While I’m on the subject of writing about comedy today, and since there aren’t any new trailers to comment on, I figured I’d go back and take another look at You Don’t Mess with the Zohan trailer. When the preview first hit, I decided not to write about it, because I know how difficult it is to write about comedy and I just know that people are apt to disagree with me over Adam Sandler’s career.

As a youngster, I was a huge fan of Sandler and a constant defender of the merits of his comedy. But I think as I’ve grown older, I’ve lost the appreciation for that random and absurdist stuff — I think this somehow coincides with my waning enjoyment of Bunuel. For awhile, I thought it was Sandler who was growing up, doing movies for kids and families and making more efforts to do dramatic roles, but Zohan seems as immature as anything he’s ever done. The problem is, it also seems as simple and formulaic (in a 1980s comedy, there’s always a bad guy to make the third act less funny, Crocodile Dundee/Twins/etc., sort of way) as anything he’s ever done. Say what you will about Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore, but there is some well-crafted, anarchic comedy in there beneath the stupid surface storylines.

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What is the difference between a great comedy and a really funny movie? Is one easily classifiable and the other too subjective? It’s quite possible. Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot is considered by many academics and critics to be the best comedy film of all time. I won’t argue, as I’m not an expert on the craft of comedy, but despite the fact that I enjoy the film, it’s not one that makes me laugh much. Meanwhile I’ll fall on the floor laughing at parts of Cabin Boy, which I know is not a well-made movie, and which I don’t even especially like. So, the question is, how does one award comedy?

Every year during the awards season, people talk about how comedies and comedic performances are largely overlooked. I’ve already commented once on the subject, regarding this year’s Golden Globe nominations, but since then I’ve noticed more complaints about overlooked comedies, and in most instances there seems to be a confusion about what it really means to be a great comedy and what is just a funny movie.  Today, the IMDb linked to the Misfortune Cookie Blog and its honoring of “the year’s funniest in film.” The site references Knocked Up and Juno as “comedic achievements” that will go unrecognized (never mind that Juno is a Best Picture Oscar front-runner) yet also makes the point of naming Superbad the “Funniest Movie of the Year” with a disclaimer stating that it is not the “best movie, or best-written, or most likely to change your life.” So, what is the argument? Are you making a point of recognizing under-appreciated comedic genius, or are you just pointing out something that made YOU laugh.

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Here are the facts: the Adam Sandler gay-sham com I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry won the weekend box office derby, pulling in about $35 million to Harry Potter and The What Kind Of Magical Scrape Have These Spooky Kids Conjured Up Now?!?’s $32 million. $35 million is a significant opening take, and it would not have been possible to rack up if Sandler’s base audience had been turned off by the pic’s pro-gay tolerance theme. Not only was the gay marriage thing not a problem–it might have been a plus. Just look at the numbers: Adam Sandler fans are more likely to rush out opening weekend see their guy pretend to pretend to be gay, than watch him in a serious film about post-9/11 ennui…by a factor of seven.

And now, here’s the spin: Jeff Wells, LAist and the New York Times think Mr. Potter’s 58% weekend-to-weekend decline may have been the result of Harry Potter overload. LAist has the better quip: “My guess is that the release of Deathly Hallows cost Order of the Phoenix a second consecutive weekend crown (I still can’t believe that Voldermort turned out to be Harry’s father!).” I honestly can’t tell if Nikki Finke is being sarcastic when she writes, “There’d been speculation whether the new Harry Potter book would cut into the franchise’s movie ticket sales. Nah!” I can tell you that she definitely loses points for using the term “fivequel.”

Meanwhile, Box Office Mojo couldn’t really care less about gay marriage vs. boy wizardry–for these datamasters, it’s all about Hairspray. Brandon Gray devotes the opening four paragraphs of a 7-graph writeup to the musical, which broke records for its genre. Gray notes that even adjusting for inflation, Hairspray’s $28 million opening easily beat the record for the best musical opening weekend ever previously held by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And it’s not just good news for song-and-dance lovers–New Line needed this hit. “It marks New Line’s first $20 million-plus launch since Wedding Crashers two years ago and breaks the distributor’s losing streak that had persisted since Final Destination 3 in February 2006.”

More spin:

Transformers is still doing okay — Comics2Film
A victory for homophobia? — Lou Lemenick
…or one for Jessica Biel’s butt? –Obsessed with Film

The gay marriage debate seems to have been relegated to the back-burner of late (apparently, there’s a war going on). Could Adam Sandler help bring it back?

At AfterElton.com [via GreenCine Daily] Alonso Duralde says I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry “will probably do more for the national debate on gay marriage than every book written by conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan and every letter you’ve sent to your senator put together.” He goes on to explain that this is mostly because “average” Americans are apparently willing to pay money to see Adam Sandler do just about anything, regardless of whether or not the themes of his films jibe with their personal preferences or political beliefs. It seems like a valid point, even if Paul Thomas Anderson might disagree.

But at the Village Voice, Nathan Lee has much more fun nailing Chuck and Larry’s potential power; the openly gay critic boldly claims that the film is “as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical.” (Lee, it should be noted, famously defended Brokeback’s “middle-brow man-on-man masochistic romanticism” around the time of that film’s release.) The whole review is basically begging to be blockquoted, but here’s a choice excerpt:

This sodomite had a gay old time. The coup of the movie is that Sandlerites will, too. They’re the ones unmistakably addressed in the courtroom climax, the moment when Chuck and Larry confess their deceptions and assert their principles. Momentarily possessed by remarkable authenticity, Sandler seems to step out of character as he appeals to the crowd to stop using the word “faggot.” I’ve used it a lot myself in the past, he says in a manner less like a line reading than a mea culpa, but it hurts the same way it does if you called me a kike.

Meanwhile, Jeff Wells links to a clip of Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff promoting his boycott of Hairspray on The O’Reilly Factor. Naff says Scientology is anti-gay, and since John Travolta is a Scientologist, ergo, a film that began life as a Broadway musical based on a cult film starring a drag queen and written/directed by the most successful openly-gay filmmaker of the last thirty years is — wait for it — also anti-gay. “Gay people are not so desperate for entertainment that we should be lining the pockets of those who want to cure us,” Naff huffs. Adam Shankman, director of the new Hairspray, responded: “Everybody involved in Hairspray - all the creators - are gay…me, the writers, composer, John Waters - all gay.”

I guess the only question is this: how many gay pockets do you need to line to outweigh the damage done by putting cash in the pants of one Scientologist?

***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN, and I don’t mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn’t actually put photographers in with units that are this elite.”

***Variety’s Brain Lowry watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry so that you never, ever have to. And though he concedes that “Sandler’s fans should enjoy hearing him toss off lines about being ‘big-time fruits’ or having ‘boarded the dude train’,” ultimately “it will be slightly depressing if a barrage of schoolyard gay jokes passes for ‘edgy’ a quarter-century after Victor/Victoria.”

***After the massive critical success of her feature directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley will return to the other side of the camera to star opposite Jared Leto in Mr. Nobody. It’s the first English-language feature for Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, and THR’s Borys Kit says the script is “a multilayered love story inspired by the ‘butterfly effect, the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.”