hix nix chix flix

My girlfriend and I like to go to see a movie on Saturday afternoon and this week the movie was Spanglish. Overall the movie was okay, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. I was sort of expecting a comedy and what it actually was fit better into the category of “chick flick.”

What was right with the movie was that the narrative was in the form of an essay attached to a college entrance application written by the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, leaving the daughter to become the narrator and tell us the story. I thought it was a clever way of taking us into the story, but our first clue a chick flick was coming, because one rarely bares ones soul in a college application or a resume. The immigrant, who became a housekeeper for a wealthy family, was played by Paz Vega and added some eye candy to the movie, along with Tea Leoni who played the wife in the wealthy family. I saw Leoni on Conan late last week and she said she had worked out to get in shape for the movie. I’ll say she did. She had the kind of abs that Jimbo always resolves to have as the New Year approaches, but she succeeded where poor Jimbo always fails.

Anyway the story morphs into a love triangle, or some kind of a multi-sided love polygon with Leoni cheating on her husband, Adam Sandler, and Sandler falling for Vega and the parents doting over each others kids. This was all entertaining, except I was waiting for Bob Barker to show up and Sandler and he to duke it out or for Sandler to sing a silly song in the high falsetto we’ve grown to know and love. I was looking for laughs and what I got was unrequited loved and deception. I was expecting to see an audience rolling on the floor and instead I saw Sandler show us his character’s fear of success in his professional life.

In Spanglish Sandler is a caring and compassionate guy, facing his fears with some amount of angst and detached resolve, unlike the way Bogart faced his fear of the leaches in The African Queen. Ah, Bogart, was there ever anyone better?

The bottom line is that this film is not a waste of time, of course I saw it with my girlfriend and any time spent with her is quality time, but it is not the comedy I was expecting. The humor is there, but it is cerebral and a smile rather than a belly laugh. And maybe I’m holding Sandler to too high a standard as a dramatic actor, comparing him to Humphrey Bogart.

But, as we say in Jimbo’s world, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”