Well folks, the most eagerly anticipated movie of 2008 is finally upon us this week. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the Adam Sandler cinematic classic-to-be You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

What, you’re not soiling yourself with excitement for Sandler’s turn as an Israeli Mossad agent who longs to be a hair stylist? Yeah, me either. It’s not any particular beef I’ve got with Sandler, but even with Judd Apatow listed as a co-writer and the great John Turturro showing up for yet another supporting role, Zohan looks to be one of this summer’s most misguided movies, vying for that dubious honor with Mike Myers’ The Love Guru.

Personally, I think Sandler’s big-screen comedic aptitude peaked with his first major movie, Billy Madison (yes, it’s an orgy of crude, juvenile slapstick hijinks, but hey, who doesn’t love an orgy?), and for years now I’ve been wishing he’d just scrap the juvenile stuff and do some more worthwhile film work – his 2002 collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love, is one of my favorite movies, and proved that Sandler has what it takes to transition to “serious” roles if he were willing to make the leap.

Until that day, though, I’ll leave you with four Sandler movies that ended up being a heck of a lot better than anybody could have predicted – in the hopes that Zohan might somehow manage to bring this list up to five.

Click

It’s a Wonderful Life it ain’t, but this potentially horrific (possibly unintentional) homage to Frank Capra actually ended up being one of the most bearable – and kinda-sorta lovable – Sandler comedies of the past decade. The plot, which wouldn’t have seemed out of place on The Twilight Zone, has workaholic architect Sandler purchasing an enchanted remote control from kooky scientist Christopher Walken that allows him to control time by simply clicking its buttons. As he uses it to fast-forward the “boring” parts of his daily existence – and occasionally ogle some jiggling cleavage in slo-mo – he begins to inadvertently skip over the important moments with his kids and his wife (Kate Beckinsale, clearly the kind of girl you want to pause, not fast-forward). Mostly sacrificing huge laughs in favor of sentimentality, Click is still markedly better than the average effects-driven big-budget comedy, thanks to its occasionally inventive script and a winning Sandler performance that has his character aging almost a half-century (aided by Oscar-nominated makeup effects) over the course of the film.

Reign Over Me



I’ve never cried during an Adam Sandler flick – thought I may have shed a tear or two after having wasted eight bucks seeing Mr. Deeds – but this 2007 film, from writer/director Mike Binder, came the closest to making that happen.
Sandler, in his riskiest role to date, plays an average family man who became a withdrawn eccentric after losing his wife and daughters in the 9/11 attacks; his old dental school roommate (Don Cheadle) bumps into him one day, and takes it upon himself to reconnect with his old friend and bring him out of the depressed, lonely stupor he’s been suffering through.
Binder has a knack for character-driven films with engaging little touches of comedy (a combination he nailed in his previous film, The Upside of Anger), and Reign Over Me gets a lot of dramatic mileage out of its Cheadle/Sandler pairing without crossing the line into exploitation – an impressive feat, considering the subject matter. Had the film been released in November instead of March last year, Sandler might have even landed an award nomination or two.

Airheads



Dated as this grunge-era comedy is becoming, it’s still got laughs to spare – and features the kind of once-in-a-lifetime cast that’ll make it worth seeing no matter how painful the hairstyles are.
Sandler plays the dimwitted drummer of headbanger Brendan Fraser’s terrible hard rock trio The Lone Rangers (which also includes a very scraggly Steve Buscemi), who resort to extreme measures to get their demo tape played on the radio: they break into the radio station with plastic Uzis and hold the staff and d-bag DJ Joe Mantegna hostage. Coming off like a lighthearted cross between Wayne’s World and Die Hard (it’s even shot in the same L.A. highrise they used for the Nakatomi Plaza), Airheads offered Sandler one of his first major movie roles and surrounded him with the funniest lineup of supporting players he’s had to date – including Chris Farley, Michael McKean, Judd Nelson, Harold Ramis, and, in a particularly entertaining turn, a pre-Seinfeld, pre-career suicide Michael Richards.

Spanglish

Though Sandler’s finest performance to date can still be found in Punch-Drunk Love, he’s no slouch in this overlong but endearing culture-clash dramedy, directed by small-screen legend James L. Brooks.
Sandler plays a successful celebrity chef whose high-strung wife (Tea Leoni) has been making life difficult for him and his two kids; into their affluent household comes Mexican-born, mostly Spanish-speaking maid Flor (Paz Vega) and her daughter (Shelbie Bruce), good-hearted immigrants who gradually begin to affect their employers’ unhappy lives in some unexpected ways.
Brooks’ film is a bit messy and chaotic – sort of like real life – and Leoni’s character can be tough to take, but Sandler shines in his scenes with Vega (making her American film debut), and Spanglish manages to find some moments of real resonance in its dysfunctional but thankfully not soap-operatic portrayal of upper-class misery.

You didn’t need a crystal ball to figure out that, once the Lord of the Rings flicks and the Harry Potter series started setting the box office on fire a few years back, Hollywood would start churning out fantasy flicks faster than you could say “Hufflepuff.”

And soon, sure as a Hobbit has hairy feet, the attempts to capitalize on those series’ success started to pile up. Unfortunately, most of them proved to be less than magical from a critical and commercial standpoint, with misfires like Eragon and The Seeker: The Dark is Rising threatening to send the genre back to the obscure realm of late night Dungeons and Dragons tournaments and the aisle at Barnes & Noble you’d be loath for your coffee date to catch you hanging out in. Still, one franchise did manage to make some bank in the wake of Harry and Frodo: the Disney co-produced Chronicles of Narnia series, whose bigger, badder, more epic-looking second installment, Prince Caspian, hits screens this week. Having never made it through more than a chapter or two of the C.S. Lewis books the Narnia movies are adapted from, I was surprised as how thoroughly I enjoyed the first film, The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, and I’m happy to see the series – thinly-veiled Christian allegory or not – continuing to pick up speed.

As much as I’m looking forward to seeing Prince Caspian, though, the fact that the Narnia series is getting a second installment irritates me just a little because my personal favorite fantasy trilogy, after a disastrous box office showing last year, may never make it to a movie screen again. That’s a shame, because The Golden Compass – the little $180 million fantasy movie whose U.S. box-office failure essentially killed New Line Cinema – is actually a pretty awesome movie, even if few people in this country appreciated it (the film, at least, pulled in some decent bucks overseas).

Adapted from the first novel in Phillip Pullman’s controversial "His Dark Materials" trilogy, The Golden Compass is a triumph of production design and special effects that, although it can’t really elaborate on some of the more interesting ideas in the book, is still a compelling fantasy story, very interestingly told. Set in a fantasy version of Earth where religion and science are involved in a centuries-old slugfest and all humans have talking animal familiars (“daemons”) that follow them everywhere they go, Compass is a “chosen one” tale about a young girl named Lyra (played by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) who’s entrusted by her adventurous Uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig) to protect a sought-after, future-predicting device called an “alethiometer” from the clutches of a villainous, supposedly divinely controlled world governing body called the Magisterium. Not even counting the daemons, the film’s world is richly populated with intriguing fantasy elements: a mysterious substance called “Dust” that may possibly allow passage to other universes (awesome), high-flying airships like the one piloted by sky cowboy Sam Elliott (really awesome), giant armored polar bears that battle each other to the death (really, really freakin’ awesome), etc.

The film, which careens between locations and introduces difficult-to-explain fantasy concepts at a way-too-rapid clip, is probably best enjoyed after digesting the novel on which it’s based, but there’s plenty to appreciate in the film version anyway – from Nicole Kidman’s deliciously icy performance as the Magesterium’s number-one villainess Mrs. Coulter (named after Ann, perhaps?) to the aforementioned polar bear battle royale to a creepy sequence set inside a lab where the baddies experiment on innocent children. Director Chris Weitz, who’d previously worked only on comedies both broad (American Pie) and more subtle (About a Boy), keeps the film flowing at a pretty good pace throughout, and shows some serious flair during the action sequences – the climactic sequence, in which humans, daemons, polar bears, and the kitchen sink scrap on an icy battlefield, is almost Lord of the Rings-quality.

In hindsight, I guess I’m not exactly shocked that The Golden Compass didn’t find its foothold with stateside audiences – it’s a lot to take in one sitting, it lacked the fanatical built-in fanbase that the Harry Potter series enjoys, and its subtle but still-there commentary on religion certainly didn’t make it an appealing prospect for the churchgoing audiences generally credited for boosting Narnia’s box-office take. Still, the film remains an uncommonly intelligent and inventive stab at the big-budget fantasy genre, and is nowhere near the failure that some critics made it out to be. And although we may never see the next two installments in the trilogy hit the big screen, what happens after the film’s cliffhanger ending can pretty easily be picked up in Pullman’s novels – and, hey, when’s the last time a Hollywood movie actually made you want to read something?

The live-action/CGI Speed Racer movie is out this Friday, which I thought would make for a good occasion to check out the Japanese sci-fi flick Casshern, another anime-inspired film that features real live actors interacting with surreal, hyper-detailed computer-generated sets.

Unfortunately, technology failed me as usual when I attempted to watch the film – after about 20 minutes of eye-popping coolness, the dvd did that awful, unfixable skip-‘n-stop thing that dvds sometimes do, leaving me wondering just what the hell a “Casshern” really was and, also, what I was going to write about for this week’s Movie Match.

And then it hit me. Technology may have crapped out on me this weekend, but there’s one guy who it worked out pretty damn well for: Robert Downey, Jr.’s fictional billionaire Tony Stark, whose superpowered Iron Man suit blasted him toward a $100 million-plus box-office payday last weekend that surpassed even the most generous predictions for the film’s success. I had high hopes for Iron Man, and was impressed by just how much the movie lived up to them – and so, in order to cover my ass this week, er, share my enthusiasm for this season’s first major blockbuster, I will devote the rest of this column to a few reasons why Iron Man is well worth catching in theaters a second time.

1. The first action sequence
Most fans will walk out of the theater raving about Tony Stark’s ass-kicking exploits in his trademark fire-engine red Iron Man suit (I could watch that scene with him and the tank about a hundred times in a row), but let’s not forget the first time we get to see him wreak some havoc in a mechanical suit of armor, as comparatively low-tech as his prototype Iron Man getup is. There’s a real sense of fun that underlines the carnage in the film’s initial action setpiece, which has Stark blasting his way out of a terrorist stronghold while still awkwardly learning the finer points of mechanized combat – thankfully, his inexperience doesn’t prevent him from chucking freedom-haters around like ragdolls or unleashing a pair of arm-mounted flamethrowers that may just be the must-have movie accessory of 2008. It’s the perfect lead-in to the sparing but spectacular superhero mayhem to follow.

2. The dialogue
Robert Downey, Jr. slings one-liners like nobody else in Hollywood, and the filmmakers behind Iron Man were smart to let him go full-throttle with them throughout the film – even if his sense of humor is a bit over the heads of the action-figure buying segment of the film’s audience. Whether cracking wise about MySpace pages or delivering awkward romantic come-ons a la Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (if I mention that movie enough in this column, will somebody please see it?), Downey’s Tony Stark is outfitted with a gift of gab that far surpasses any screen superhero we’ve seen so far. I’m not sure how much of the killer dialogue to credit to the film’s writers as opposed to Downey himself, but either way this is easily the wittiest movie this genre has produced to date.

3. Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts
Female characters tend to get sidelined in even the best comics-to-screen adaptations, but despite her limited screen time, Paltrow did a fine job carving out some space for herself as Tony Stark’s devoted assistant and schoolboy crush Pepper Potts in this one. Crafting a poised, down-to-earth character who’s the perfect foil for Downey’s wisecracking, big-kid persona, Paltrow was one of the big reasons that Iron Man seemed like a much classier, more grown-up superhero movie than we might have expected. Plus, if you’ll allow me to get my chauvinist on for a second, she also looked better in this flick than in anything she’s done since the late 90s.

4. The visuals
Matthew Libatique is one of my favorite cinematographers, having been responsible for the jaw-dropping camerawork in all three of director Darren Aronofsky’s films, so I expected great things from Iron Man in the visual department. For the most part, it was hard to be disappointed – from the dimly-lit caves where Tony Stark fashions his clunky original Iron Man suit to the futuristic Malibu mansion where he tinkers with servos and beds the occasional Vanity Fair reporter, the film’s settings and characters pop off the screen as vividly and stylishly as anything you’d see on the comics page.

5. The bit after the end credits
You probably need to be a bit more of a hardcore Marvel acolyte than I am to fully appreciate it, but the two-minute scene that ran after Iron Man’s end credits was pretty cool nevertheless -- it not only featured my favorite celebrity cameo of the year so far, but also dropped some really tantalizing clues as to where the next Iron Man movie, and the onscreen Marvel universe as a whole, will be headed in the near future. Based on this little teaser, we geeks have a lot to look forward to.