Blu-ray Review: The Waterboy (1998)

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In the world of film criticism, it seems as though if say you find Adam Sandler funny, you're committing an offense of the highest order. And while you'll never catch me wanting to watch Click, Little Nicky, or even The Waterboy ever again-- overall and flaws aside, I've still found a lot to like in his comedic work in movies such as The Wedding Singer, Anger Management, Billy Madison and You Don't Mess With the Zohan.

Yet it's also on display when he's working alongside other talents in dramatic performances such as in Paul Thomas Anderson's underrated Punch Drunk Love, James L. Brooks' underrated Spanglish and Mike Binder's underrated Reign Over Me. Gee, are we sensing a pattern? Yes, there is a Sandler prejudice and also Adam Sandler is extremely underrated. To this end, it seems as though very few individuals have realized the extent of his talent which goes way beyond the horrific character he created along with his frequent screenwriter Tim Herlihy in director Frank Coraci's The Waterboy.

Moreover, the Sandler influence seems to crop up everywhere from-- I swear-- a similar voice heard in some of Jon Stewart's impressions on The Daily Show to Jimmy Fallon basically trying to become the next generation's Sandler even going as far as to make his best film with Sandler's greatest female costar Drew Barrymore via Fever Pitch.

Yet where Waterboy forgets to incorporate the funny is by failing to successfully blend together the two ingredients that seem to show up repeatedly in the man's various characters whether created by Sandler or others including Binder and Anderson. In other words, the quintessential Sandler character is one that possesses genuine innocent sweetness and a boyish naivete mixed in equal measure with a Warner Brothers Acme stick of dynamite that's ready to explode.

A lot has been written about Sandler's good angel and bad angel schtick as the well-intentioned overgrown juvenile character we've witnessed in Madison, Happy Gilmore or Big Daddy (which co-starred Jon Stewart). Essentially, he seems filled with true sweetness yet he has the capability to move directly into overly violent bully territory within an instant which can honestly alarm viewers.

Whether he's beating up a bathroom in Punch Drunk Love, throwing dodgeballs extremely hard at first graders in Billy Madison, or rough handling any number of people in his films-- in a sense Adam Sandler has taken the classic Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers or Three Stooges-like ensemble idea and turned it into one individual.

Basically, when we meet a Sandler character in each successive film, we're never exactly sure whom we're going to encounter as he moves from hugs to hits with frightening speed but one of the reasons it worked better in the aforementioned comedy teams is because they were an ensemble and so it was easier to take when you balanced Harpo with Chico and Laurel with Hardy.

Walking the thin line between physical comedy and downright violence is the task undertaken in The Waterboy when we first encounter Sandler in sugar sweet mode as Bobby Boucher, the overly sheltered, smothered mama's boy still living at home at the age of thirty-one.

Apparently mentally challenged and shy-- he rides his tractor from his cliched Louisiana backwoods bayou swamp home shared with his mother Kathy Bates (a long, long way from her usual Oscar worthy self) to the local university where he delivers high quality water as the football team's official waterboy.

Mercilessly ridiculed with school bus level insults aimed squarely at his disability, when it's the victim Bobby who's accused of distracting the team so much by simply existing as a mentally challenged individual the guys bully to no end, he's fired.

Unwilling to just quit the waterboy gig altogether, Bobby visits a local college whose football team's historic losing streak has made them the laughingstock of ESPN. And much to his shock, he's hired-- obviously for free-- to become the "water distribution engineer" by the formerly great and now frazzled Coach Klein (Henry Winkler).

One of the film's only saving graces--Winkler's Coach Klein is the one who tells Bobby at long last that it's okay to stick up for himself. Although when thirty-one years of pent up frustration boils to the surface, Bobby goes berserk, violently knocking the man to the ground in a way that gives Klein the idea that Bobby may be precisely what his team needs to actually win a single game.

Lying to his mama about becoming a football player and college student as well as spending increasing amounts of time with free-spirited recently released jailbird Vicki Vallencourt (Fairuza Balk), Sandler's Bobby Boucher soon becomes the star of the team.

An obvious retread of not just Happy Gilmore but other underdog sports tales-- where Waterboy goes terribly wrong is by constantly resorting to awful gross-out memories and over-the-top violence as the most frequent source for jokes. Likewise in having way too much fun with the stereotypical southern setting as Bates cooks up squirrels and gators, we're never sure if we're laughing with Bobby and the Louisiana community or at them as the same cliches of "retarded" and "redneck" that the film allegedly is trying to prove are shallow and wrong.

Thus, in the end, it's squirm-inducing, uncomfortable humor that feels like a ninety minute live action version of a cartoon created by a few teens understandably tired of being picked on in high school yet seeking creative justice rather than violent justice. I only wish the same could be said for the journey of Bobby Boucher.

However, at the end of the day, there's nothing creative about a film that Sandler and Herlihy could've penned in a single afternoon that is nowhere near as intricate or clever as the brief skits from SNL where Sandler would star in "The Denise Show," play the "Opera Man" or grab a guitar and sing odes to Hanukkah, red sweatshirts, or lunch ladies.

A waste of all involved save for Winkler whose playful performance earned the sole laugh I could muster when screening the work for the second time in eleven years on Blu-ray disc as he illustrates the need to rebel by sharing his inked appreciation for Roy Orbison.

So instead for angry Sandler, your best bet is still seeing him square off opposite Jack Nicholson in Anger Management when the premise works precisely because he's in denial of the rage he repeatedly lunges towards in his films and for sweet Sandler, he'll never top The Wedding Singer which is still one of my favorite '90s romantic comedies.

Boasting zero bonus features since most likely none of the individuals involved felt like reliving the experience-- the Blu-ray from Touchstone Pictures is otherwise top-notch as it was distributed by Walt Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment which proves on a weekly basis that they have this format down to an exact science.

Moreover it duplicates the same experience I'd had viewing the film originally in theatres back in '98 with a clear soundtrack that balances the sound of a roaring crowd and the dialogue well across your speakers that syncs up perfectly with razor sharp picture quality. Yet, given the price-tag of Blu-ray discs, my advice would be to hold off on making the upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray for this feature based on the poor content alone (regardless of its superior quality) in the hopes that eventually, a definitive Sandler set will be put together on Blu-ray that will make the price increase worth the switch.

However, one major hurdle that will no doubt get in the way of this becoming a reality-- as Jack Lemmon's son Chris explained in our recent interview while discussing the complexities of sets regarding his dad's body of work-- is the number of studios that would have to work together and film property that's owned by several different corporations. Although, I'm still optimistic that in the future more cross-promotional efforts will be made since studios have begun to realize the home entertainment boom in lieu of poor box office returns.

Likewise, in a society where so much content is available online, perhaps thinking outside the box for business reasons in sharing material to give fans what they'd want and a reason to shell out money would be one extremely profitable and beneficial way to combat the problems facing the entertainment industry in the new millennium.

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Blu-ray Review: Strange Wilderness (2008)

Now Available on Blu-ray

Also Available on DVD

You have to be a fan of actor Steve Zahn to be able to appreciate the loony mayhem that is director Fred Wolf’s Strange Wilderness. Fortunately, this is one prerequisite that I’ve aced ever since I witnessed my fellow Minnesota native initially playing the sweet, closeted Reality Bites character amidst a terrific ensemble of actors in Ben Stiller’s directorial work.

Balancing out blockbusters with indie films, he followed this up with more great little-seen turns over the years (Safe Men, Happy, Texas), but it wasn't until he finally stole the spotlight away from such larger-than-life celebrity presences as Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, and Don Cheadle, first in Hanks’ underrated, sunny ‘60s feel-great musical comedy That Thing You Do! before he brought a bizarre mixture of humor and pathos to his small time hoodlum turn in Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant Out of Sight that people started to pay attention in a bigger way.

Although unfortunately, despite some truly memorable and instantly quotable laugh-out-loud moments in this film penned by Fred Wolf and Peter Gaulke that finds Zahn starring as the inept son who’s inherited his deceased Jack Hanna-like father’s nature television series, Strange Wilderness loses its way shortly after the characters hit the road in a series of escalating, tired, gross out, and cliched “outsiders on a journey” gags.

And despite the fact that only a third of the way into the roughly 90 minute movie, most viewers will feel like channel flipping as though they've stumbled onto the movie on television and moreover feel the strange sense they’ve seen it all before in countless other Happy Madison productions from executive producer Adam Sandler-- the main reason that the film succeeds at all (in the precious few times that it does) and what kept me watching for its entire running time was none other than Steve Zahn.

Coming right off of an impressive dramatic portrayal in Werner Herzog’s acclaimed Vietnam-set biopic Rescue Dawn co-starring Christian Bale, Zahn is instantly believable in familiar comedy mode as the fictitious version of Peter Gaulke.

The ill-prepared host of the now laughably awful series a three a.m. time slot-- Gaulke’s show is just weeks away from justifiable and long overdue cancellation by network executive Jeff Garlin. So in one last ditch attempt to bring back the viewers and make his father proud, Zahn leads his group of even more clueless staffers (including Allen Covert, Jonah Hill and Justin Long) on a journey to find Bigfoot by traveling down into central America.

Of course, we know they're completely unprepared for the dangers that face them given the group's prior tendency to prep for shows with voice-overs written on bar napkins, nonsensical and erroneous “facts” and pseudo-intellectual observations like “it is estimated that the faster a shark swims, the more distance he covers in a given period of time,” and enlisting crew members to don animal costumes to horrific results. And sure enough, it isn’t long before they’re flat broke and find themselves truly trying to survive in some very “strange” wilderness indeed.

A few years following the success of the movie’s origins as comedic shorts from Wolf and Gaulke via an independently produced series of short video “parodies of wildlife shows… which [were] eventually [aired] on Comedy Central,” former Saturday Night Live writers, stand-up comics and TV writers Gaulke and Wolf decided to turn that idea into a feature length work.

Kick-starting their ambition to see it as a movie by crafting their own version of it on video for potential financiers-- Wolf acknowledges that time and again they encountered “a lot of people interested in making it into a TV show… until Adam Sandler and his producing partner Jack Giarraputo read the script.”

With the blessing of Happy Madison Productions and Sandler’s name enabling them to attract some top-notch talent including Ernest Borgnine (in an inspired casting decision made after seeing him on SpongeBob SquarePants), soon the film was set into motion. And while one can’t argue with some of the incredible performers involved like the always-welcome Justin Long as the perpetually stoned, creepily tattooed new crew member and fun cameos with Robert Patrick and Joe Don Baker—- not to long after the movie's incredibly addictive and wholly original set-up-- the film's tone is destroyed by excess.

Namely in unsuccessfully trying to juggle so many different characters (including a bizarre and overdone turn by Jonah Hill that grates on the nerves within seconds) and an increasing over-reliance on disgusting sight gags-- soon the great premise about the dim-witted host is left by the wayside in lieu of sequences involving animals attacking our lead in the privates and-- I'm not kidding-- an entire conversation centering on the fact that a character's name is Dick.

And overall, Wilderness is a movie that holds our interest for the first portion as we see some of the characters in action creating what has to be the worst animal show ever captured on film-- making the screenwriters’ initial feedback that it would’ve probably worked best as a television show seem especially true in hindsight.

With a great deal of enthusiasm, the actors all try their hardest but sadly, there’s not much to like about a film that alienates more viewers with each successive scene that goes for laughs in the crudest possible manner, forgetting just what made the first act so damn funny to begin with.

Typically for the format, the Blu-ray quality of the 2008 work is quite impressive given the stellar sound and heightened depth perception, however since it was purposely filmed to visually hearken back to 1970s wildlife shows, it’s not a great improvement over the DVD so those who already own it may want to skip the upgrade.

Containing some extra features that relish in the repulsion of the infamous “turkey scene,” Jonah Hill’s bizarre Eddie Vedder modeled song performed alongside Justin Long, a veritable press kit extra on the film just added onto the disc and deleted scenes—the sole standout that shows exactly what the cast is capable of is titled “What Do We Do?” which finds Zahn, Long, Hill, Covert, and Borgnine all riffing in a hilarious exchange about Jack Nicholson, Nell Carter, and others.

As they improvise and challenge one another to be funnier, you can sense Long’s polite discomfort as he apologetically blames his crude outbursts on his character rather than himself (while seated next to the legendary Borgnine) but it’s a great example of just putting a bunch of creative and comically gifted people in a room together and letting them rip.

Likewise, it’s a terrific indication that—instead of the gross-out gags and over-the-top effects-- if Gaulke and Wolf would’ve done more scenes like the one featured in this extra over the course of the film, perhaps they’d be sitting with a much more successful and far less formulaic Happy Madison Production that’s memorable for something other than just simply marveling at the next ridiculous nature observation to be uttered by Zahn’s host.