EW review: A middling, mild 'Yard'
Sandler's remake doesn't have bite of Reynolds' original
By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- Adam Sandler doesn't look like a guy who could shave points off a football game, at least not without bursting into tears of remorse and apologizing in a high-pitched burble.
Burt Reynolds does -- and did with even more anarchic macho swagger some 30 years ago, when he originated the role of disgraced former NFL quarterback Paul ''Wrecking'' Crewe currently reprised by Sandler in "The Longest Yard."
And therein lies a cultural shift that culminates in the reasonably diverting but curiously defanged remake of the jailhouse-gridiron underdog saga we have now before us: In studio comedies and urban entertainments -- even those that claim to rebel against the system, stick it to the power and detonate the bombs of racial bigotry -- we are living in the age of the PG-13 Sandler Man, intrinsically nice team player, rather than the R-rated Reynolds Man, potentially dangerous lone fox. And in such a setting of boys-at-play, it's harder to tell the subversive from the product-placement deal.
Not that this remake, directed by simpatico Team Sandler member Peter Segal ("Anger Management"), doesn't generously follow the playbook of the original, either in story, dialogue or, in many places, shot selection. (One difference: Tracy Keenan Wynn's original script made no disposable references, as Sheldon Turner's does, to Beyonce, Star Jones, Michael Jackson, "Forrest Gump" or "Shrek.")
Now as then, Crewe starts off as a drink-sloshed has-been, a washed-up former Sports Somebody who, when we first meet him, dumps his rich-bitch girlfriend, steals her fancy car and leads cops on a wild high-speed chase. (In this case, the bitch in the boob-spilling frock is played by an uncredited Courteney Cox Arquette, and Sandler looks as whipped by this scary specimen of the female sex as he did by Tea Leoni in "Spanglish.")
Once captured, roughed up and sent off to a prison far from home, Crewe first endures the taunting hatred of his fellow cons, ready to forgive rape, murder and thievery, but not something as ''un-American'' as throwing a game. Then he endures the bullying of the prison's warden (James Cromwell), a rotten, football-obsessed politician eager to make use of his new star inmate as a coach, on the convict side, in a rigged football match between the guards and the cons.
As it was in Robert Aldrich's original, the heart of "The Longest Yard" is the building of the team that calls itself the Mean Machine -- a band of multihued brothers bound by shared status as incarcerated scum -- and the playing of the cataclysmic game itself, in what sometimes feels like actual time. (The fundamental things applied too in the bone-cruncher 2002 British remake, "Mean Machine," starring anvil-headed soccer star Vinnie Jones.)
But then, even as the sports choreography intensifies and Segal cuts from crowd reactions to scoreboard close-ups to shots of the tranny-convict cheerleaders in full Rockette formation, this new, MTV-generation version downshifts into a different, broader, gentler, less politically subversive comedy than Aldrich's bleaker end run around Watergate-era authority.
The real tyranny of the jailer over the jailed alluded to in 1974 -- certainly a topic of wincing interest in a modern era of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib -- is laughed off in favor of a few race jokes.
And oddly, the new version skews neutral despite the featured participation of the always usefully mouthy Chris Rock as the wily prison fixer known only as Caretaker (a role originated by Jim Hampton).
Flitting around Texas' fictional Allenville Penitentiary with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and a finger in every inside deal, observing his too-soft-for-Oz fellows (including rap star Nelly and "SNL's" Tracy Morgan among the prisoners, and ex-jocks Brian Bosworth and Bill Romanowski among the guards), Rock's Caretaker becomes a one-man chorus of easy barbs.
Each joke and one-liner is a made-for-HBO zinger, each scene with Sandler a reaffirmation of the old friendship between the two successful "SNL" alums, now celebrating their success with a big-ticket comedy in which getting smashed in the crotch is as good as a handshake.
It's a safe bet that the prime audience for the movie won't have seen the original, won't be able to recall Reynolds in his 1970s prime and won't, indeed, care whether the yard is long, short or covered in crabgrass, so long as it sprouts eye-catching celebrities like Sandler, Rock and Nelly. Yet I can't help thinking that in this game of remake, points have been shaved.
EW Grade: C+
'Saving Face'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
 Michelle Krusiec stars in "Saving Face." |  |
In America, when you watch an ethnic soap opera in which old-world parents reject their adult children's dreams of love, it's no secret that a lot of us can feel a twinge of nostalgia for those deeply rooted parental puritans, even though we're aware their view of relationships is all wrong.
"Saving Face," a pleasant if sketchy Chinese-American family drama, is a study in multigenerational guilt-tripping. Wilhelmina (Michelle Krusiec), a rising young surgeon, prefers women to men, but her mother (Joan Chen) would disown her if she knew.
Mom, however, is every bit as scandalous: At 48, she gets pregnant without a husband, and her parents, who are stern survivors of the Cultural Revolution, are aghast.
The writer-director, Alice Wu, fudges a lot of the basics -- I never believed the heroine was really a physician -- but the final, proudly public girl-on-girl smooch still jerks a tear.
EW Grade: B-
'A League of Ordinary Gentlemen'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
If you want a whiff of how unironic the 1970s were, consider bowling, a sport that on any given weekend was broadcast (usually on ABC) with the hushed solemnity of a moon launch.
Who, exactly, were these doughy men in their loose-fitting shirts, their every spare greeted with a burst of applause?
In its early scenes, Chris Browne's documentary "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen" looks fondly back at an era when bowling was the most popular leisure activity in America -- a middle- and working-class ritual of resplendent squareness.
As a spectator sport, however, bowling went into decline (it was dropped by ABC in 1997), and the heart of the movie is the game, funny and stubbornly inspiring attempt to bring it back.
We meet the trio of retired Microsoft geeks who purchased the Pro Bowlers Association for $5 million, along with the sports marketer they hired to repackage bowling, replete with ''attitude'' and sponsorship by Odor-Eaters. The players who helped him do it include a handful of the veteran pin warriors of the '80s, such as Wayne Webb, whose now-fading skills provide moments of bitter poignance.
If you want a whiff of how ironic this era is, check out Pete Weber, who made himself the bad-boy showman of bowling simply by wearing sunglasses and following up a strike with his patented ''crotch chop'' -- an ebullient double-hand bounce that's a celebration of his masterly, uh ... balls.
EW Grade: B
'Tell Them Who You Are'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
"Tell Them Who You Are" is a fluky and revealing portrait of the veteran cinematographer Haskell Wexler. A spry 80 when most of it was shot, Wexler is a rude and imperious man, yet he's possessed by art and life -- he's a sacred monster of testiness.
Directed by Wexler's son Mark, in a therapeutic personal-verite style, the movie offers up a smattering of tasty yarns about the making of "In the Heat of the Night," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Bound for Glory," but the heart of it consists of Wexler berating his son right on camera, telling him how to direct his movie.
More often than not, he's right. Beneath its exploration of fatherly distance, this is really a portrait of why cranks make better artists than earnest nice guys.
EW Grade: B
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