I watched 'Happy Gilmore' at the weekend. It's a gentle comedy about a talentless but fixated hockey player who tries his hand at golf and turns out to be a genius - but stil treats it like an ice hockey match. It's perfectly watchable - Adam Sandler is, well, Adam Sandler, and the acting - what little there is of it - is perfectly passable. The script, similarly, is pretty much okay - par for the course (sorry) when it comes to this sort of comedy genre. Nothing wrong there, either. Sure, it's all a little lightweight, but hey, it's a lightweight movie.
And yet it was bad.
It took me a while to work out why. I mean, the performances are okay, the script is okay, the camera work seems fine - what else is there? And yet I came away unsatisfied. Only much later did I realize - this movie has been irretrievably mauled by its editor. The editing is not merely bad, it is execrable. People turn up in places with no explanation of how they got there, and no buildup to their arrival. The movie takes far too long to build to the showdown, which is then over all too quickly. Somewhere, I feel certain, there is enough footage on some cutting room floor to make good these shortcomings - but for some reason the editors decided to leave in unnecessarily long sequences of Granny Gilmore being terrorized in her old folks' home.
This was a new one on me. Whenever I've seen bad films before, it was because the acting was wooden, or the script dreadful (or the sets, or the continuity, or the effects...). For someone to have edited a film, retained a decent-sounding script, and yet have successfully avoided any dramatic tension or coherence, is not something I've come across before. It was an educational experience. Thanks to Happy Gilmore, I've discovered a whole different way in which a film can fail.
6 comments:
If you think Happy Gilmore was bad, try another Sandler movie: Billy Madison. That is the most rubbish movie in the history of rubbish movies. It makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like a work of art. Believe me, don't see it for yourself, just believe me. :-P
I agree. For different reasons. In my case the "plot" (put up Gran's house in an illogical wager) was totally lost on me after awhile in the movie. I really enjoy slapstick, especially in the "haute-handed" and hilarious vein of 1940-50s Hollywood, and for this reason I got a kick from the film. Sandler is just too tedious for my tastes, however. Call him uniformly unimpressive or underwhelming or whatever you liken his portrayals to be -- he puts me to sleep. I've seen a few of his films and he seems to lack good backup (a key, in my opinion, to the best slapstick) and the camera work fails to set up his gags reliably. Maybe I get just an overarching sense that "some unknown scriptwriter churns his stuff out and then a director shouts cues to him from off mic" and action proceeds woodenly from that perspective. Hmm.
Thanks moom. I knew there was something stopping me liking this one, but I hadn't figured out what.
Hmmm:
Editor on Happy Gilmore: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on Big Daddy: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on Little Nicky: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on Mr Deeds: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on Click: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on The Longest Yard: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on 50 First Dates: Jeff Gourson.
Editor on Anger Management:Jeff Gourson.
Editor on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry: Jeff Gourson.
vs
Editor on Punch Drunk Love: Leslie Jones
Editor on The Wedding Singer: Tom Lewis
They (Adam Sandler movies) all suffer one fatal flaw... the lead actor. That he comes with a package of dodgy editors, scriptwriters, producers, cameramen, grips, foley artists, best boys, doubles, makeup teams, hair stylists, animal handlers, runners, carpenters, animators, musicians, lighting guys, sound recordists and on-set caterers is purely coincidental.
I like Punchdrunk.
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