Weekly round-up

Family-friendly Adam Sandler
and doggie dullness

RUFF GOING: Marley and Me

by CHRIS BARRY and
JOSH LOVEJOY

Bedtime Stories
Skeeter (Adam Sandler) is asked to take care of his sister’s (Courtney Cox) kids for a week. He has no parenting experience but a vivid imagination and decides to tell them crazy bedtime stories. Mysteriously, the parts the kids make up come true.

The plot is simple and so is everything else about the movie. Sandler, now a father, has decided that his normal fare of base level humour might be a bit too raunchy for his kids, and so he has teamed up with Disney to deliver us some wholesome fun for this holiday season. But don’t worry, all of you Sandler fans out there, the jokes are still as stupid as ever, including a goofy guinea pig with huge bug eyes that farts, an angry dwarf who pops out of nowhere kicking poor Adam’s shins, and a giant space-snot-monster.

A favourite scene of kids in the audience (that had me laughing too) has Sandler stung on the tongue by a bee then trying to deliver the most important presentation of his life with an enormously swollen tongue. Luckily his sidekick (Russell Brand) understands and is able to translate his unintelligible blathering.

I have to admit that I am a fan of the stupid. But watered down Sandler can be annoying at times. The level of sappiness he stoops to makes me cringe, but if you see this movie in the right mood with a theatre full of laughing children, it might just be the light holiday comedy of the season you were looking for to chase away the Christmas blues. (JL)

Marley and Me
I didn’t read John Grogan’s best-selling novel, Marley and Me, and now that I’ve seen the movie, rest assured I never will. Even though there’s got to be a little more to the story than this insipid rendering of it lets on, if the film is even half-faithful to the book, then the book has got to suck as well. Because believe me, folks, director David Frankel’s Marley and Me is lame with a capital L, man, lame, lame, lame—and this coming from someone who’s as much of a sucker for happy, lovable yet precocious dog stories as the next guy, maybe even more so.

But while Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston put in relatively convincing performances as the journalist couple who adopt Marley the troublesome mutt in preparation for their soon-to-be new roles as parents of three lovely children, the plot is so uneventful and uninspired you find yourself not giving two fucks about what happens to their characters anyway. And even when something notable does happen to them, like when they miscarry their first child, everything is resolved so quickly you’re never given any time to care in the first place—not that you necessarily would.

The rest of the movie focuses on crazy, lovable Marley and all the nutty trouble he gets into. Anybody who’s ever had a dog will be able to relate, but so what? Yeah, yeah, Marley eats household items he’s not supposed to, Marley shits at inopportune times, Marley loves you when no one else will. You call that a movie? (CB)

BOTH FILMS OPEN THIS
THURSDAY, DEC. 25