As terribly easy as it is to hate on the Twilight films, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II was the best of the series. (Not that it was without its share of WTFery — imprinting and vampire fistfights and every second of Michael Sheen onscreen, anyone?) But with Breaking Dawn - Part II nominated for 11 Razzie Awards in just ten categories, up against the likes of Adam Sandler's That's My Boy, Eddie Murphy's A Thousand Words, and the bizarro pop culture sensation/box office bomb The Oogieloves In Big Balloon Adventure, let's be real: Does Twilight truly deserve to win all the Razzies?
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Well, not all of you. Just the ones on the haterade-swilling Anti-Sandler train, "an unconscious social ideology that protects Hollywood’s status quo" according to everyone's favorite provocateur, Armond White: "Sandler’s key challenge notes the derangement of social values, beginning with the celebrity young Donny endured [...] silliness doesn’t prevent Sandler from accurately pinpointing our social hypocrisy. That’s what W.C. Fields used to do [...] Despite its deliberate ribaldry and outrage, That’s My Boy poignantly reminds the elite class of its forgotten virtues [...] Sandler dares to express feelings about family, ethnicity, friendship – the realpolitik of genuine social interaction. [City Arts]
To say that That's My Boy is a step up from the recent output of Adam Sandler and his company Happy Madison Productions really is to suggest only that the film isn't likely to be screened as some sort of new Guantanamo interrogation technique. Jack and Jill, Zookeeper, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star — these movies aren't merely bad, they're sandpaper-on-skin excruciating, unfunny to the point of inspiring hostility toward whoever's chosen to make them. Sandler, once upon a time, was king of a winning kind of anarchic, gleeful stupidity — Billy Madison holds up so well (seriously, it does) because it feels like it's just every idiotic gag that he and his buddies could come up with while crowded around a table littered with bongs and beer cans, crammed into an hour and a half. These late features have an undercurrent of misanthropy — their silliness isn't inclusive, its confrontational and unpleasant, as if it was a chore to have to be bothered to actually make the movie in order to get everyone paid.
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Stop. Collaborate and listen. Ice is back with a brand new invention. No, really! He is. Rob Van Winkle, who you know as ‘90s rap sensation Vanilla Ice, has a major role in this summer’s new Adam Sandler comedy That's My Boy, in which he plays himself, Vanilla Ice. The set-up: Donny Berger (Sandler) became famous in the ‘80s for having an affair with his hot teacher. Donny knew Ice from the flash in the pan/has-been circuit, and goes back to hang out with Ice when he reunites with the grown son (Andy Samberg) he fathered.
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