Grown Ups

Little Nicky, Punch-Drunk Love, Mr. Deeds, Anger Management, 50 First Dates, Spanglish, The Longest Yard, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Click. In case you were lacking evidence and reason to never see another Adam Sandler movie again, there you go. Future movie reviews will usually deal with more recent releases, but after seeing this movie I decided it was too terrible to ignore.
    Sandler's latest gem was worse than all of the above. The script for this movie was in all likelihood conceived at an Appleby's after Adam and co-writer Fred Wolf pounded down a couple of "2 for 20" deals and one too many Cervezas. It is as if they wanted to do a roast of Rob Schneider so they wrote all these jokes and zingers and thought to themselves, "Hey maybe instead of a roast we could do a movie," explaining the inception of Grown Ups (it pains me to even use those words in the same sentence).
   Each scene in Grown Ups is the 5 reunited friends sitting around cracking the kind of jokes you would hear on a bus ride home from junior high. On top of that, there is no real story/plot/conflict in the movie. They seriously just hang out for a couple of hours and then it's over. I have no idea what Selma Hayek is doing in this movie...I guess Drew Barrymore was busy ruining a someone else's  movie. I could go on, but by now I am sure you are getting the picture.
    I had the lowest of low expectations going into this...and it failed to meet them. This movie is a true and justified F-. I have yet to, and probably won't, see The Expendables, but I would imagine it is the action-movie equivalent to Grown Ups and You Again is probably the chick-flick version of it. These kinds of movies are just lazy money-grabs that pay for the big name actors and don't bother with anything else. Few movies put in the time and effort after they have landed multiple big name stars (exceptions include Oceans 11 and The Departed).
     Sadly, the days of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore are long gone. 

...like the salmon of Capistrano

The title of my blog happens to be from my favorite comedy of all time: Dumb and Dumber. My future posts will involve analyzing and critiquing movies, both good and bad, in a timely matter in hopes that you will use my analysis as a guide in choosing carefully which movies you see and which ones you don't. I have to make a few things clear up front. 
          1) I put very high value on the script and the acting. Of all the different things that go into making a movie (script, screenplay, directing, special effects, etc.) you can't have a good movie without those two. I would say that together they make up about 90% of what makes a good movie good. If you don't care much about those two things, then perhaps this blog is not for you.
          2) I will use the ABCDF grading system so that you can know relative to other movies where a specific movie falls. 
          3) I believe that your expectations, whether they be grand or non-existent, play a major role in the watchability of a film. For instance, I had very high hopes for the new Robin Hood movie with Russell Crowe and because of that I was slightly disappointed after watching it. The movie wasn't terrible, it just wasn't The Gladiator. This same concept works in  reverse. I saw The Stepfather with extremely low expectations and I left pleasantly surprised. Robin Hood is still a better movie, but I left more satisfied after the Stepfather.
       
         My future weekly posts will analyze, grade, and tell you how low or high expectations should be for specific movies. Feel free to disagree, just know that you will be wrong :)