Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

Mrs. Zwicker and I saw two movies this weekend, both of which met the expectations we had for them. On Saturday night, we saw The Departed, Martin Scorsese's latest film about mobsters and police officers from the mean streets (no pun intended) of South Boston. If any director knows how to make a movie about cops and criminals, especially criminals, it's Scorsese. With "The Departed," Scorsese does not disappoint.

The movie was promising, given not only its director but also its star-studded cast, including Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen. Of course, other movies have had casts with major star power but fell far short of the mark. One glaring example is The Score, which was very average despite starring Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton, each arguably the best actor of his respective generation. Maybe it's because Scorsese was directing or just because they had a great script, but the cast delivered. While the big three leads deserve their accolades, special props to Baldwin and Wahlberg. The former is an arrogant jerk in real life and is equally convincing and entertaining in that role, even though it's pretty much the only one he ever plays these days.

Last night, we did a cinematic 180 and watched Click. Mrs. Zwicker and I didn't expect much and we again were not surprised or disappointed. We expected a stupid and silly Adam Sandler and that is what we somewhat got. Stupid and silly are not necessarily bad things in a movie and Sandler delivers those better than most.

For those unfamiliar, the movie is about a guy who gets a remote control that is indeed universal. He can control everything around him. The annoying thing about the movie was that Sandler decided to take a light movie and tried to make it deep around two-thirds of the way into it. The movie looked at the effects of Sandler's character abusing the remote control's power to skip past important life events.

Sandler has already shown in "Spanglish" and "Punch Drunk Love" that he can do the dramatic thing. If that's what he wanted to do here, he could have done it and created a movie that actually makes you think. You might laugh at the idea of an Adam Sandler movie making you contemplate serious issues but it would actually not be so novel. After all, movies like Defending Your Life and Groundhog Day are just two examples of movies that are the subject of theology and philosophy courses in universities and religious institutions, despite their starring Albert Brooks and Bill Murray respectively. If Sandler wanted to make that type of movie, he should have gone for it. I for one think that he has the chops to make that leap. Instead, he provided a movie that was neither silly and amusing enough nor serious and thought provoking enough. In the end, the only things we wanted to see on the DVD's extras were how Sandler got to look hilariously obese in one scene or how the famliy dog humped a large stuffed animal in many scenes. Of course, a dog humping a stuffed animal is always entertaining.