June 15, 2012

If You Care About Yourself, You Won’t See This Movie

Ugh.Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures

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That’s My Boy
Columbia Pictures
114 minutes

The new Adam Sandler flick That’s My Boy is one of the most oppressively unfunny films ever produced, reaching levels of jaw-dropping unwatchability that rival 2002’s The Sweetest Thing.

I could detail for you the dumb, gossamer storyline, but what would be the point? That’s My Boy stars Adam Sandler (remember when he was in Punch-Drunk Love?), playing a hybrid of Dickie Roberts and a bad Good Will Hunting parody. Andy Samberg co-stars, presumably trying to win a bet he drunkenly made with friends who thought he couldn’t make a movie worse than Hot Rod. James Caan and Susan Sarandon are also in the movie, for god knows what reasons. What follows is a long slog of vulgarity-to-nowhere. There is not one boob joke, fart joke, hard-on joke, masturbation joke, trailer-trash joke, pube joke, bunghole joke, cunnilingus joke, sex-with-your-mom joke, vomit joke, incest joke, or obesity joke in this that isn’t unpardonably stale.

To add shotgun-to-the-kneecap to injury, Vanilla Ice (Vanilla Ice) plays himself.

If you care about yourself, you will not see this movie ever. It is tailor-made to be consumed by the kind of grown men who will only eat chicken nuggets if they’re shaped like dinosaurs, and there are times when the film honestly feels like physical torture.

Here’s a redband TV spot for the damn thing:

That’s My Boy gets a wide release on Friday, June 15. The film is rated R for crude sexual content throughout, nudity, pervasive language and some drug use. Click here if you hate yourself and want to get local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones. To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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