Happy Hanukkah to all our Jewish readers around the world. On this penultimate "crazy night", I thought it appropriate to look out a slab of Hanukkah Hollywood, but the pickings are thin, save for this 2002 offering from my sometime fellow Granite Stater Adam Sandler. Born in Brooklyn, Sandler grew up in New Hampshire and was discovered in an LA comedy club by Dennis Miller, who recommended him to "Saturday Night Live". Eight Crazy Nights was a flop on its first release but has become something of a cult film, and is in its way a significant cultural artifact: a big-budget multiplex animated gross-out comedy about a Jewish holiday. Only in America!
It takes its title from a lyric in a comedy sketch Adam Sandler first did on American TV three decades ago. Surrounded by Christmas standards, he decided to create the first Hanukah song - or, if you prefer, Channukah, it being the first major American holiday without an agreed spelling (the Presidents Day/Presidents' Day/President's Day variables are a punctuation dispute). Anyway, Sandler's song includes the attitudinal line that "instead of one day of presents we get eight crazy nights". Other than that, all I recall from it is basically a laundry list of famous Jews not generally known as such:
David Lee Roth lights the menorah
So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas and the late Dinah Shore-ah...
There was nothing much else in the way of Hanukkah pop, although a couple of decades back, just before he bombed out in the Iowa caucuses, the Utah Senator and songwriting Mormon Orrin Hatch disclosed to me that he was writing a Chanukah number. I don't know what became of that, but, in the absence of Orrin, Sandler's song, by default, got an enormous amount of airtime from culturally sensitive radio stations, grateful for a Hannukah anthem the goyim could get a handle on. I think I first heard it on WQEW New York, in between Perry Como's "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" and Peggy Lee's "Winter Wonderland". Having become Mister Hanukah, Sandler then parlayed his hit into Hollywood's first mainstream animated musical Chanukkah movie. I've no idea why they even bothered to release this picture in Belgium or Germany. No other culture but America could have produced this film: not because it's a mainstream movie about a Jewish religious festival, but because its view of that festival, as just another pretext for an all-purpose secular holiday celebration anybody can be a part of, is so American. Indeed, Seth Kearsley directs, Rob Schneider narrates and A. Film and Yowza! Animation animate the picture consciously in the style of those perennial Rankin-Bass Christmas specials also built around songs: Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Frosty the Snowman and, of course, the now reviled Rudolph. The animation is affectionate and reassuringly familiar. Coming soon: 'Twas The Night Before Ramadan.
The story opens in Dukesberry, New Hampshire, where a thirtysomething criminal alcoholic (which struck me as a comparative rarity back in 2002, but is now near universal in the state) steals a snowmobile, attempts to total the town ice sculptures, and is delivered by the district court into the care of a septuagenarian basketball coach. Aside from the fact that "Dukesberry" seems to be the most Jewish town in New Hampshire other than the once popular Jewish summer resort of Bethlehem (seriously), Mr Sandler's first animated feature is, at least initially, in conventional heartwarming holiday mode.
Alas, after becoming Mister Hanukah, Adam Sandler decided also to become the Hollywood comedy star most willing to lower himself a little further down the toilet on each outing. A couple of decades back, he was releasing a film a week, which meant that, if you took a month's vacation, you returned to find Sandler's comedy had managed to evolve - or de-evolve - in fairly spectacular ways. The big set-piece in Eight Crazy Nights involves a PortaPotty (or PortaLoo in Britspeak) being kicked down a hill. The old codger inside scrambles from the wreckage covered in human excrement. He gets hosed down, but it's winter, so the fecal matter freezes on him.
A herd of deer come along, spot the human lollipoop and start licking it, until they figure out what exactly that elusive taste is. There may be a place for a joke like this, but probably not in a mainstream family holiday animated musical. And it's in trying to ride the two horses of the first Hanukkah cartoon and just another Sandler fecalfest that Eight Crazy Nights winds up falling between two, er, stools. The director Seth Kearsley subsequently revealed that he'd wanted to cut the sh*t-licking deer, but it "tested" really well with the focus groups, so they changed their minds and kept it in. Which may have something to do with the kind of person who agrees to be part of an Adam Sandler focus group.
The Gospels aside, there's really only one surefire Christmas plot, and Mister Hanukah lifts it shamelessly. That's the one where the Scrooge/Grinch figure has his cold heart thawed, preferably by a cute child or a lame oldster or, in this case, both. The cartoon realization of Davey Stone, the "33-year-old crazy Jewish guy", looks just like Sandler (who was then 36). Like Sandler, he grew up in southern New Hampshire but, unlike Sandler, never got out. He hates Channukkah, hates holidays, hates his neighbors. When first we meet him, he's belching at a Chinese waiter, humping his car in the street outside and mooning at Christmas carolers.
The grunting misanthrope is forced to move in, for not entirely persuasive reasons, with the Mister Magooey elderly four-foot basketball coach with a nails-on-blackboard annoying voice (Sandler again). Did I mention the old-timer lives with his bald sister? Meanwhile, his childhood sweetheart, now a single mom, moves back to town. The old guy has one dream left in his life of disappointments - to get enough votes from his neighbors to win the special patch presented to the town's "all-star" citizen at a gala holiday banquet. The clock is ticking and you know where we're headed: Mister Fart'n'Puke will find redemption somewhere around dessert at the town dinner.
There's nothing wrong with predictability per se. Personally, I prefer holiday-movie predictability to Adam Sandler predictability. So Eight Crazy Nights lavishes vast amounts of time and visual detail on the scene in which the opposing basketball pair lose their bet and have to eat the visibly sweaty jockstrap of the fattest guy in the room. That leaves the upbeat Hollywood ending looking even more artificially tacked on: it's so obvious everyone's having a gas laboring over the gross-out gags that the sentimental message seems even more perfunctory than usual. As the narrator puts it, "Just when you're starting to like Davey, he goes and has a butthole relapse."
That's more or less what's happened to Sandler: the critics adored him in Punch-Drunk Love, but his fans missed the bodily fluids. This was what he figured was a commercially sound butthole relapse, as befits the only man to rhyme "Hanukah" with "colonic-ah". Eight Crazy Nights is light on the first, heavy on the latter, a fable of redemption that paradoxically confirms the protagonist is really best-suited to self-degradation. I don't recall a lot of A-list Hannukah features in the years since, but I do remember at the time a novel Jewish conspiracy theory that the picture was badly made by anti-Semites deliberately to kill the incipient Chanukah movie genre. In that sense, it worked.
~Dennis Miller has gone from discovering Adam Sandler to discovering Mark Steyn. To see how that works out, please check them out in Pennsylvania and New York early in the New Year.
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The best part of Chanukah is when antisemites such as Jeremy Corbyn wish the Jews a Happy Chanukah not realizing they are congratulating us on re-taking and purifying the Temple and Jerusalem, on having stronger and better Jewish warriors than those who wanted to kill us (that time) and resisting assimilation and Hellenism and living Jewish.
Hey Mark
It is amazing that this where you have to search for a film about one of the oldest cultures. This past Thanksgiving I had my seven oldest grandchildren, 21-12, watch 30 minutes of life is beautiful. They
Watched the whole movie, enthralled. I prefer now to say Happy Holy Days to those I meet, all Judeo Christian days waylaid by the culture. They are Holy by definition. As a follow up, I purchased and read the Scarlet Pimpernel and it is amazing how "les citoyens" treated each other like dirt when power. Do not move until the tall Englishmen is seen. Lol. And Maurgarite, making the task just a bit more difficult, page 310, whilst my little wife's fate was so uncertain. Lol. Why did she go, to be their if her husband was killed.
Better yet page 286, ".. For she was weak, and she was a woman." Ouch, written by a woman. #metoo! Lol
Mark, you will be pleased to know that Orrin Hatch followed through on his promise to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, and produced a record of his song "Eight Days of Hannukah" just in time for the holiday in 2009. Goldberg wrote an article about it in the Atlantic on December 9, 2009, and you can watch it being introduced by Goldberg and then performed on YouTube. You will note that Goldberg shares your opinion of Adam Sandler.
Goldberg notes that Hatch, like his fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is "a philo-Semite". The affinity felt by "Mormons" for Jews has been repeatedly affirmed by social science surveys, such as those conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, as the highest for any Christian denomination in America.
On the other hand, I am fond of the first two collaborations between Sandler and Drew Barrymore, "The Wedding Singer", which ridicules 1980s pop culture, and "Fifty First Dates", a very unusual love story.
The "Eight Days of Hanukkah" (I always spell it a different way each time I pen a holiday note to the Jewish folks in my family tree) was rather sweet, maybe a little repetitive, but I could get some meaning from it.
A friend told me of his moving to Jacksonville from New York in the early Sixties when his company (the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad) promoted. One day a colleague looked at his desk calendar (from New York, naturally) and noticed an unfamiliar holiday indicated. He pointed to it and asked Rick, " Chah-NOOK-ah? What's Chah-NOOK-ah?"
Nothing ruins a holiday movie than toilet humor for 95% of the movie and 5% about the holiday or the actual plot. I don't mind the holiday movies but don't make the movies mirror the classics. Be original, be serious, a little humor is OK but don't go overboard. I think of one movie at around this time: It's a Wonderful Life. I hope to hear your review of it Mark.
You make me glad I never saw this movie. Just as an aside, rhyming menorah with Dinah Shorah reminds me of Perry Como's song. I'm in Love with a Dolly Named Glendora who works in the window of a big department storah. Sadly, she lost her head and lost her arms and when they got through she'd lost all her charms, but all the same Perry declaimed Oh Glendora I wanna see morah you.
I never realised that Glendora was a Perry Como song!
This is the version I know and love. A rough and ready slice of 60's British RnB by the Downliners Sect. The musicianship might not be top draw but the whole thing just "works", especially the female backing vocals.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AP-kCIp1gRk
Adam Sandler's movies make me yearn for the sophisticated wit of Jim Varney's "Ernest" movies or a Larry the Cable Guy film festival.
An Adam Sandler movie is like a drive I once took to the next state over with a group of old men - it was bodily function jokes the whole way.
What would we be, after all, if we didn't let our hair down now and then with some occasional low-brow jocularity? Stiffs!
Mark, are you aware that a couple of radio stations in Ohio have banned "Baby its cold outside"? It apparently suggestes "date rape". But no one is concerned about rap espousing the trashing of hos and other depradations. America is no longer alone, we have dropped to the moronic level of the rest of our "allies".
It's time for more Ohioans to move south and west to Southern New Mexico, Thomas. We have the Coloradoans who moved here from Greeley and they meet every Thursday night in a restored high school for down and dirty dancing to the tunes that molded us into the Great Satan. They're an aging crowd but man, they can still dance. Besides, if we get enough conservatives here maybe we can flip it back to red. Red, Hot and Rockin' and I don't mean the wooden chairs on the porch.
THAT is just SAD ... and sickening. I'm guessing Dennis is sort of sorry he discovered Sandler about now.
Sandler's song is pretty cute, but of course I'm more partial to the (unauthorized) punk rock version, which honors the many Jews who were and are key figures in that musical genre-- of which there are so many that the song would have to be much longer to name-check them all (See the fun book "The Heebies-Geebies at CBGB's...")
There IS another Hanukkah movie, which also happens to be THE official Christmas movie at our house, "The Hebrew Hammer" (2003.) It is VERY crude and so-stupid-it's-funny, so be warned :-)
"The Hebrew Hammer" is very funny. It may be crude, but is a Noel Coward dressing-room comedy compared to the average Adam Sandler movie.
I can't feel sorry for Adam Sandler because he is laughing all the way to the bank. What puzzles me is why Sandler is universally panned while the amazingly unfunny Will Ferrell gets critical raves for doing the same shtick. Watching Ferrell is absolutely painful in its awfulness.
Ferrell and Weinstein schtup. Adam goes low, but not that low.
In the eye of the beholder I suppose. I don't know that I've ever made it through a Sandler movie other than Happy Gilmore, but Ferrell's Elf is a Christmas standard at my place, not least for the rendition of Baby it's Cold Outside with Zooey Deschanel. Even though the movie runs out of steam three quarters through there's hardly a gross-out to be found from start to finish.