Adam Sandler Has Best Actor Buzz After Making A New Movie Which Is <Chaps Voice> Actually Good
USA Today - Adam Sandler has made a bunch of bad movies lately (see: Sandy Wexler). So he’s probably as surprised as anyone to find himself in the Oscar conversation at Cannes Film Festival.
When the actor’s latest movie, Noah Baumbach’s tender family comedy The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), premiered Sunday night in France, it was met with rapturous reviews and a four-minute standing ovation.
“Who times those things anyway?” Adam Sandler joked later to USA TODAY. “Why not just say five?”
In the film, Dustin Hoffman plays artistic patriarch Harold Meyerowitz, whose estranged children Matthew (Ben Stiller), Danny (Sandler) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) reconnect after he lands in the hospital for an untreated injury and slips into a coma. The prospect of losing their dad brings up complicated feelings for half-brothers Matthew and Danny, who sought Harold’s approval all their lives but always felt inadequate.
Meyerowitz has 89% thumbs up on Rotten Tomatoes, with praise being particularly effusive for Sandler’s performance.
What a roller coaster of a day for me. Let me tell you. I woke up. I did some blogs. Did you guys see how fat Kelvin Benjamin is? Classic. I went to the beach. I shredded the gnarl. Got tubular. And then I came back, popped onto Twitter, and to my amazement, found out Adam Sandler has made a good movie. And not just that, people are giving him early best actor Oscars buzz. Oh it’s true, it’s damn true.
“A standout among other standouts,” Deadline’s Pete Hammond wrote of Sandler. “A sentence I thought I might never write: Is Adam Sandler a contender for best actor in Cannes?”
“With no shtick to fall back on, Sandler is forced to act, and it’s a glorious thing to watch,” says Variety’s Pete Debruge. “Sandler is terrific,” Time’s Stephanie Zacharek confirms.
I mean he has always had acting chops, he just goes out of his way not to use them. He would rather make Grown Ups 5 and reel in hundreds of millions of dollars (what an idiot, right?!) than challenge himself in harder roles. So now, instead of making Jack and Jill or Pixels, he’s making The Meyerowitz Stories, and people are saying he’s fucking phenomenal, just like in Puch Drunk Love and Reign Over Me.
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You know what I really hope? This inspires Jim Carey. I have always been very team Sandler and Carey as two guys who can take on roles outside their comfort zones and crush them. More so Carey though. He had that string of performances in Truman Show, Man On The Moon, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where he was so, so, so, so good that it’s a travesty he never received a best actor nomination. If Sandler can stop the Grown Ups nonsense for 1 film, hopefully Carey ain’t done yet either.