In brief: It is bad, and it IS drawn that way.
---(With apologies to Jessica Rabbit.)

Directed by Seth Kearsley
Story by Adam Sandler
Screenplay by Brooks Arthur, Allen Covert, Brad Isaacs

Adam Sandler Davey Stone/Whitey Duvall/Eleanore Duvall
Jackie Titone Jennifer
Austin Stout Benjamin
Also featuring voices by Tyra Banks, Jon Lovitz and Kevin Nealon.

Adam Sandler plays Davey Stone, a local Scrooge-like ne’er do well/slacker/drunk who, after being convicted of a crime, is sentenced to coach a basketball team as part of his community service. The other coach on the team is Whitey, an elderly optimist whose generous nature, short stature and lifelong white hair has earned him the role of the town doormat, and who lives with his twin sister Eleanor, whose total baldness requires her to own a barrage of different wigs. In the course of his service, Davey also befriends a young boy named Benjamin, and his apparently single mother Jennifer.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not a fan of Adam Sandler. I don’t find any of his comedy funny, and when watching The Waterboy, I was mystified as to what people found so funny about it. But hey, I was at the screening, I was curious to how this movie, an ostensibly animated holiday movie, might compare with other work by Sandler, and didn’t mind investing an hour and a half in it. I figured, if it’s meant to be as heartwarming a Chanukah film as all those beloved Christmas cartoons we grew up with, maybe Sandler’s decided to break with his usual moronic humor, and try something different. I mean, hey, he did Punch-Drunk Love, so why not? It would be cool for Jewish kids had a holiday cartoon to call their own, and I was actually hopeful when I first saw the poster for 8 Crazy Nights, that Sandler, having the opportunity to fill in a void, would be creating something new that the Jewish community could fondly grow up with, just as we Christians did with the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and those claymation Santa and Rudolph specials.

If I were Jewish, I’d be outraged.

Hell, I’m not Jewish, and I’m outraged.

8 Crazy Nights is NOT a Chanukah movie, first of all. Saying that it is one simply because there are characters celebrating it in the movie would be like saying Die Hard is a Christmas movie simply because it is set during the holidays, or that JFK is about Mardi Gras simply because it takes place in New Orleans.

We don’t learn anything about Chanukah, or what it means to Jewish people in the movie, which would’ve been a very interesting thing to see, given how uncommercialized it has remained in comparison to Christmas. We don’t get a speech by a Linus character nicely juxtaposed with a hapless character who can only get the flimsiest Minora at the store. Chanukah is relegated to the background, and is simply incidental. There’s some PC inclusiveness, in that we see a large ice statue of Santa right next to a large ice Minora outside a town lodge, but it is nonetheless inconsequential to the plot and not touched upon.

But that’s not the worst part of the movie. What’s disturbing is the adult content in the movie, given who the intended audience is. I’m not a fan of the current thinking in recent comedies that putting as many appearances by excrement, semen and urine as possible in a film is somehow funny. It’s not. It’s disgusting. I don’t WANT to see excrement, animated or not. I don’t WANT to see frat boys duped into eating eclairs filled with dog semen. It’s stupid, it’s nauseating, and shows a total lack of talent for writing or for comedy. It’s the kind of thing one might expect to find in specialty porno for perverts, not in a mainstream movie. 8 Crazy Nights is clearly another entry into this "scat genre" of comedy. In the course of the movie, there are several appearances by excrement. One is when the porta-potty being used by one character is knocked down a snow-covered hill, and he emerges, covered in said excrement, to be showered with a water hose, only to be encased in ice. Although the MPAA required a shot of him emerging from it cut, subsequent ones showing friendly deer licking him out of his icy prison and getting mouths full of the stuff, was inexplicably left in. And it doesn’t end there. There’s scenes involving the positioning of unconscious people with their hands in compromising places, scenes involving people who lose a bet forced to eat the jock strap of a fat guy, etc. And of course, there’s profanity of the usual four-letter variety.

Now it’s not as if I object to adult cartoons. Whereas less enlightened people may insist that cartoons and comic books are strictly for kids, and should be made only for them, I’m the last person to think this, because I think there’s room for material for all age groups in every entertainment medium. What I find outrageous about this is that Columbia is marketing this piece of trash to people age 13-21. Thankfully, I didn’t see many 13-year olds there, but the fact that Columbia wanted them is appalling. Most of the audience that was there liked the film, it received some good applause at the end, and ABC movie critic Joel Siegel laughed throughout it.

That said, is there anything redeeming in the film? Well, the animation is okay. It was kind cool to see characters voiced by Sandler, Jon Lovitz and Kevin Nealon that looked just like them. And of course, I enjoyed the third version of Adam Sandler’s Chanukah song over the end credits, but then again, you can download the video of him and Rob Schneider performing it on SNL at http://www.adamsandler.com/ anyway.
---There is some attempt at heartwarming fare, as Davey begins to address the cruel way he and the rest of the town have treated Whitey and Eleanor, but the problem is that it’s so darn depressing the way the movie makes you slog through 90 minutes of abject cruelty toward them in order to get there. It’s bad enough that the entire town treats the two twins like absolute losers and freaks. But what’s more fundamentally disturbing is that the movie itself does. Much like the films of the Farrelly brothers, it seems to take some perverse fascination with physical ailments, deformities and injuries of people who don’t look like most people. Whitey, for example, has been only a few feet tall all his life, and has a nose that would make Karl Malden do a double-take. He has had white hair all his life. He suffers frequent seizures. He is so hirsute, that during a skins vs. shirts basketball game in which we see him topless, he looks like he’s wearing an angora sweater. Eleanor, also very short, has to carefully pluck the middle of her brow to keep from looking like Frida Kahlo. She’s bald as an eagle. Other characters include an amputee, a homeless person who calls attention to their body odor, and a woman with three bouncing breasts without explanation why. And just so that we understand that they’re all fully functional, three hungry babies are later shown….well, you get the idea.
---But worse, the movie is disingenuous, because it milks the twins’ physical abnormalities and the way everyone is abusive towards them for cheap laughs, so when it tries to have the town coming together to show them that oh, they really care about these two, it’s like a bully who kicks the snot of someone for years, and then pats him on the head before leaving him in the gutter, as if to say, "Hey, no hard feelings, buddy." It doesn’t take a stand against abusive behavior the way films like My Bodyguard or Three O’Clock High do, it simply stands on the sidelines laughing at it like a fair-weather friend, and then has the nerve to condemn it at the last minute. The movie is so cynical that even someone who sincerely feels shame and regret about his childhood abusiveness towards Eleanor, and tries to apologize to her, isn’t taken seriously by the film. Indeed, you can get an idea of the type of nihilistic attitude the film has toward the holidays by the verbal greeting Sandler gives you when you visit the film’s official site at http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/eightcrazynights/. Hell, the film is so cynical that I even noticed several PRODUCT PLACMENTS, for cryin’ out loud, the first time I’ve ever noticed them in an animated movie.

I feel sorry for Jewish parents and children who might’ve liked to have a heartwarming holiday cartoon. Instead they got just another 90 minutes of the usual unfunny Sandler toilet humor, profanity, cynicism and nastiness.

Oy, vey.

And btw, what is it with the number "8" in movie titles this year? Eight-Legged Freaks, 8 Mile, 8 Crazy Nights, 8 Women. Geez. It reads like grist for one of Louis Farrakhan's conspiracy speeches.

Tech note, Luigi. Unless I stand to be corrected, I think it's "menorah"

Ah. Thanks, Sparrow. My apologies to the Jewish community.