Twenty Twenty-Four was a terrible year to be alone. Since the 2020s, life has only continued to be filled with a sense of malaise. Every new experience was fraught with terror and a feeling of isolation that only the unknown could bring. Beginning college, starting HRT, having to come out to my family, and biting my nails waiting for which flavor of despot would run our country next felt like stumbling around in the dark with my phone flashlight dead. But nobody could be more alone than David Stone.
Eight Crazy Nights is by and large one of the worst things I’ve ever had to watch. I’d like to extend an apology to every Jewish person – I’m so so sorry for all the anti-semitic conspiracies that you’ve been conditioned to brush off growing up. There’s no world in which they have an ounce of truth. If Jews actually ran Hollywood, you might actually have a Hanukkah movie worth watching. I blame Adam Sandler, that white demon. His performance in this movie has a bizarre hollowness to it. His character delivers every line of dialogue with so much glib apathy that the viewer is almost made uncomfortable. It feels like he would rather be anywhere except the recording booth, and at times it felt like you walked into something you shouldn’t have – daddy fighting with mommy, or Adam Sandler fighting with himself. Aside from his irredeemable criminal basketball star (?) analogue, Sandler also voices an elderly hobbit named “Whitey.” Looking at him makes me squeamish, and watching him interact with the world around him makes me cringe. The movie is animated so gorgeously, largely by the same people who animated The Iron Giant – yet Whitey and his incestuous sister Eleanor (also voiced by Adam Sandler, that b*tch) are the only two characters who truly are detestable to view. They move through the world like overanimated toddlers, with all the grace of a child taking their first steps, and they’re half the size of any other character. In turn, they both act like their minds didn’t age past eight. I think the implied butt of the joke is that they’re somehow mentally disabled, which is why the whole town disdains them (which is absolutely terrible). Also Adam Sandler (David Stone, they look the same, so f*ck off) literally TORTURES Whitey throughout the movie. And that’s what most of the humor in the movie is. Whitey does something nice because he’s trying to keep Adam Sandler from going to jail by forcing him to be a basketball coach (?), and Adam Sandler responds by HURTING HIM. David Stone is a genuine sociopath. When I say “hurt” or “torture” I truly mean that. There is a scene where David locks Whitey in a used portapotty and pushes it down a hill. Whitey comes out COVERED in festering orange sh*t, and David proceeds to HOSE HIM DOWN with freezing water, turning him into a sh*tcicle. And David just did that because he was a little upset. He was calm and deliberate. But I digress.
I don’t know a lot about Jewish culture and practices, to be honest. I was raised Protestant and never really had a close Jewish friend until college. I know that Hanukkah is a holiday celebrated vaguely around the winter time, but I’m not familiar with its traditions and celebrations. Because of this, I felt pretty confused watching the movie – confused because the movie had SO LITTLE to do with the holiday that I don’t know why it’s considered a holiday movie. I will die on the hill that Die Hard is a Christmas movie because 1) it’s funny, 2) it makes numerous references to the holiday (now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho), and 3) its central theme is Christmassy in nature (being with family, killing Europeans, etc.). I guess Eight Crazy Nights had an ice sculpture of a menorah that Adam Sandler broke while he was fleeing from the police, and they mention Hanukkah once or twice throughout the movie, but it is NOT integral to the plot like Christmas is in die hard. Christmas causes the plot in Die Hard, but Eight Crazy Nights is just a movie because of how truly evil David Stone is. He could be doing this sh*t any day of the year, and the only thing that would change is the nature in which he torments an old man. I honest to god can’t remember why the holiday is relevant -- I think as a child David’s parents left him on Hanukkah maybe? But the only thing which that affects is his ability to ball. In fact, most of this movie is about basketball. Maybe it’s a Jewish deep cut that I'm too Lutherpilled to understand.
The night that I saw the movie was strange – three transient souls gathered together to watch something marvelously terrible. We pirated the movie, and I think we got taco bell and went to my Jewish friend’s apartment to kill time and to keep my Arab friend’s mind off her recent breakup. It was cold outside, and finals were around the corner. I had finally gotten a girlfriend, my Arab friend broken up with hers [Editor’s Note: Alhamdulillah], and my Jewish friend was uncomfortably single. Countless emotions were contained within that room – hope and hopelessness, a yearning, the overarching stress of our first set of finals, the excitement of a break compounded with the dread of being alone and far from friends for the holidays, and fresh anxieties about finally being someone’s girlfriend. And also Adam Sandler. There was something beautiful about that night. For a meager 1 hour and 16 minutes (thank god), we were united in hatred. We could put aside our thoughts and turn our minds purely to how much we disliked a sh*tty Hanukkah movie.
So dearest gentile reader, this is my advice to you in the year of our lord 2025. No matter what was or wasn’t on your 2024 bingo card, don’t turn blindly into the darkness of the new year. Pick a nemesis. Find someone to despise. Encounter a concept you hate. Let your vitriol light your way into a happy 2025. Because remember, if the smug sociopath David Stone can pull a bad b*tch by the end of the movie by constantly hurting everyone around him, then you can at least have a decent year by acting insane towards one specific thing.
Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Feliz Navidad from the team here at Leftist Infighting: The premier source of mediocre communist satire bullsh*t. We’re returning to our writing bunkers for now, but we’ll see you in the next article.
Comments
Post a Comment