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Pre-packaged outrages

Sandler offers more safe porn for boy-men
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 27th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The Eddie Murphy of the Tel Aviv set. The chronically unfunny Sandler.
You Don't Mess with the Zohan


Directed by Dennis Dugan
With Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Lainie Kazan, Rob Schneider, Emmanuelle Chriqui
William Blake once wrote that “the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But then, he didn’t know Adam Sandler. The idol of the semi-literate is back with another purported comedy, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, which ably serves as the perfect showcase for Sandler’s limitations and narcissism. It is, in short, another offering to that growing male subset (accent on the “sub”) that never successfully graduated beyond the anal-sadistic phase of their childhood development.
There was an excellent piece by Martha Bayles on her Serious Popcorn Web site last week titled “The Socialization of Young Men,” which took issue with a “bizarrely uncritical” article by Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times on the devolution of so-called “gross-out cinema” (how Porky’s begat American Pie, etc.). What prompted the Times piece was the just-released Ben Stiller programmer Tropic Thunder, which Prague will be threatened with later this autumn. The stunted Stiller has been getting strife for having laced his film’s screenplay (he is the director and co-writer of Tropic Thunder, as well as the star) with the word “retard.” That one of his co-writers, Etan (not Ethan) Cohen, wrote and directed a short titled My Wife is Retarded certainly seems to have early on set the tone.
In the Times, Itzkoff wrote of Tropic Thunder: “When the film opened, even favorable reviews criticized its depictions of severed body parts and excretory functions as vulgar, puerile and needlessly gross.” (And these critics were expecting what, exactly, from Stiller?) “This mentality can be summed up simply,” Bayles wrote, picking up the discussion of comedy aimed at adolescent males. “Young men have no minds, souls, or characters worth bothering about; they care about nothing, respect nothing, and aspire to nothing. … Without sports — and, of course, war — what other challenges are presented to young men? Being the biggest gross-out on the block?”
Any tour of bogland cinema must halt before the career of Adam Sandler. Yet there is something about him that sets him apart from his crawlleagues — Stiller, the Brothers Farrelly, et al. Sandler has pretensions to be relevant. No schlong joke or fart is aired merely for pleasure, but serves a more serious, fuzzily liberal purpose. In Click we were reminded of the dangers of soulless commercialism (in a film awash with product placements); in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, gay love and marriage were given due support, though only after an hour and a half of retrograde characterization and “Chink” jokes. These epics usually end to tinny tinklings from the right hand of a piano keyboard, indicating that love, trust and bonding with one’s fellow humans has won the day. Oh, for the purity of Three Stooges violence.
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan assumes even greater purpose in Sandler’s mind (he, too, is a co-writer of his own vehicles). Nothing less than forging peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is the goal behind two hours of cretinous high jinks involving shtupping old ladies, animal torture, “pee-pee” problems, parades of slack buttocks and such deathless witticisms as mistaking “Community Nightwatch” with “Communist Tight Crotch.” You begin to believe that there’s less to life.
The premise is that an Israeli hero of MOSSAD, Zohan (Sandler), wants only to migrate to New York, where he can become a stylist at a Paul Mitchell salon (insert gay joke here). After faking his death in a battle against Palestinian terrorist mastermind the Phantom (John Turturro), Zohan makes his way to Gotham clutching a Paul Mitchell stylebook from the Duran Duran era. He finally succeeds in getting a chair at a salon run by a Palestinian woman, Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), where he is soon in demand, as his idea of full service includes banging the blue-rinse crowd in the back office. The envy of every farmyard, Zohan is secure in the knowledge that his organ and its unkempt thicket of “bush” is unbeatable, if you will, until suddenly the “pee-pee problem” occurs. His Israeli heart has been won by an Arab girl, and she alone holds the key to his passion. “I only be stiff for you,” he confesses to Dalia in a Borat-like voice, piano tinkles just off.
The intense boredom of watching such idiocies lies in how generic the presumed taboo breaking is. These films are routinely imbecilic — they offer packaged, standardized “outrages” to a troop of boy-men who are terrified of women, inexperienced or fumbling at sex, insecure with their beer-cellared or scrawny bodies, bong-stunned and, intellectually, retards, to filtch a Stillerism. And they are cowards. Their voracious appetite for “pee-pee” and “poo-poo” should be easily satisfied with any number of specialty porn options, though the seriousness of these enterprises would undoubtedly frighten them.
The primary fear, certainly found in Martha Bayles’ piece, is that this lumpen herd could move toward some majority status, a Jackass generation, something the box-office returns for these films already suggest. William Blake also wrote, “We become what we behold.” Behold.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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Reader's comments:

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[08:59 02/09/2008] : Very nicely done!
James Walling
Vancouver
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