BEFORE: Well, that's a wrap for the Tribeca Film Festival, as I worked a 14-hour shift yesterday and tomorrow the theater closes for two months. See you guys in...August? Now I have to figure out what to do with myself between now and then, since I'm only scheduled to work three days a week at the primary job. Well, when in doubt, make a list - of all the things I've been putting off, including seeing a couple doctors, clearing out some old e-mails, looking for temp work, maybe cutting back the vines in the backyard, taking some comics to storage - there's plenty to do, I just haven't been motivated to do any of it. Maybe boredom will motivate me to get some things done instead of just moping around. I can also pull some DVDs from the collection that I need to watch before June 4 and then try to program a chain that connects July 4 and October 1. Maybe I can even go to the movies once or twice, I know there are some blockbusters coming out that I may want to see, plus I'm behind on my Marvel movies, so that's a thing to do. Whatever gets me through the next two months - I can cut back on movies in September when I may be working more.
In the meantime, it's Father's Day at last, I've been building up to it for the last three weeks at least. I called my Dad today, and he's considering taking my sister up on her offer to move my parents down to North Carolina. I hate that I don't really have a say in this matter, but the truth is I only see them a couple times a year anyway, this probably won't change that, it will just mean I'll need to travel further when I do see them. Great.
Adam Sandler carries over from "Blended".
THE PLOT: While in his teens, Donny fathered a son and raised him as a single parent until his 18th birthday. Now Donny resurfaces just before his son's wedding after years apart, sending the groom-to-be's world crashing down.
AFTER: Wow, this movie was terrible, it just aimed so LOW with its comedy. Who makes a comedy that STARTS with a teacher having sex with a high-school student? How is THAT a jumping-off point for some good old-fashioned comedy? And then it goes even lower from there, with jokes about incest, strip clubs and bachelor parties, masturbation, fantasizing about sex with senior citizens, and more. Which all really amounts to less - I know Sandler started his whole career in low-brow comedies, but this really should have all been beneath him. Maybe this is why he wanted to transition to dramas like "Uncut Gems" and "Hustle", but then again, he still made "Hubie Halloween" lately so I just don't get it. Maybe actors don't have as much control as they think they do, if they can't control whether a movie is going to end up being "funny" or "good", whatever those terms mean. But this one is neither funny NOR good.
Now I have regrets, because there were so many other, BETTER movies about fathers that I could have place on this day. Fathers are everywhere, and I settled for this one, so I guess I apologize for this, only it's not really my fault. I have to watch a movie to determine just how bad it is, and this one's just terrible. I wish I could just drop it and not count it - actually I could and you at home would never know, but I don't like to be dishonest. I watched it, I'll take the hit and I'll hope for something better out of Adam Sander tomorrow.
I can go almost all the way back to Mother's Day and find better films with fathers in them - starting with "The Pale Blue Eye", then "Eighth Grade" would have been a fine choice, too, "News of the World" had Tom Hanks acting like a surrogate father figure, "The Land of Steady Habits" had Ben Mendelsohn as an irresponsible father, "White Noise" had Adam Driver trying to save his family from a deadly toxic cloud from a train crash, "Stillwater" had Matt Damon trying to prove that his daughter wasn't a murderer, and in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore", Credence Barebone learned who his father was - any of those films would have been better than "That's My Boy". "Dom Hemingway" (absent father safe-cracker), "A Simple Favor" (father with a missing wife), "Top Gun: Maverick" (ace pilot Rooster tries to live up to his father's legacy), "Apollo 10 1/2" (boy remembers his father in 1969), "Shazam: Fury of the Gods" had kids with a foster father, "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again" (teen takes over his father's job), "Senior Year" (cheerleader's father supports her when she wakes from a coma), "School Ties" (Jewish kid going to prep school gets advice from his father), "The Tender Bar" (Long Island kid has an absent father), "Nobody" (father uses his skills to protect his family), "Respect" (Aretha Franklin clashes with her father), "Dope" (L.A. kid with absent father), and "Blended" of course. Hell, even "Bullet Train" had a couple fathers in it, who then fought each other with swords. Any of those I could have chosen over this one, and I could have made it work.
But "That's My Boy" is just a whole lot of garbage. If feels kind of like a Peter Farrelly film, like you could trace the humor back to "There's Something About Mary", which also had jokes about masturbation and also had a weird old lady character that got naked. (Like, WTF?). But is this really what the general public is craving in a comedy film? Not me, I just don't get it. Sandler has proved that he's better than this, so why do all these lowest-common-denominator gags and play to the cheap seats?
Look, I don't really want to break down WHY the jokes are so bad, because explaining comedy tends to kill it, and it's already pretty dead here. But I kind of have to mention a few things, like that characters work best when they are consistent, and there are inconsistencies all over this thing. The worst example is probably Jamie, the fiancée character - we never really get any read on her at all, she's a giant blank. What is she all about? We have no idea, because the screenwriter never bothered to give her anything to DO throughout the whole film, except be a person engaged to Todd Peterson (aka Han Solo Berger). A screenwriter should not be allowed to create a character this underdeveloped, she's practically invisible until the script needs her to do a particular thing, which is to cheat on Todd. Very very bad, from a feminist point of view, that a woman has nothing remarkable about her at all, except for who she's sleeping with.
The teacher who had a relationship with her student is almost as bad - umm, what subject does she teach? We don't know anything about her either, except for her name and that she's having sex with Donny. What's her motivation, why does she do this thing? Why does she give Donny detention for him coming on to her, then quickly reverse herself and seduce him? There's an opportunity here to get inside the head of a Pamela Smart-type character, but it's completely wasted. Was she abused as a child? Was she dumped by her boyfriend, is she divorced? I will admit it's a clever idea to have her played by Susan Sarandon's daughter when she's young and by Sarandon herself when she's older. That's a little bit of genius, but even when the character comes back into the storyline 28 years later, we still don't learn one personal fact about her. Very, very bad, obviously this came from a screenwriter who can only view women as sexual objects and doesn't care one bit about their thoughts or hopes or dreams.
Donny's a terrible character as well as a terrible person - he owes $43,000 to the IRS in back taxes, so how am I supposed to, you know, like him? He apparently made some money as a minor celebrity after the trial of his teacher, but then he wasted most of it, invested none of it, and apparently spent NONE of it on raising his son? Well, it's a good thing he's not irresponsible, right? Then he let his son have cake and candy every day for breakfast, which led to Todd/Han being very overweight and getting diabetes. Well, now I really hate him, I hate the car he drives, I hate everything he wears, and I really hate how everybody seems to like him when he's such a complete a-hole. How does that even work? There's no rational explanation for it, he's got no job, no charming personality, no responsibility, and he's been coasting for decades on the fact that he slept with his high-school teacher? No way that the court of public opinion would have championed his cause for so long, it doesn't compute.
Then, of course, he sells out his whole family and arranges for a TV camera crew to be there when his son reunites with his mother, who's still in jail. For this, Donny will get $50,000, more than enough to pay the IRS his back taxes. NITPICK POINT: This doesn't compute either, because if he gets another $50,000 in income to pay his back taxes, he'll still have to declare the new $50K in earnings for the current year, and if the TV producers don't take out withholding taxes, then he'll have to pay taxes on THAT, and it's just a vicious cycle that's never going to end. To make it stop, he'd probably have to earn at least $60K gross, pay the taxes in advance on the $60K, and then MAYBE he'd have $43K left to give to the IRS for the previous years. But what do I know, I'm not an accountant.
Anyway, the plan doesn't work because Todd/Han gets angry and doesn't sign a release form. So Donny's back to trying to borrow the money somehow or win a bet on the Boston Marathon. Umm, here's a crazy idea, did he ever think about maybe getting a job? Oh, I hate this character so much, who the hell decided this was a good character to build a movie around? He's just going to give young people bad ideas about how to live their lives, like earning money from being TikTok and Instagram influencers and not realizing that all income is taxable income. Or that betting on a really fat guy to win a marathon is a super-terrible idea, also it's very very impossible, because duh, of course it is.
The priest is another example of a character that just makes no sense - what's his deal? Why did he get into fights with everybody? Because he's Irish? That's a very poor excuse. I mean, I know there had to be something wrong with the priest to cause some kind of wedding mishap, but every little story element has to make sense even in a fictional world. You can't just have "priest who for some reason gets into a fight with the lead character" be a thing and get away with that. It's just bad writing when there are this many loose ends that come out of nowhere, and worse, don't end up going anywhere. What was with the naked people in the car? Same problem. What happened to Donny's best friends in high school, why did they disappear from the movie? Why don't we get to see what Donny's father looks like? It's just all so damn sloppy.
I can usually find something redeeming about any movie, besides the fact that it links me to the next one, but I'm really struggling with this one. I regret watching this, and I almost never say that. What a terribly inappropriate movie for Father's Day.
Also starring Andy Samberg (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Leighton Meester (last seen in "Life Partners"), Vanilla Ice (Rob Van Winkle) (last seen in "The New Guy"), James Caan (last seen in "Eraser"), Milo Ventimiglia (last seen in "Gamer"), Blake Clark (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Meagen Fay (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Tony Orlando (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Will Forte (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Rachel Dratch (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Nick Swardson (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Peggy Stewart (last seen in "The Runaways"), Luenell (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Ciara, Ana Gasteyer (last seen in "Val"), Eva Amurri Martino (last seen in "The Banger Sisters"), Justin Weaver, Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Jagged"), Todd Bridges, Dan Patrick (also carrying over from "Blended"), Jackie Sandler (ditto), Sadie Sandler (ditto), Sunny Sandler (ditto), Abdoulaye NGom (ditto), Robert Harvey (ditto), Rex Ryan, Erin Andrews, Peter Dante, Baron Davis, Brad Grunberg (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Dennis Dugan (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Nancy Yee (last seen in "Dumb & Dumber To"), Koji Kataoka (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), with cameos from Alan Thicke (last seen in "The Clapper"), Ian Ziering (last seen in "Domino"), Colin Quinn (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Rich Eisen, Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool") and David Letterman (last seen in "Nothing Compares")
RATING: 3 out of 10 fungoes hit in a replica of Fenway Park
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