6 Degrees of Separation

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2006)

When you watch these things, they provide little amusement by themselves. All the fun is in watching ourselves watch it.
What's interesting is that this is a genre twice removed. You start with the sports movie. The formula there is rather strict: underdog or compromised hero, forces working against them in a deliberate way, goodness and godliness equated with something like perseverance and commitment, and the little guy(s) triumph.
For some reason this little formula just won't die and I think it is because we have discovered how to make sports cinematic. Or we have reinvented sport to be cinematic: basketball, for example.
Because the formula is so tight, you can have all sorts of comedic takeoffs. When Burt did his 30 years ago, that notion was fresh.
Now we have a whole new genre to apply, the Adam Sandler movie. I admit I like this man's created persona. He seems to have good intuitions about how to surround himself with elements that support his type of light, self-deprecating humor. "50 First Dates" was in its own way a parody of self-referential cinema, the re-introduction to love each episode. Turns "Groundhog Day" inside out both in concept and manner.
So in watching this, you have several degrees of separation: life, whatever collection of metaphors that sports abstracts from life, movies about that, movies that parody that, and this, an Adam Sandler movie of a parody of a representation of an abstraction of life.
++++
Since watching "Bleak House," I am reminded of how much society hates lawyers. When something is so deep, it takes on a life of its own, beyond stereotype. James Cromwell has made a career out of playing lawyers and men who have power and carry it with a dignified artifice. Dangerous because they know their own fragility. He also does wardens, as here.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.