Monthly Archives: December 2024

What the Hell Was That?

What the Hell Was That? – Eight Crazy Nights (2002)

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On thing that we know about Christmas movies is that there are a lot of them.  Literally hundreds.  And you have any type of Christmas movie you want; funny Christmas movies, sad Christmas movies, dark Christmas movies, and even violent Christmas movies.  But, the one other thing you’ll note is that the holiday season seems to exclusively belong to Christmas cinematically.  It’s not the only holiday that is celebrated during the peak of the Winter season, and yet if you had only the movies to go by, you would think that Christmas stands alone.  There are a variety of winter season festivals that mark the end of the year, but it’s perhaps the eight night holiday of Hanukkah that usually is celebrated alongside Christmas by the Jewish community that is the only other one known to most people.  Hanukkah, the Hebrew festival of light, shares the tradition of gift giving with the Christmas holiday, and in recent times it has risen up in esteem culturally as being a presence in the otherwise homogenous Christmas season.  It’s not uncommon today to see a menorah alongside a Christmas tree in public holiday displays, and as there are growing interfaith families across the world, the sharing of the season between the two holidays is becoming far more widespread as well.   And it is a great thing that culturally we are viewing the holiday season as a celebration of traditions from all over the world now and not just that of Christmas.  But, in terms of cinema, we still haven’t seen much change in the dominance that Christmas has over the season.  Though there have been some attempts, we haven’t seen a film emerge as the definitive Hanukkah movie that helps to cement it’s place as a classic in the same way so many Christmas films do.  Of course, one filmmaker did try, and it unfortunately turned into a monumental disaster.

One of the reasons that we haven’t seen a true Hanukkah classic emerge out of Hollywood is because so many Jewish filmmakers have used their talents to help shape the Christmas season we all know and love.  If you think about it, we have the Jewish community to thank for some of the best Christmas specials and songs that continue to remain essential parts of the holiday to this day (Rankin & Bass, Irving Berlin, etc.)  So it’s surprising that Jews, who make up a significant part of Hollywood history and continue to remain an important community in the industry today, have never been self reflective and put a spotlight on their own holiday season traditions.  Well, one of the reasons that it’s probably the case is that Hanukkah isn’t as important a holiday on the Jewish calendar as Christmas is to the gentiles.  Passover and Yom Kippur are far more important, so Jews probably never saw the reason to spotlight Hanukkah on the big screen as a big deal.  A lot of modern Jews even celebrate the secular aspects of the Christmas holiday alongside their non-Jewish friends, so it’s probably why many Jewish filmmakers gladly made movies and specials to celebrate the holiday season.  But, as Hanukkah has grown as a part of the season culturally in recent years, there are more filmmakers who have wanted to try to give the spotlight to the holiday.  One of those filmmakers turned out to be comedian Adam Sandler.  Sandler, who grew up in a Jewish household himself, played upon the absence of Hanukkah in the public eye during the holiday season, and worked it into a song in his act.  Dubbed “The Hanukkah Song,” Sandler’s tune made it’s first debut on a segment of Saturday Night Live, with Sandler using the song to spotlight a list of beloved Jewish celebrities.  It’s corny and doesn’t really give you any insight into the holiday itself, but in a way it’s also a fun way of showing pride in being Jewish that I’m sure was a major part in Sandler’s crafting of the song.  Perhaps to his surprise, the song took off and became a hit.  In a season dominated by Christmas, it seemed that Sandler’s joke song may have in fact finally enabled Hanukkah to finally crack into the holiday season songbook.

With a hit song, it seemed only a matter of time before Adam Sandler would capitalize on it’s success by making a movie.  And in the turn of the millennium, it was a good bet that he could get that movie made.  Sandler spent his immediate post-SNL years becoming a huge box office champ with movies like Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996) and Big Daddy (1999) all performing extremely well.  At this point in his career, he could get any film greenlit.  This eventually got him a meeting with Columbia Pictures had Amy Pascal, who was interested in producing a holdiay themed movie based around the popular Hanukkah song.  Sandler had an idea for his Hanukkah themed movie, but it was a major departure from what he had made before.  In perhaps the spirit of holiday specials like those from Rankin/Bass and classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Sandler wanted his Hanukkah movie to be animated.  And not just any kind of animated; it was going to have Disney quality traditional animation, but still maintain the irreverent edgy humor that Sandler had featured in his earlier films.  It’s unusual that Pascal approved the project, given that Columbia at the time didn’t have an in-house animation studio like Disney had.  Also, traditional animation was already starting to lose it’s luster in the early 2000’s, where even Disney was struggling to find a hit with the medium at a time when CG animated movies like Shrek (2001) were starting to dominate.  Also, Sandler was uncompromising in having this film reflect his standard of adult humor, meaning that this film was likely not going to be marketed to younger audiences who normally would go to see an animated film.  But, the movie got the greenlight and the problems became very apparent as the movie finally reached theaters in time for the 2002 holiday season.

Titled Eight Crazy Nights, after the popular lyric from the song, the movie is a confused mess that neither works as a wannabe holiday classic, nor even as a vehicle for Adam Sandler’s comedy.  Fundamentally, the film really fails to accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to be a Hanukkah themed movie.  The festival barely is a factor in the story, and in the end it really just becomes another Christmas film, because it’s just unavoidable given the wintertime setting of the film.  The story centers around a character named Whitey who is the standard Adam Sandler protagonist; brash, loud and rude.  With this character, Sandler seems to be going for a Christmas Carol arc of trying to soften a mean-spirited jerk through the warmth of the holiday season, only the film never manages to successfully land that plane.  Davey remains one of the least funny and hatable characters that Sandler has ever played, and it’s due to the mistaken belief on Sandler’s part that the mean-spiritedness of the character is what makes him funny.  Perhaps the arc of his character would feel more genuine if there was effort put into showing his transition from heartless to compassionate over the course of the movie.  But no, we need scenes of him throwing another character down a hill in a port-a-potty because gross out humor was considered in during the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  It should be noted that gross out humor seems even worse in traditional animation.  Poop eating deer is bad enough of an idea in concept, but actually drawing it out makes it even worse.  That’s the level of humor you have to endure through the movie.  And what we get less of is anything heartwarming or endearing, which is kind of what you need to be remembered as a beloved holiday movie.

But Davey is not the worst character that Sandler plays in film.  There’s an elderly man named Whitey that takes Davey under his wing and tries to reform him, and Adam Sandler for whatever reason decided that he wanted this character to have the most grating and obnoxious voice ever.  Whitey is the second most prominent character in the movie, meaning you have to hear his voice through the majority of the film, and after a while it becomes an endurance test.  I don’t know why Sandler thought playing this character was a good idea.  Sure, goofy voices have been a staple of his comedy before, but in this case, the comedy is not translating.  I think it’s because the movie attempt to make the character sympathetic, being the one who takes the brunt of Davey’s abusive behavior, but Sandler undercuts all that sympathy by making the character unnecessarily obnoxious.  The character of Whitey needed to be a lot more grounded in order for the film to work, and that called for a much more subtle performance on Sandler’s part, or just the courtesy of allowing a different actor to play the role.  The thing is, we can still hear Sandler through the performance, making his vocal performance feel disingenuous, as if his own intent is to keep mocking the character even through the moments we are supposed to care for him.  There’s also a third voice that Sandler provides in the film, which is for Whitey’s twin sister Eleanore, but that role isn’t nearly as bad.  For one thing, Eleanore is not in the movie that much, and Sandler makes her sound unique enough that you wouldn’t initially know that it’s him playing the role.  If he was wiser, he would have given the role of Whitey to a different actor, like maybe a veteran professional that would’ve found the humanity in the character, and just left the funny voice part for himself for the role of Eleanore.  But, even with the awful performance he gives as Whitey, it’s still not the worst part of the movie, as freqent Sandler coat-tail rider Rob Schneider sinks to another low by playing an Asian restaurant owner with a typical stereotypical accent.  A typical low bar met with Schneider, but made even worse when you have to see it animated.

The most disappointing thing about the movie, however, is that the animation for it was actually really good.  Seriously, the animation team did an outstanding job making the movie look colorful and fluid.  When Adam Sandler demanded he wanted Disney quality animation for his film, he seems to have gotten his wish.  One thing that the production of this movie benefitted from was that it became a refuge for a time for a lot of out of work animators who came from the recently closed animation departments of Warner Brothers and Fox.  Many people who’ve seen this movie have noticed a lot of striking similarities between the animation of this movie and that of The Iron Giant (1999), and that’s because both movies shared many of the same animators.  And those who came to this film from Fox would have had the experience of working under the direction of animation legend Don Bluth.  The pedigree in this film’s animation team really was quite impressive.  It’s just too bad that Adam Sandler had them animating things like pooping reindeer.  It’s astonishing to think that some of these animators went from working on a masterwork like The Iron Giant to working on one of the worst animated films of all time.  The only good thing about this is that it helped a group of animators stay employed for just a little while longer.  The early 2000’s was not kind to the traditional animation industry as it was transitioning into one primarily geared towards computer animation.  Eight Crazy Nights was definitely not the film to help reverse the trend, and in the end it was another sign that the era of traditional animation was coming to an unremarkable end.  It may not have flopped as hard as Iron Giant or Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002), but it certainly failed to connect with audiences just like them.  But unlike the Giant and Planet, it didn’t gain a cult following over time, and has been rightfully dismissed as a failure that needed to be forgotten.

One of the other big failures of the movie is the fact that it even attempts to be a musical.  There are no less than seven original songs in the movie, each of them about as unremarkable as you’d expect.  Even worse, about half of them feature the character Whitey, so if you thought his voice was grating before, now you get to hear him attempting to sing as well.  But, you know what song is not here at all; the actual song that the movie was based on.  At least, it’s not in the story proper; you have to wait until the end credits to actually hear the song.  But it does make you wonder, why bury it in the credits when it should have been the centerpiece of the actual movie.  Sandler wanted to create a new holiday classic that celebrated the often overlooked holiday, so why didn’t he make the kind of movie that lived up to the spirit of the song.  A lot of his baser instincts as a comic probably got in the way, as he likely favored irreverent, offensive humor over heartwarming material.  The musical score also is fairly lazy from a composition standpoint.  Songs just start to be sung without reason in the story.  It’s like Sandler and company were just adding them in to meet a quota.  And they are generic as possible.  Sandler, as demonstrated with his Hanukkah song, can carry a tune, but here he particularly seems to phone it in, especially as Davey who just seems bored whenever he sings.  The weirdest and most out of place song comes from a scene when Davey breaks into the mall, and he hallucinates all of the different brand mascots of the stores coming to life to teach him a lesson; all of which is another blatant example of Adam Sandler using his movies as advertisement space for product placement.

Clearly, Adam Sandler was not the guy to deliver the definitive Hanukkah movie.  Eight Crazy Nights is a nearly unwatchable mess that doesn’t work in any way; not as an animated movie, not as a musical, and especially not as a holiday classic.  It’s just Adam Sandler doing his normal schtick but with even less effort and through the medium of animation.  Sadly, it wastes some really good work from talented animators, many of whom were at the time struggling to survive in a rapidly changing industry, which this film did nothing to help with.  It wouldn’t be Adam Sandler’s last foray into animation, however, and thankfully he has gotten better with working in the medium.  He found success with the Hotel Transylvania series and later his production company Happy Madison produced the acclaimed Leo (2023) for Netflix.  Sandler continues to perform the Hanukkah song on a regular basis, but the film it spawned has faded from the picture, and it’s probably for the better.  It’s just too bad that no one has picked up the mantle and created a memorable Hanukkah movie on the level of the Christmas classics we watch every single year.  It would be nice if a company like Hallmark maybe tried out doing a Hanukkah themed movie in their style of holiday themed, inspirational films.  With Hanukkah’s profile in the holiday season being elevated to where it is now, it’s beyond time to actually give it a worthy cinematic celebration.  At this point, we already know that Adam Sandler is not the guy to make it happen, but his failure shouldn’t dissuade others from trying either.  A lot of Jews helped to make our holiday traditions a little bit brighter.  It would be worthwhile to show some support for getting a spotlight directed at their own holiday for once, whether it’s in song, on television or on the big screen.  As the song goes, “Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah.  So much funikkah, to celebrate Hanukkah.”

Editorials

Gifts That Keep Giving – Why Hollywood is Spending Big on Christmas Movies

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Like any other year, you’d expect at least one movie hitting the big screen that takes advantage of the holiday season and centers it’s story around theme of Christmastime.  This year is no exception.  We were greeted with a major one this year in the form of the action film, Red One (2024), which brings a bit of Michael Bay-esque mayhem to the Santa Claus mythos.  The movie also brings in two of the biggest action movie stars in Hollywood today, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, to give it even more cinematic gravitas.  Unfortunately, even with it’s well-timed holiday season release date, the film failed to deliver the presents at the box office, becoming a rare misfire for the the two stars on the marquee.  But that’s not the thing that got the notice of Hollywood insiders.  What really sparked a conversation around this movie was it’s astronomical price tag.  The movie, which is based around an original concept centered on the mythos of Santa and holiday traditions, cost over $250 million to make.  That is an astonishingly high production budget for what is essentially nothing more than a Christmas movie.  Now, the movie was financed by Amazon Studios, which is part of one of the world’s wealthiest corporations, so it’s soft box office results will not exactly sink the fortunes of the studio, but even still, many are questioning why a Christmas film needed a quarter of a billion dollar budget.  It’s been speculated that the budget ballooned because of cost overruns due to the lack of professionalism on the part of it’s main star (Dwayne Johnson) who caused multiple delays, but it still doesn’t account for why the project needed to keep going despite all of the production issues.  The answer lies in the fact that Holiday movies have grown into a much larger business over the last couple years.

In the last few decades, we’ve seen a rise in what can be considered Holiday blockbusters.  Christmas films certainly aren’t anything new, as they have existed in Hollywood as far back as the early days with classics like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).  But it was with the success of Home Alone (1990) that Hollywood took notice that a Christmas themed movie could not only perform well at the box office, but also be dominant too.  Further Christmas themed movies would continue to emerge afterwards that were not only successful but could also lead at the box office.  There was The Santa Clause (1994), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), all of which delivered surprisingly strong box office results.  In some of the cases, these movies succeeded not just because they capitalized on the holiday season, but because they connected with audiences in a way that transcended their holiday theming.  Home Alone especially stands out more for it’s comedic pratfalls than it does for it’s holiday aesthetics, because that’s what drove people to the theaters over and over again.  This is usually what separates the good holiday films from the bad, as not every holiday movie is a success at the box office.  Red One is proving that right now, as it does not have the legs to carry it through the holidays and will likely be out of theaters even before Christmas Day itself.  But, there is still a lot of signs that Hollywood is not weary of banking heavily in Christmas themed movies anytime soon even as movies like Red One continue to eat it at the box office.  What we are finding out is that Holiday movies are a far more resilient genre all on their own that have longer shelf lives than most other types of movies.

The reason why studios are willing to invest so much in new holiday themed films is because of something called the long tail effect.  This long tail effect is when a movie premieres in theaters or somewhere else and remains in the public view long after, You see it with movies that remain profitable many years later, helped by a healthy presence in subsequent television airings and re-releases.  Some movies get rediscovered this way too, such as It’s a Wonderful Life which had initially bombed at the box office and then later became a perennial classic.  While the long tail effect can happen to movies in any genre, it seems to more frequently happen with holiday films.  This has been an interesting phenomenon in recent years and it is beginning to be reflected in the way that more and more holiday films are being produced.  Hollywood certainly is more comfortable investing in something that they know is going to have long term value beyond it’s initial release.  One thing that has certainly changed in recent years is the frequency.  While it was common to see a new holiday classic emerge every couple of years, we now are seeing at least one new movie a year specifically be spotlighted with a Christmas theme at it’s center.  This year it’s Red One, a couple years ago it was the R-rated action comedy Violent Night (2022).  And I’m sure that the next couple of years will give us plenty more.  But what is interesting is that these movies are not just being made to solely rely on their theatrical box office.  Now, many more holiday movies are getting made with the intention of sticking around for many years.

What I think has contributed to this trend is the creation of programming blocks on cable television and on streaming.  These are special selections of movies centered on Christmas that are meant to cater to their audience’s desire to see holiday themed entertainment in the lead up to the special day.  The cable channel Freeform dedicates the entire month of December to playing nothing but Holiday themed movies and specials.  And on Christmas Day itself, the cable network TBS devotes it’s channel to a marathon run of one specific movie, 1983’s A Christmas Story, which has become an annual tradition all on it’s own.  On streaming services, there are specific specialty pages created just to help viewers find holiday themed movies and show episodes.  And what these specially selected programming blocks do is to keep the same holiday themed movies and specials in the public eye year after year.  These have definitely helped in making the long tail effect work especially well for holiday movies.  But, the programming blocks can’t just survive on the same small sampling of holiday classics we all know about.  They need new entries to help keep things fresh over time, though the best of them still remain an essential piece.  Sure, you’ll easily see evergreen titles like Home Alone or The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in the mix, but every year there are newer movies that get added, whether created as an original by the station or the streamer in question, or became an essential addition due to it’s box office performance.  It’s too early to know if Red One will see that kind of future, though the fact that it was made by Amazon tells you that it’s almost a certainty that Prime Video will be spotlighting it on their front page for many Christmases to come.

While these programming blocks definitely take advantage of the holiday season as a whole, it’s hard to know what kind of movies will become perennial favorites.  The problem is that Hollywood is producing a glut of holiday movies every year, and most of them don’t stick the way that they hoped they would.  Hallmark has created literally hundreds of holiday themed movies, but I don’t think many people can name one right off the top of their heads.  Still, Hallmark’s holiday block of films are among the most watched on television every single year, so their business model is still working well for them, even if their Christmas movies all blend together into an indistinguishable holiday blob of entertainment.  The same thing is also happening with broadcasters that cater to the same crowd as Hallmark, such as the Lifetime network or Netflix.  These easy to digest, non-offensive holiday themed movies are good at capturing that holiday spirit, but they don’t stand out like the perennial classics do, and those are the ones that continue to drive the highest viewership during the holiday season.  People just have the desire to re-watch the best Christmas movies there are to get into the holiday spirit, but it’s a hard canon to add onto.  When the same movies continue to generate viewership year after year, why try to replace any of them?  Just like any other genre, it’s hard to know exactly what movies are going to click with audiences and holiday movies ae no different.  For some of the “perennial” Christmas films, they were likely created without ever knowing that they would take on another life as an essential holiday film.  And yet, Hollywood tries a lot harder than they should trying to manufacture the next big holiday classic.

This is probably the reason why holiday films are becoming bigger budget undertakings in recent years.  The bar has been set high by the movies that we recognize as a perennial holiday classic.  A movie like Red One attempts to hit those holiday tropes in a big way, and sadly comes across as too much of a manufactured product rather than a movie made with a lot of heart.  The movie banks on us knowing all of the mythos surrounding Santa Claus and the Christmas season, mainly through the secularized sense, and tries to use all that as the unique element added into a standard action movie plot.  It’s a mix that doesn’t work as intended because we can see the intention behind the film, which is a cyncial ploy to re-sell a regurgitated, standard action movie plot with a new gimmick, and hope it hits that holiday sweet spot.  This is certainly the response it’s getting in theaters, but separated from it’s box office disappointment is it possible that the movie will have a long shelf life as a title spotlighted on Amazon’s own streaming platform?  It’s too early to know, but that long tail effect has kept even bad holiday movies like Jingle All the Way (1996) and Eight Crazy Nights (2002) in the public eye for much longer than they should have been.  The huge budget that Red One received certainly gives it a grander feel, and that’s likely what the filmmakers were intending with their movie.  Because the bar is high for standing out in the genre, you’ve got to present your movie as something pretty special.  Maybe Red One accomplishes this on a visual level, but it remains pretty hollow as a story.  Still, it’s an indicator that holiday movies are getting more ambitious as they try to crack open that door into becoming a perennial favorite for the season.

The only thing is, a lot of the holiday classics became just that out of more humble means.  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) was just a second sequel in a comedy franchise, taking the next logical step past the summer based vacation of the first movie, and managing to surpass it with it’s spot on holiday observations mined for comedy.  It certainly didn’t need a massive budget to do that.  A Christmas Story and Home Alone were also likewise modest projects that only grew in esteem over the years due to their perfectly executed storylines that tie into Christmas.  It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even about Christmas for most of it’s run time, and only incorporates the holiday into it’s inspirational final act.  In all, it’s difficult to actually manufacture a perennial holiday classic, and even with a bigger budget and big conceptual gimmick, your movie is still going to face an uphill battle to be accepted as an essential part of the holiday season.  But, this season also gives more movies a chance than any other genre towards achieving that classic status, because there is a audience that is primed every year to expect something new over the holidays.  Being a Christmas movie definitely brings it’s own built in public attention because there are people out there who seek out holiday themed entertainment.  While that journey to the podium of all time classics is a very narrow one, the platform to launch that journey from is quite broad.  That’s why we see such a large annual investment from Hollywood towards making so many holiday themed movies.  And in the case of movies like Red One, they are getting to be bigger and more ambitious in the hopes of standing out.  But as we’ve also seen, the holiday audience is discerning  and more prone towards accepting past favorites over flashy newcomers.

The holiday season is becoming a much bigger deal when it comes to the movies that take advantage of it.  The reason why Hollywood considers it essential to invest so much money into creating new holiday films is because they hope that one or more will give them that long term success that holiday films typically bring.  With the case of Red One, the question arises about what is too much to spend on a holiday movie?  Red One is certainly going to be a prime example of how not to spend money on a Christmas movie, and will almost certainly leave Amazon in the red.  But, is Amazon looking at the short term box office or the long term viewership on Prime Video as as their barometer for the success of the film.  It may play differently as a permanent fixture on their streaming platform that they can re-promote every holiday season.  But, it’s just one example out of many.  None of the classics are ever likely to diminish over time, because they continue to hit that sweet spot for the holidays that we all appreciate.  The question is, what else may land in that special category of perennial favorites?  For the amount of money that is increasingly becoming a part of Hollywood’s plans for the holiday season, something of quality is likely to emerge.  The long term prospects for success the a perennial holiday film provides is what helps to drive new investment into the genre each year, and eventually something will land and become a new classic.  It may not be this year, but Hollywood will keep trying.  In any case, there is an excitingly open market during the holiday season that we all participate in as we search for new favorites while also indulging in what makes Christmas so fun.  And the classics will remain there as well to help give us that entertainment fix during the holidays.  I for one always have to catch Christmas Vacation once every year(in addition to Charlie Brown’s Christmas).  I’m sure that all of you have your go to essentials as well.  With the frequency that Hollywood is attempting to give us something new each year, let’s hope that another holiday classic is waiting to be opened under that Christmas tree very soon.