“Fifty First Dates” was a rehash of “Groundhog Day.” I used to know two other of his movies that were rip-offs of Bill Murray.
To be fair, Mel Brooks really knows what he is doing. There are few other who are as competent as him. I still think Blazing Saddles is one of the best Comedies every made.
Sandler is the funny frat dude who some how got famous. I found him hilarious when I was 16. I think I still like Happy Gilmore. But let’s be honest, his comedy pretty much depended on low brow humor. It’s kinda sad that he is still using schtick that awful at his age.
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Wait, what about “Don’t Mess with the Zohan”?
This is why Sandler doesn’t bother trying to make good films. When he does, they bomb.
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For some reason I’m reminded of “Cannibal! The Musical,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s college film project, in which they couldn’t get any actual Indians so they substituted Japanese exchange students, and then played that to the hilt.
“Indian” (with thick Japanese accent): “We are Indian! We are Nihonjin tribe! We have teepee!”
White guy: “Uh…okay.”
And then the “Indian language” dialogue is mostly just them saying how stupid the movie is in Japanese.
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Yeah it can totally work. I kept thinking of Blazing Saddles, and really Mel Brooks in general. His parody/satire certainly isn’t deep, and his jokes certainly sometimes embody the very thing he’s mocking which is pretty much the failure condition here. But his whole schtick is to mock weird tropes from classic hollywood by just playing them as over the top and screw ball as possible. There’s no deep comentary, or complex attempts to avoid offense. It works often enough and it moves fast enough that the failed jokes and mistakes don’t register or bog anything else down. And its all played so ridiculously that the bad jokes become a large part of what makes it funny in the first place.
Its really not hard to make this sort of thing funny without pissing anyone off. A lot of classic Hollywood genre pics are inherently kind of absurd to begin with, and often unintentionally funny. To a certain extent you can just change one thing, or play it a different way and you’ve accomplished your goal. I mean thats basically the point of Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Just re-edit actual footage from old Noir movies except we also edited in Steve Martin playing it like a farce. Rearange things a bit and throw in a comedian playing it as deliberately rediculous and you’ve suddenly got a classic comedy.
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