If you need to rest your eyes at any point during the 146 min. comedy epic Funny People, your best bet is to do it early during a sequence in which Adam Sandler’s character has back to back sex with a couple of female fans. The second of these scenes is mildly amusing, but there’s just no need to put the images in your head of either Sandler with a face full of breasts or the actor taking a girl from behind.
There are some actors we don’t need to see in a sex scene, humorous or otherwise, and Adam Sandler is one of them. He’s of a generation of comedic actors who starred in movies where they get the girl but where there’s no need for gratuitous sex and nudity. Unlike most of his successors, including Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd and Dane Cook, he was never a pin-up in addition to being a funnyman. Even if he was better looking than some of his brethren, such as David Spade, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Rob Schneider.
Still, Adam Sandler isn’t the last male actor we’d want to see in a sex scene. He’s not even in the bottom ten, which we present in a list below:
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“The best part about the 81st annual Academy Awards on Sunday night—y’know, besides Zac Efron, OMG!—is that once it’s over, we’ll never have to think about Slumdog Millionaire again.” — Christopher Rosen, at The New York Observer.
As the last weekday before the big event, today seems to be filled with more Oscar bloggery than all previous awards-season days combined. There are last minute predictions, last minute commentary and, most enjoyable, last minute Oscar nonsense. Are you ready? Are you bored? Are you so behind that you really need to attend tomorrow’s Best Picture nominee marathon at your local AMC theatre?
Whether or not you care about who or what wins on Sunday night, you may enjoy some of the following stories, quotes and video:
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The only possible advantage a small-ish movie like Transsiberian has when opening on the same weekend as the biggest box office draw in recent memory, is that in cities where Transsiberian is being shown, The Dark Knight’s screenings have been sold out for weeks. So, if you’ve been left out in the cold by Batman, go see Transsiberian. Or better yet, see them both.
Transibberian is the most enjoyable film I saw at Sundance this last January. As far as best film, I’d say it’s tied with the steroids doc Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Transsiberian is directed by Brad Anderson. (Also known for The Machinist, which is maybe where Christopher Nolan found his next Batman? Discuss). It follows the story of an American couple, Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) as they travel the transsiberian railway from China to Europe after a mission trip. Tensions in their marriage are clear, Roy is a squeaky-clean do-gooder, tapping into a delightful naiveté we haven’t seen since Cheers. Jessie, on the other hand, is a reformed bad-girl. Mortimer makes her apprehension about having settled with Roy readily apparent without overdoing it.
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Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.
I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
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Egotastic has a couple of artfully lit but not particularly safe for work clips from Elegy, which feature a naked Penelope Cruz in bed with Ben Kingsley. I don’t know much about this film––it premiered at Berlinale, where Jurgen Fauth described how Cruz’s “breasts even become a plot point”––but surely, this is the most pre-release attention ever given to anything directed by Isabel Coixet, and that’s probably ultimately a good thing. Still, it points to an alarming trend of indie/art films which position the 65 year-old Kingsley as a sex symbol to much, much younger women. If it takes three examples to make a trend, we can easily find the other two in Kingsley’s next film to hit the American marketplace, Sundance crowd pleaser The Wackness.
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There are a number of accomplished actors who have worked with infamously bad filmmaker Uwe Boll: Sir Ben Kingsley; Geraldine Chaplin; Clint Howard. And many of those actors have worked with some great filmmakers. Yet who would think to ask Kingsley how Boll compares to Spielberg or Polanski, or Chaplin how Boll compares to David Lean or Robert Altman, or Howard how Boll compares to his brother Ron. Well, Shawn Adler of MTV Movies Blog decided that it would be really amusing if he asked Leelee Sobieski to comment on any similarities between Boll and Stanley Kubrick. Surprisingly, she managed to squeeze out a decent answer — at least considering she’s on camera to wholeheartedly promote her and Boll’s film In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and has to say something nice about the director.
Sobieski may not be the best person to ask, though. She was only 15 when she appeared in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and that film isn’t even considered to be on par with the filmmaker’s regular work. Still, she obviously understands the clear distinctions between “the greatest filmmaker of all time” and “the worst director of all time,” as Kubrick and Boll are respectively labeled, and she gives a good response in saying that both ask a lot of questions and both deserve respect for getting things done and not being lazy. As for the rest, its a cop-out, though a good save publicity-wise, but still makes perfect sense as an apples vs. oranges kind of comparison. Even Kingsley, who has been in his share of terrible films (only one of which is Boll’s Bloodrayne) and likely has to defend his choices all the time, would probably say something along the same lines as Sobieski’s claim that people want to be stimulated in a “plethohra” of directions and that there’s room for intellectual films and “great” action movies.
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I can’t quite get it up to care about 
