Oh man, it's been a while, hasn't it? I'd like to apologize...but I'm not going to.
I suppose I haven't really pinpointed the purpose of this blog. Is it to ramble? Is it an outlet for my frustrating observations of this crazy thing we call life? Is it a cry for attention? Is it a place where I can safely criticize the crap out of everything I deem unworthy of this world? How about...all the above?
...Or how about it's a thing I do because I want to and I don't need to explain myself to ANYBODY!
Today I'll be criticizing -- I mean, reviewing...okay fine, criticizing the movie The Cobbler. Why did I italicize the title? Because I am one grammar savvy beeyotch.
Not unlike most Americans, I saw the cover of this film and immediately assumed, "Yes, another Adam Sandler piece of horse shit that is ridden with awkward crassness and painfully unfunny poop humor. ...I LOVE IT ALREADY!!!" When I started watching the film, however, I was met with an unfamiliar tone of sincerity and heartbreaking truth of humanity. I was very disappointed.
Honestly, though, I was excited to see a film with Adam Sandler that actually drew me in emotionally rather than with the promise of 1,000 fart jokes. Sandler plays a Jewish cobbler, which apparently still exist in Manhattan...cobblers, not Jews...who is begrudgingly upholding his family shop and taking care of his senile mother. His shop neighbor, Steve Buscemi, is a barber who acts suspiciously fatherly to him throughout the film. Sandler is approached one day by a perky activist chick, who is conveniently single but would be waaaay too young for him in the real world, and encourages him to sign some petitions to keep his shop from being gentrified. He goes against his wishes of taking this out from his pathetic life to sign the petition because he hopes this will get him laid.
Days later, Method Man enters Adam Sandler's shop to get his alligator shoes resoled. We don't know much about Method Man yet, but the film strongly hints that he's a bad motherfucker and he wants his shoes fixed TONIGHT! Adam Sandler works after hours to fix Method Man's shoes for fear of getting murdered when his machine explodes. When he can't get anyone to come fix it in time, he resorts to the ancient relic he keeps in the cellar from his great, great, great grandfather. But this machine is MaGiCaL!!! When he stitches the shoes and tries them on for shiggles, he immediately BECOMES Method Man!
After much confusion and heavy breathing and cheap camera tricks, Adam Sandler discovers that any pair of shoes he stitches with his ancestor's machine will allow him access to their bodies. (!!!) For a solid eight minutes of film, he tries on dozens of shoes and becomes dozens of people including a transgender and a corpse. Amazingly all these shoes are his exact size. At no point through this whole experiment does he stop and question why he has so many pairs of unclaimed shoes.
Armed with this special ability, Adam Sandler decides he can be "anybody I want!" Which of course isn't entirely true. He can be anybody he wants from the small selection he has...which it turns out aren't very interesting. If I had the ability to become the likeness of any of my customers, I'd look in the mirror for a long time and think "This is creepy." and immediately go back to my life. Adam Sandler, however, takes utmost joy in wandering around Manhattan in someone else's body. He doesn't do anything he wouldn't normally do otherwise. He does, however, use the ability to stalk Perky Activist Girl by staring at her through a window as he occupies a 13 year old's body.
At home, he talks with his mom who laments that she only wants to have dinner with his father one last time before she kicks off. Adam Sandler gets the crazy idea of putting on his father's shoes and becoming Dad (Dustin Hoffman) for one mind-bending night with his mom. I was totally betting on the evening ending, or at least going in the direction, with Mom trying to get frisky with her long-lost husband and Sandler being unable to deny his mom's wish, thus resulting in an awfully grotesque, yet classic Sandleresque attempt at humor. However, I was one again deeply disappointed.
The next morning, Mom is dead, but most likely died happy after having gotten to see her fake husband one last time. Adam Sandler is devastated. He can't afford a decent casket for Mom because he spent the last week of work dicking around in other people's bodies, dining and dashing and fapping off to Perky Activist Girl. When he finally returns to work, Method Man is waiting for him demanding his gators. Sandler dickishly asks for Method Man's ticket and upon not having it refuses to return his shoes. Method Man threatens Adam Sandler and leaves without putting up much of a fight. This launches the second leg of an already drawn-out story!
Sandler packs about ten pairs of shoes with him and follows MM around Manhattan. Upon observing him through several different bodies, and apparently finding time change into them without being seen transforming, he discovers MM is quite the douchebag. He gets in random fights with convenient store workers, he beats his girlfriend, he orchestrates the gentrification project that's threatening the city block that Perky Activist Girl is fighting to protect...Wait WHAT!! This guy is very busy! And what a coincidence that he gets his shoes fixed at Adam Sandler's shop and wears the exact same shoe size as him!
Sandler, in Method Man's body, manages to enter MM's apartment in search of his expensive watches to hock for his Mom's well-deserved, diamond-encrusted casket. But when Method Man unexpectedly walks in to the apartment and sees..Method Man! things get dicey!
Eventually Real Method Man is defeated by Adam Sandler Method Man and is left tied to a chair and gagged. Out of his vast selection of shoes to wear for the intimidating captor role, Sandler chooses the transvestite's stilettos and transforms into probably the least intimidating person to demand where the watches are hidden. Personally I would've picked the corpse. If I didn't look scary enough, I would've at least stood quietly and waited for the stench of rotting flesh to break Method Man's will. But whatever.
As his interrogation goes fruitless, Method Man's homies show up. Oh no! Now Adam Sandler Method Man emerges and travels all over on a mission to "get his money." After stopping by a few sketchy warehouses, they make their final stop at a nice upstate mansion where Evil Gentrification Mastermind Lady is cooking crab ragu and hands Adam Sandler Method Man a giant brick of money. At this point in the film, I disabled my suspension of disbelief and tuned out the nonsense of the logistics of why this lady would want to bulldoze a city block in Manhattan and why she would have any business paying off a thug like Method Man to do anything that the government should be doing in the first place. It was all supposed to make sense, but it wasn't!
Like I'm supposed to make sense out of a film in which the protagonist can transform into someone else's body just by wearing their shoes.
Back at the apartment, Adam Sandler, still in Method Man's body, opens the door...to Method Man in Method Man's body! Instead of just shooting him dead like a true thug would've done, Method Man in Method Man's body launches into the long-winded speech about how "you're dead, you're SO dead!" that only truly good writers would engage in. A struggle ensues, transvestite body takes over, a kick in the jugular with the stiletto ends MM's life. Because stiletto heels are sharp objects.
Adam Sandler panics and turns himself into he police but when they go to retrieve the body, it's GONE! What a craaaazy movie!
Perky Activist Girl and Adam Sandler then team up to fight the new enemy, Evil Gentrification Mastermind Lady, and together they take her down in a very confusing, probably unnecessarily complicated way that I refuse to recall. But it involves putting on the shoes of every henchman involved and transforming into several different bodies. In the end, EGML is defeated and everybody wins.
One final kidnapping attempt later, Adam Sandler wakes up to find himself in Steve Buscemi's barber shop. At this point I jokingly exclaim: Steve Buscemi is Adam Sandler's father! Because at the rate this movie was spiraling and twisting, it was very possible.
Lo and behold, Steve Buscemi takes off his shoes and becomes Dustin Hoffman. "I'm your father the whole time!" Adam Sandler is pissed. I would be too if my father chose to hide from me for decades in Steve Buscemi's body. Turns out Dustin Hoffman had to hide from the world because of all the horrible situations he found himself in and chose that particular moment to reveal himself because...by God it was TIME.
The film ends with father and son driving off in Dustin Hoffman's fancy shiny car that was hidden underground, driven by personal driver named Webb...I can't even finish this thought because I am so done talking about this movie!!
EDIT: For being "one grammar savvy beeyotch" I sure had to fix a lot of typos.
No comments:
Post a Comment