for us all, Sandler and his regular crew of writers, co-stars, and directors continue to crank out the same lame stuff a quarter of a century later and needless to say, it’s lost a lot of its appeal.

With laziness being his hallmark, it makes sense that Sandler’s latest movie can’t even be bothered to it to the theater for its initial release. The supposedly comedic western The Ridiculous Six premiered on Netflix this week, and given the effort that went into the writing and acting of this movie, it makes sense for it to be most available to us when we are sitting half asleep on our couch at home covered in a fine layer of Cheeto dust. It is a powerfully superficial, casually racist, and perhaps most importantly really unfunny movie.

In it, Sandler plays a Caucasian man raised by Native Americans who gave him the name White Knife. Of course, he’s a deadly warrior and is engaged to be married to the prettiest woman in his tribe whose name is Smoking Fox. One day, White Knife’s real father, a criminal named Frank Stockburn played by Nick Nolte, shows up and wants to make amends for his past and reconcile with his son. Stockburn’s old gang shows up and kidnaps him because they want their share of the loot they stole together. Sandler’s character, now called Tommy, decides to reenter white society in order to rob banks so he can pay off his father’s captors. At each stop along the way, he encounters another guy who says Frank Stockburn is his father. So they form a gang to rescue the dad that none of them ever knew.

The ridiculous six of the title are the six illegitimate Stockburn boys including the sad Mexican cliché played by Rob Schneider, the mentally deficient cliché played by Taylor Lautner, Luke Wilson as the handsome one, Jorge Garcia as the funny overweight guy, and Terry Crews as the funny African American guy. Even this simple description makes the movie sound better and more sophisticated than it actually is. It’s a collection of racial stereotypes, dumb sex jokes, dumber toilet jokes, and Adam Sandler wandering through it all trying to do some kind of quiet Clint Eastwood impression but ending up sounding like he took a couple of Ambien before each day of filming.

The film half-heartedly tries to satirize race and gender roles but fails. It’s not enough to simply point out that people say and do racist things or marginalize or objectify women. True satire uses exaggeration to make a point about those things. The makers of The Ridiculous Six are just happy to make poop jokes and have the Mexican guy walk around with a burro all day. The film wants to be a 21^st century version of the great Blazing Saddles. But like its star, the movie is simply too lazy for that and so, instead of Blazing Saddles, all we get is another crappy Adam Sandler movie.

The Ridiculous Six lasts for two hours, and that’s two hours too long.

A Few Words About Star Wars

The original Star Wars movie was released in 1977 when I was three years old. This was long before the days of VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, YouTube, or even pay-per-view, and so rather than leaving theaters in a matter of weeks, films stayed pretty much as long as they made money. Since people couldn't really watch movies at home and because TV went off the air at eleven or so, people also went to the theater a lot more often. Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope showed continuously in some theaters for over a year. Got that? After it was released in May of 1977, you could take a date to see it for high school graduation, catch a late show after fireworks on the Fourth of July, dress up as a Storm Trooper to see it for Halloween, catch it again at Christmas, and then take your prom date to see it in the spring.

In addition to these epic runs in theaters, there was also a time when a successful movie would get re-released in theaters after it had been gone for a while. These days, a movie generally only gets a theatrical re-release if it has been converted to 3D or if it's a significant anniversary or both. So Star Wars came out again in 1979, 1980, 81, and 82. (It came out again in 1997 but that's another story.)

I’m pretty sure my very first movie going experience ever was seeing the 1979 rerelease of Star Wars when I was five years old. 

Even though it was so long ago, I remember a couple of things with great clarity. We saw it in a single-screen theater in a little town called Rupert, Idaho. My brother and I sat together with Dad on one side and Mom on the other. Of course, all Star Wars movies start the same way: yellow words explaining the set-up of the movie crawling from the bottom of the screen to the top and then disappearing into space. My mom whispered the words to me because, you know, I was four. After the words disappeared, there was just a moment of silence and a field of stars.

Then came the moment that I (and most other nerds) remember perfectly: blazing across that field of stars comes a small, white ship, its thrusters glaring against the darkness of space. In the next second, a giant, triangular ship a thousand times bigger than the first one plows across the screen, shooting streaks of red lasers at the tiny, obviously outmatched first ship.

I was a kid and had no idea what a "rebel alliance" or a "galactic empire" were, but I didn't care. For the next two hours, I was transfixed - by Darth Vader and his obsidian-black samurai helmet, by Greedo and the other sketchy characters in the Cantina, by the weird asymmetry of the Millennium Falcon, and by the light sabers. Swords made out of lasers? Even at four, I knew that was a hot cup of steaming awesome. Seeing that movie was a big moment in my life, and it still resonates with me all these years later. 

Next week, I’ll take my family to see Star Wars episode VII: The Force Awakens, and unrealistically or not, my hopes are high. I am excited about the possibility of wonder and the potential return of the fun that was so absent in the prequel trilogy. I look forward to taking my kids and sitting next to them in the theater like my parents did over three decades ago. For a lot of people, Star Wars is an inter-generational thing we can enjoy and talk about and argue over. I hope the Force is with J.J. Abrams and his team and that this film almost 40 years in the making can somehow live up to the hype.

The Good Dinosaur

 

Disney-Pixar’s latest offering, The Good Dinosaur, is exactly that – it’s good. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s also not great. On the scale of Pixar films that has Toy Story 3, Ratatouie, and The Incredibles at the top and Cars 2 and Monsters University at the bottom, The Good Dinosaur is squarely in the middle. There are elements of it that are sublime but other aspects that are pretty ho-hum.
 
 

 The concept of the film itself is unusual. We’re used to talking animal cartoons. Those have been around since the very beginning of movies. But there are usually two kinds - those animals interacting with humans in the world we know. Think of the talking mice helping Cinderella sew her dress or Bugs Bunny foiling Elmer Fudd once again. Then there’s the animals-as-humans approach like the iguana and snake gunslingers in the old west cartoon Rango or Hamlet played with African beasts in The Lion King.    

What makes The Good Dinosaur a little unusual is that while it features animals and humans interacting, their roles are reversed. The giant lizards are the evolved, civilized ones and the humans are the inarticulate ones just barely learning to walk. Instead of the expected dynamic of dinosaurs fearing people or being subservient to them, the movie’s main human character is a dog-like pet to the character from the title.

Basically, The Good Dinosaur is a western. It’s about a family of homesteaders trying to carve out a life for themselves in the shadow of some mountains that looks suspiciously like the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. They’ve built themselves a cabin (a big one) and spend their days tilling the land and raising corn so they can have enough food to survive the winter. The film opens with the birth (or hatching to be more specific) of the homesteaders’ three children – the free spirited Libby, the brutish and thickheaded Buck, and the shrimpy, scared Arlo. 

 Arlo grows up to be skittish and, frankly, a little unlikeable. His timidity is funny at times but grating at others. His funny, panicky scream featured so prominently in the movie’s trailer is featured even more prominently in the movie. After the forty seventh identical scream in the first third of the film, it begins to lose its charm.

Anyway, the real story begins when Arlo is separated from his family. He gets washed far downstream in a river and then has to make his way back over miles and miles of the most gorgeously rendered western landscape I’ve ever seen in a film. He is accompanied by the human boy he names Spot, and Spot, who is brave and resourceful, ends up saving Arlo’s life repeatedly. 

Because it’s a frontier story, there’s a mountain hermit, marauding desperados, and macho, tough-guy cowboys. The cowboys, which are buffalo herding T-Rexes, are one of the best parts of the film, and their leader is played by the granite-voiced Sam Elliot. Elliot doesn’t do anything different than he’s done for a role for the last two or three decades – but having him play a grizzled, scarred, incredibly macho Tyrannosaur simply makes sense and whatever line of dialogue he rumbles out just makes you want to say, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir.” It’s an excellent piece of casting, and the sequence where the dinosaurs are galloping in slow motion across a grassy plain at sunset to a music very reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven theme is beautiful, knowing, and hilarious all at the same time. 

 

While moving at times, the story fails to tap into the same vein of universality that the best Pixar films hit. Again, it’s good but not great. What is great, however, is the depiction of the dinosaurs’ physical environment. If there weren’t purple and green dinosaurs galumphing everywhere, you would think they simply took hi-def cameras and the world’s best cinematographer to Wyoming and Montana and just filmed everything. There is a level of uncannily beautiful photorealism in The Good Dinosaur that is better than anything you’ve seen in a computer-generated film so far. It is one great aspect of an otherwise good film.