Product: Eight Crazy Nights [VHS] (2002)
Rating: 5.0
A great film if you're in the market for it
I loved this film. But you may very well not like it at all. Answering a couple quick questions will help you know whether you should stay away from Eight Crazy Nights:Can anything in an artwork offend you? Be honest here; there's nothing wrong with you if you can be offended by content. If you're the kind of person who might say, "I normally don't mind (or I even like) crude humor, but that just went too far", then the answer is "yes". If you think that an artwork can go too far, if you have any personal sacred cows, then be very cautious of watching Eight Crazy Nights.Next, do you like to think of yourself as being more mature than you were as, say, a 13 year old? I don't just mean, "Are you more mature", but do you pride yourself on that, so that you don't find joy in playing 13-year-old again. If yes, that's another indicator for caution.And finally, for people who actually are teens and who answered "No" to the above questions, do you dislike your crude humor to have any positive messages or sentimentality? If yes, use caution.It's not that Eight Crazy Nights is the most outrageous, risk-taking, potentially offensive comedy ever, or that it's constantly juvenile or ever over-the-top sappy. For offense and maturity, there's nothing here that's not found in the average episode of South Park. But maybe because it's an animated holiday film where many people aren't expecting something like South Park, a lot of viewers--especially the offendable and proudly sophisticated--have turned up their noses.Eight Crazy Nights is actually quite complex and sophisticated on many artistic levels. The animation is exceptionally well done--at least as good and complex as most Disney features. For example, there are many subtle layering and perspective effects, similar to Disney's multiplane approach, and often mimicking "live action" cameras, so that different focal depths will be blurred. The environments are lush and subtly modeled. Characters are fluid and well drawn. There are many difficult sequences, such as action and sports scenes, and they're all very impressive.Script-wise, Adam Sandler achieved a film that both mocks/spoofs traditional holiday films and manages to be one at the same time. It's not that different in theory from, say, Elf or Bad Santa, except that Sandler isn't at all afraid to continually go for the throat in his brand of humor (which isn't to suggest that Elf or Bad Santa are bad films--I love both of them, and especially Bad Santa goes for the throat sometimes, too). The plot has some similarities to A Christmas Carol in that the main character, Davey (voiced by Sandler), has an over-the-top, bitter, bah-humbug attitude about the holidays brought on by past events. Davey is even visited by something akin to supernatural entities at one point.Sandler's music and music performances are impressive. The focus is on silly/funny lyrics, of course, but at times, his singing and songwriting skills suggest that he could have easily had a career in the music business instead. While watching Eight Crazy Nights I kept thinking how much I'd like to see a Sandler penned Broadway show--that would be just the thing to help knock Broadway out of its frustrating musical and content conservatism.A couple characters, especially Whitey (also voiced by Sandler), take some getting used to. Sandler is doing one of his odd, affected voices for the character, and Whitey is designed to be disturbing and disagreeable. But of course the joke is that he's the symbol of positive holiday spirit, so Sandler is again pulling the rug out from beneath our expectations--something he does regularly, in many different ways, throughout the course of Eight Crazy Nights--and that's a good thing.