My Top Ten Episodes of 2012-2013

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2012-2013 television season below, in no particular order.  And a few spoilers ahead, including that one episode of "Game of Thrones."  Yes, that one. 

House of Cards, "Chapter 1" - Arguably this is the most culturally pivotal episode on this list, because "House of Cards" was the first real streaming hit when Netflix decided to move into original programming.  I'm picking the premiere episode, because I admire the skill with which we are introduced to Kevin Spacey's ruthless congressman, Frank Underwood, and everyone in his circle.  This also marked the start of director David Fincher's long relationship with Netflix.

Orphan Black, "Variations Under Domestication" - The marvel of "Orphan Black" was always Tatiana Maslany's multiple performances as the various clones, and uptight suburban mom Alison is my favorite.  So, of course I love the episode where Alison has to juggle hosting a neighborhood party and trying to get answers out of a suspicious Donnie at the same time.  This is also my favorite Vic episode, because he's at his best when the universe is out to get him.  

Utopia, "Episode 1" - "Utopia" immediately gained attention for its disturbing use of graphic violence, including a torture scene in the first episode.  What struck me the most was the art direction, which uses a lot of whimsical imagery and exaggerated artifice, adding to the uneasy feeling that something is very wrong.  Couple that with Cristobal Tapia De Veer's psychedelic score, and "Utopia" quickly stood out from the crowd as a totally singular piece of media.  

The Americans, "The Clock" - This is only the second episode of the show, but it's already established that characters on both sides will be difficult to root for.  On the one hand you have the Jennings, who demonstrate that they're willing to do some pretty despicable things to fulfill their missions, and on the other there's Stan Beeman, who spends this episode digging up information to use as leverage to get Nina to spy for him.  Should we root for both?  Or neither?  

Rick & Morty, "Rick Potion No. 9" -  About halfway through the show's excellent first season, this is the episode that fully won me over, thanks to an ending where Rick essentially just gives up on the terrible situation he's caused, finds a new dimension for himself and Morty, and nothing is actually resolved.   The animation is fabulous at rendering its monsters, the writing is incredibly dark and twisted, and I'd never heard "Cronenberg" used as a verb before this episode. 

Breaking Bad, "Dead Freight" - It's a train heist episode!  This'll be fun, right?  The caper episodes of "Breaking Bad" were always some of my favorites, but this time around Todd is involved, and Todd demonstrates that he does not have any scruples whatsoever.  As Walt and Jesse  compromise themselves further and further, they cross lines they would never have crossed in prior seasons, and get too comfortable with the worst people, until inevitable tragedy strikes. 

Hannibal, "Coquilles" - I absolutely had to have an episode from the first season of "Hannibal."  After all this time, it still seems crazy that this aired in prime time on network television.  "Coquilles" had one of the most grisly of the show's famous murder tableaux, where the partial nudity is what got the creators into trouble, not the mutilated corpses.  I also love the first appearance of Gina Torres as Phyllis "Bella" Crawford, alongside her real life husband, Lawrence Fishburne.  

Person of Interest, "God Mode" - Here's a fun one.  "Person of Interest" was a nice balance of action show and crime procedural, but occasionally they would do a pure action episode, and this was one of the best.  Reese and Shaw are both given direct access to the Machine in the second season finale, allowing them to use "God Mode" - exploiting the Machine's omniscience to become unstoppable.  Amy Acker's Root also continues to be a very entertaining villain.

Game of Thrones, "The Rains of Castamere" - I wish I hadn't known this episode was coming, because it didn't live up to the hype.  How could it?  "Game of Thrones" was already known for its shocking and bloody twists, and this was one of the most shocking and the most bloody.  It absolutely impacted what television storytelling could do moving forward, though not all for the better.  At least Michelly Fairley got to show that Catelyn was capable of some real violence on her way out.

Mad Men, "In Care Of" - In many ways "Mad Men" is bookended by two of Don Draper's pitches.  The brilliant Carousel pitch in the first season shows him weaponizing the power of nostalgia.  Here, we have its inverse, the Hershey pitch, where Don's unnerving and unvarnished revelation about the truth of his past becomes the final straw that prompts the firm to cut ties.  However, it's a truth that Don is finally ready to face, as we turn toward the show's final chapters.

Honorable Mention

Parks and Rec, "Leslie and Ben" - Because who doesn't love it when the right people get married to each other?

---

Rank 'Em: "Love Death+Robots" Volume IV

It's been six years since the first "Love, Death+Robots," and the series is back with ten new shorts.  Many of them are directed by familiar names from the previous volumes.  Unfortunately, most of the shorts feel like brief teases or animation tests instead of anything substantive.  However, there are a few highlights that deserve their due.  

Here we go:

1. "Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners" - It's Aardman's "Creature Comforts" with gadgets and appliances!  It's all CGI, but they're definitely aping Aardman's clay character designs.  This being "Love Death+Robots," most of the humor is sexual and/or sophomoric, but the execution is great.  Multiple comedians were recruited for the gadgets, including Kevin Hart as an ionizer, Ronnie Chieng as a toothbrush, Brett Goldman as a toilet, Josh Brener as a showerhead, Nat Faxon as an abandoned waffle iron, Amy Sedaris as a paranoid security camera, and Niecy Nash Betts as a vibrator.

2. "How Zeke Got Religion" - Easily the best animated short of the bunch on a technical level, with  character designs that look vaguely reminiscent of "Archer" at a few points.  This isn't one of the stronger shorts simply based on story or concept.  However, if you like your gore, your monsters, and your WII aircraft, this is not one to miss.  This is a properly horrific piece of animation on a level we don't see very often, with kudos to the effects animators and the sound designers in particular.      

3. "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur" - Of course Tim Miller would be directing the one with all the naked chicks fighting in a gladiatorial arena with a horde of dinosaurs, and an emcee voiced by (and clearly intended to look like) Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson.  However, points for having all of the Bai Ling character's dialogue in Mandarin, and for committing to an absolutely ridiculous premise as hard as they possibly could.  I was thoroughly entertained for fifteen minutes, which is all I can ask for.  

4. "The Other Large Thing" - A cat voiced by Chris Parnell and a robot voiced by John Oliver plot to take over the world.  This is supposed to be a prequel to the "Three Robots" shorts though that's not made apparent enough here.  Anyway, we finally get  to see what the humans looked like in this world before the apocalypse, and it's not a pretty sight.  The story boils down to a few silly gags, but Chris Parnell and John Oliver do a lot to help sell it.  I only wish this were a little longer and more fleshed out.  

5. "400 Boys" - Robert Valley has been one of the more dependable "Love, Death+Robots" directors, with "Zima Blue" and "Ice."  This time around, we've got street gangs warring with each other in a post-Apocalyptic world, who find themselves up against a new nightmare enemy that manifests as giant babies.  None of it made much sense to me, but it all looks fantastic.  I'm putting it in the top half of the list just based on the effortlessly cool visuals.    

6.  "Close Encounters of the Mini Kind" - This is essentially "Night of the Mini Dead" from Volume III again, except with an alien invasion instead of a zombie apocalypse.  The style, many of the gags, and the plot beats are exactly the same, right down to the ending.  However, the short delivers its share of laughs and the premise still works fine.  It also functions very well as a cohesive story, which is more than I can say for some of the titles in this batch of "Love, Death+Robots."   

7. "Spider Rose" - This is the Jennifer Yuh Nelson directed short this year, and it lost me almost immediately because of the title character, one of those super-angsty warrior babes that are all over this genre.  And "Spider Rose" isn't one of the better ones.  Anyway, the story centers on what's essentially a "Lilo & Stitch" situation with a mean little twist ending.  The critter is cute and the animation is solid enough, so I can see this short working fine for someone else.

8. "For He Can Creep" - Now here's a curiosity.  This is one of the more ambitious shorts, depicting a battle between Satan and a cat for the soul of a poet.  However, it's too much story crammed into too little runtime, and there are too many distracting visuals that are difficult to parse.  Satan can bend reality to his whims.  The cat and its friends seem to have powers that aren't explained.  It's all CGI, but with woodcut textures everywhere?  The result is visual chaos.

9. "Golgotha" - Luma Pictures is better known as an effects house, which explains why they decided to go with a photorealistic style, including a main character who is a distracting digital recreation of actor Rhys Darby.  So much effort was spent on making sure everything looked good, and the storytelling feels like an afterthought.  The big reveal absolutely did not come off the way the short's creators intended.    

10. "Can't Stop" - This is just a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video.  David Fincher just took the band's performance at Slane Castle and redid it with everyone as marionette versions of themselves.  That's it.  Why is this part of "Love, Death+Robots"?  Do marionettes count as robots?  I don't think so.   

—

"The Sandman," Year Two (With Spoilers)

All the spoilers ahead, including for the comics.  And if you're looking for the Neil Gaiman caveat, it's in the previous post.  

I think I've heard just about every criticism of the second season of "Sandman" now, from Wanda being fridged to having the Corinthian reformed via a straight romance.  Both of these issues seem to have been the totally inadvertent result of a rushed and budget-conscious production, where creative compromises (replacing Ruby with Wanda, and pairing up the new Corinthian and Joanna to save on Matthew CGI) had unintended results.  A lot of the second season is like this, where the production seemed to be juggling way too much, and managed to get something wrong for everything that they got right.  

Let's focus on the positives first.  I love all the new additions to the cast.  Esme Creed-Miles as Delirium, Freddie Fox as Loki, Jack Gleeson as Puck, Barry Sloane as Destruction, Jacob Anderson as Daniel, Douglas Booth as Cluracan, Ruairi O'Connor as Orpheus, Umulisa Gahiga as Nada, and Ann Skelly as Nuala made me so glad that the second season of "The Sandman" finally made it to our screens.  I love this version of Nuala in particular, who is so much smarter and more assertive than the version in the comics, and who is not a doormat in her relationship with Cluracan.  I like the kinder, more human Daniel.  I actually liked both the Loki/Puck and the Corinthian II/Johanna pairings, which made "The Kindly Ones" storyline much more tolerable this time.  I didn't mind that Thessaly got booted and Nada got a bigger role.  And whoever decided to bring in Rufus Sewell and Tanya Moodie as Time and Night, the Endless's terrible parents, wins all the marbles.

Some of my biggest disappointments really boil down to the show's visuals not being able to get anywhere close to the work of Mike Dringenberg, Kelley Jones, Matt Wagner, Jill Thompson, Michael Zulli, and the other artists who contributed so much to the comic.  Dream's castle was rebuilt with darker interiors, possibly to help with all the CGI needed for the "Season of the Mists" sequences, and it ends up making everything look dim and difficult to see properly.  Delirium has her mismatched eyes and a few locks of rainbow hair, but she's far too sane and coherent compared to the source material.  There are some visuals in this season that are absolutely arresting, like the starlit appearance of Night, and the seaside meetings of Dream and Orpheus.  Then you have the final appearance of Lucifer, which only seems to take place on a beach because it did in the comics.  Except, there wasn't the budget for a properly balmy Australian beach, so they had to settle for one in the UK where everyone looks like they're freezing.  There were more creative workarounds, like the meeting with Time taking place in an almost monochromatic, Brutalist environment, instead a psychedelic one, to reflect his terrible relationship with Dream, but this kind of departure didn't happen often enough.      

The more difficult changes involve the storytelling.  Due to the nature of the accelerated plots, there are some episodes that feel like a "Greatest Hits" version of the original stories.  A large amount of "Brief Lives" is squashed into a single installment, where Dream spends too much time talking about characters who never show up onscreen.  Poor Wanda is shoehorned into a role she was never supposed to occupy.  However, it was the right decision to give over the lion's share of the time to the Orpheus story, which is the high point of the season.  For better or for worse, this "Sandman" adaptation is all about Dream, and getting him to the point where the choice between change and death feels inevitable.  Western media is not in the habit of making shows with tragic endings, especially not on this scale, and not in the context of a genre program, so I applaud the show's creators for fully committing to the idea.  But that said, I wish that more capable hands had been involved.  The back half of the season really needed to be more intense and violent, and the episode adapting "The Wake" is so leadenly paced that I was relieved when it was over.  It was all very cathartic, but enough was enough.        

I've had a very long relationship with "The Sandman," and tracked all of the various attempts at an adaptation for years.  I really never thought that we would get to this point, where the better part of the series has been more or less faithfully translated to screen.  It's not anything close to perfect, but I'm satisfied.  And thank goodness, because I don't expect anybody else will take another stab at it for a long, long time.  

   

---

"The Sandman," Year Two (Without Spoilers)

Here's the Neil Gaiman caveat up front.  Neil Gaiman has been accused of terrible things and cancelled and in all likelihood deserves it.  I am one of those people who doesn't have much trouble separating out a piece of art from the artist, so I'll be writing and reviewing "Sandman," treating Gaiman like he's dead.  Unfortunately, I've had a lot of practice at this over the years.  I respect anyone who decides not to watch this show on moral grounds.  However, film and television are inherently collaborative mediums, and I don't see the logic in discarding the work of hundreds of artists because one turned out to be a horrible person.  And here we go.

The first season of "The Sandman" covered roughly twenty issues of the comic in eleven episodes.    The second had to cover the remaining fifty-five issues in eleven episodes.  Even after removing whole story arcs and nearly all the side-stories, that still means that each episode is juggling at least twice as much material.  That's why this season feels so rushed and certain storytelling choices don't seem to add up.  I also found that the writing hewed way too close to the comic, with attempts to translate some concepts from page to screen that just didn't work.  And there were things that already didn't work in the comics, like the overlong, twisty "Kindly Ones" arc, that didn't get fixed in the adaptation.   

This season also had a lot of production troubles, and it's very noticeable at some points.  I found multiple instances of something from the comic being recreated because it looked cool, but without enough of a budget to actually do it right, and without the context to help it hit the way it should emotionally and thematically.  Several locations appear to be reused, and not well.  The cinematography is much darker and murkier.  There are inexplicable slow-motion shots, and generally the pacing is either too fast or too slow.  The writing is messier, and episodes are plagued with constant exposition overload and repetitive dialogue.  And while most of the performances are pretty strong, one returning actress does so poorly that she almost single-handedly derails a major plotline.  Fortunately, most of her storyline is greatly reduced.  

And yet, I'm so happy that showrunner Allan Heinberg and his collaborators tried anyway.  With the second season of "The Sandman," they've made something big and heartfelt and unapologetically fantastical.  We get to meet the entire Endless family, including the previously unseen Destiny (Adrian Lester), Delirium (Esme Creed-Miles), and eventually the Prodigal (Barry Sloan).  Dream has to confront Lucifer again, but more importantly he also has to confront the mistakes of his past.  Storylines involve his wrongly imprisoned former lover Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), and his tragic son Orpheus (Ruairi O'Connor), and Dream facing up to his own complicated relationship with being responsible for the Dreaming.  This year we spend a lot of time with characters from Faerie, including the lovely Nuala (Ann Skelly), and her dissolute brother Cluracan (Douglas Booth), who are subjects of the capricious Queen Titania (Ruta Gedmintas).  We also meet members of the Norse Pantheon, including Odin (Clive Russell) and Loki (Freddie Fox).  There are many returning characters and some new guest stars who I will not spoil.      

Newcomers to "The Sandman" might be taken aback at how the tone of the story has shifted from action adventure to much more self-serious melodrama.  After the first three episodes, dealing with Lucifer and Nada, Dream doesn't get to act much like a typical comic book superhero.   There are plenty of fantasy elements still in play, and "The Sandman" is constantly showing off fancy VFX left and right. However, most of the season is spent with Dream trying to mend bad relationships and deal with the fallout of some bad decisions.  This involves a lot of brooding and glowering, and at least two instances of angsting in inclement weather.  The comic always had a thing for monologues and anticlimaxes, and the show follows suit.    

And I expect existing "Sandman" fans who have read the comics will not be happy with how much was streamlined, excised, reordered, and toned down for television.  The entire last arc has been rejiggered to heavily telegraph the ending, and new romantic relationships have been added for some of the characters.  People have rightly pointed out that Wanda (Indya Moore), a beloved trans character who was moved into a different role in the show, absolutely needed more time and more attention.  The adaptation didn't do her justice.  And yet, I still loved what little we had of her.  

So, I expect that the second season of "Sandman" is going to make a lot of people very unhappy for a variety of reasons.  However, it didn't make me unhappy.  I enjoyed every minute, even the boring, mordant bits with the bad lighting.  The good parts, like Tom Sturridge's performance and the fabulous production design, and getting more of Gilbert and Merv and Joanna Constantine turned out to be worth all the trouble.  And I'll get into more of the details in my spoiler post next time.    

  

---

A Matter of Life and "Chuck"

"The Life of Chuck" is one of those rare films that is trying very earnestly to say something profound about human existence.  It's a Mike Flanagan adaptation of a Stephen King novella of the same name, which has some supernatural elements but isn't particularly scary.  I read the novella in anticipation of the film, and it left me puzzled.  However, I think knowing how the story was going to play out helped with my processing of the film version, which is an extremely faithful adaptation.  I'll try to steer clear of too many spoilers, as a big part of the experience of watching the film is working out who Chuck is and how the three acts of the film relate to each other, so I'd recommend going in with as little information as possible.  I will say that I thought the film was pretty successful at what it was trying to do.  I understand why some viewers came away feeling misled or manipulated, but it worked for me. 

I think it might also be helpful to think of "The Life of Chuck" as an anthology film of three separate stories that happen to share a character in common.  The first is a story about a group of ordinary people including school teacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and nurse Felicia (Karen Gillan) facing an impending apocalypse.  The second story is about a busker (Taylor Gordon) and a pair of dancers (Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso), who share a moment of spontaneous joy together.  The last story is about a boy (Benjamin Pajak), who moves in with his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara) after the deaths of his parents.  The three stories happen in reverse order chronologically, with the apocalypse up first, labeled "Act Three."  All are narrated by Nick Offerman, and all are told in a sort of hyperreal, heightened style reminiscent of other Stephen King films like "The Green Mile."

It's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to analyze everything in the film for hidden symbolism, or to take things too literally and focus on the mechanisms for how the universe in "Chuck" works.  That sort of thing is fun, but completely beside the point.  This is first and foremost a film about feelings and yearnings, and the ineffable, unexplainable parts of being human.   There's not much traditional horror in the film, but a lot of it is concerned with fear and mortality and how to live with these parts of existence.  The second story is the shortest of the three, but also arguably the most important, because it gives us a beautiful example of human beings living in the moment and seizing the opportunity for joy where they can.    

Mike Flanagan breaks a lot of rules with "The Life of Chuck."  He's got a narrator going for a lot of the time, often reading directly from the Stephen King source material.  The film's tone changes completely from story to story, and so much of the film's effectiveness is dependent on that tone.  There are monologues everywhere, because it's Mike Flanagan, and every theme and idea and message is underlined multiple times in the cinematic equivalent of red ink.  Fortunately the cast is wonderful, with many of the players from Flanagan's regular troupe filling out the smaller roles.  I want to highlight the work of Mark Hamill in particular, playing the loving, complicated grandfather, who can still be intimidating when necessary.  

              

"The Life of Chuck" is a box office bomb, and it's a miracle that it exists at all.  It's a weird outlier of a film that feels like it should have been made twenty years ago, and plenty of viewers didn't like it, didn't get it, or found it too flawed and underbaked and sentimental and cheese-infused to fulfill its huge ambitions.  However, it also shows every sign of being one of those movies that's going to hit some people exactly the right way, that they'll watch at exactly the right time in their lives, and remember forever.  I don't know if "The Life of Chuck" is going to be an all-timer, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, and I know I need to watch it again soon.         

---

What Happened to "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"?

So, "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is set up like a finale to the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, and is supposed to be paying off the storyline set up by "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One" from 2023.  I disliked "Dead Reckoning" whenever there wasn't an action scene going on, finding the AI-instigated doomsday scenario ridiculous, and the Esai Morales villain dull.  "The Final Reckoning" manages to be a significantly worse experience.  In fact, it's so much worse that I have to wonder how this movie made it to theaters in this sorry state.  It is easily the worst "Mission: Impossible" movie by a considerable amount, even worse than John Woo's "Mission: Impossible 2," which may have been silly, but at least it was still entertaining.

Let's start from the top.  "The Final Reckoning" does have two big, impressive action sequences.  In one, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) infiltrates a sunken submarine and has to escape it.  In the finale, he and the villain fight over the world-saving MacGuffin in biplanes, performing a variety of aerial stunts in the process.  These are everything you want "Mission: Impossible" to be, and I understand why viewers would watch the movie for them.  However, getting to the first major set piece requires sitting through almost a solid hour of incredibly tedious exposition and montages, setting up the plot and characters, reminding us of everything that happened in previous movies, and fawning over Ethan Hunt as the only one who can save the world from the evil AI, the Entity.  There are some brief fisticuffs here, and a quick sprint away from an explosion there to break things up, but nothing that lasts more than a minute or two.  This is a 170 minute movie, and you easily could have chopped the first forty.  

Trying to make a play for nostalgia, there are also a lot of callbacks to the first "Mission: Impossible" film from 1996, and more attempts are made to involve the rest of Hunt's team in the actual world-saving.  Old favorites Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), are joined by newbies Grace (Hayley Attwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis).  We also get a cavalcade of celebrities in bit parts including Tramell Tillman, Hannah Waddingham, Katy O'Brien, and Angela Bassett as the US President.  These are diverting enough if you actually recognize the actors, or remember enough about the prior "Mission: Impossible" movies to catch the references (remember the Rabbit's Foot from Mission: Impossible III"?), but I found most of it pretty tedious.  The only callback I liked involves a minor character played by Rolf Saxon getting the spotlight for a bit, which was nice.

However, the whole tone of the film is eye-rollingly self-serious, the script is drowning in technobabble, and everyone is trying much too hard to get us to get emotionally invested in characters who have always been cardboard thin.  It was a relief when we finally got to the submarine infiltration, and the extended underwater sequence, because that happens mostly in silence and I didn't have to hear any more of the tin-ear dialogue for a while.  While the stunt sequences were a lot of fun, I actually much preferred the parts of the film that focused on the other characters, who got to banter and act like actual members of a team when Ethan Hunt wasn't around.  If Tom Cruise quits the series, can we just keep going with Simon Pegg?  Frankly, I haven't liked the "Mission: Impossible" movies very much for a long time now, and "Final Reckoning" just cements for me that it's about time for a change.          

However, I expect that this is going to be the end of the road for the franchise for a while, at least on the big screen.  The box office returns have been shaky, and Tom Cruise has been pushing his luck for a little too long.  You can expect my personal ranking of the "Mission: Impossible" films shortly.  Because if Charlie Cale has a ranking, I should too.    

 

---

Was I Too Hard on "Happy Gilmore"?

I wrote up a post long ago about my feelings towards Adam Sandler, who made a lot of hit movies I didn't like and a lot of smaller, weirder films that I did.  I had long resolved to stop watching his mainstream comedies and just focus on his more critically acclaimed projects like "Uncut Gems" and the upcoming "Jay Kelly."  However, upon hearing that "Happy Gilmore 2" was getting pretty decent critical notices, I decided to revisit the original "Happy Gilmore," and to my surprise I liked what I saw.

I don't have a clear recollection of when or in what circumstances I first watched "Happy Gilmore" and "Billy Madison," Sandler's first two major films.  I just remember that Sandler's screen persona was a lot cruder and more physically aggressive than the leads of most comedies at the time.  He seemed to fly into destructive rages a lot, and Roger Ebert famously wrote that he didn't have a "pleasing personality" when remarking on Sandler's performance in "Happy Madison."  When I was a kid, onscreen aggression of any kind came across to me as threatening and sinister, so I'm not surprised that I didn't find him funny.     

I still don't like Happy Gilmore much as a character, but I understand more of his appeal.  Specifically, Gilmore represents a now instantly recognizable type of underachieving blue collar young male living with a lot of frustration and not many opportunities.  Unlike some of the other, later Sandler leads, he's not especially mean-spirited or crass.  He just has a lot of impulse control issues, which he's eventually able to improve.  He works great as the hero of "Happy Gilmore," where an unpolished wannabe hockey player shows up snooty golf pros and disrupts the golfing establishment. Sandler is pretty sympathetic and easy to root for here, instead of puerile and overbearing the way he comes across his less successful comedies.

What really struck me with this watch was that the supporting cast does a lot of the heavy lifting. Christopher McDonald as Gilmore's rival Shooter McGavin, and Carl Weathers as Gilmore's intensely committed coach, provide big personalities for Gilmore to play off of.  I loved seeing Richard Kiel get to menace people again, and appreciated the pure absurdity of the Bob Barker fistfight.  The cameos from Kevin Nealon and Ben Stiller are brief, but just enough to be memorable.  This is also easily the best movie I've seen from director Dennis Dugan.  The comedy always comes first, but the sports competition tropes are executed well, so the golfing is actually fun to watch.  

However, I don't like the attempts at romance at all.  The moments of Gilmore's jackassery I can't forgive are the ones aimed at Virginia, played by Julie Bowen.  Adam Sandler also co-wrote the movie with Tim Herlihy, and It was very disappointing to realize that their idea of the right girl for Happy Madison is a pretty, bland woman whose most prominent characteristic is not showing any sign of being upset when men are being abhorrent to her.  There are a few scenes where it's like she suddenly stops being able to understand English when Gilmore says something particularly crass.

This is acknowledged and corrected in "Happy Gilmore 2," which picks up twenty-five years later.  I found it mildly enjoyable, though Sandler's persona has totally changed from anarchic outsider to aging dad, and Happy Gilmore follows suit.  In a total reversal, he's now trying to save "traditional golf" from being destroyed by an obnoxious Xtreme sports style "Maxi Golf" league backed by an evil energy drink CEO (Benny Safdie).  Pretty much every surviving cast member from the original film returns, and a lot of time is taken up with tributes to the departed ones.        

But more than anything, "Happy Gilmore 2" emphasized that I did have some affection for the original movie, even if my feelings remain mixed on Adam Sandler's performance in it.  And my relationship with Sandler as a performer remains very complicated.  If we get any more late sequels to the likes of "Billy Madison" or "The Waterboy," however, I might be convinced to give those titles a rewatch too, for old times' sake.

---