Fri 17 Nov 2006
A mate from Canadia came by this little pearler in the states a few months ago. Thankfully, it’s everything an Adam Sandler movie should be. Why do I mention Sandler you ask? Because a cursory look at the credits and you’ll see that the movie is by Happy Gilmour productions. And it’s all the better for it.
Grandma’s Boy is like some sort of modern day American Graffiti, Happy Days, or Detroit Rock City kind of thing. Basically replace the greaser haircuts, motorbikes or your heavy metal for a controller, a bong and an X Box and you’re starting to get the picture. Grandma’s house is all about the pot and the games!
Your plot is basically set around Alex who’s a Quality Assurance tester in the video games industry. His job is to ‘clear’ all levels in video games and identify all the bugs. Life is good until his house mate defaults on the rent and he’s evicted. With only a bunch of neer do well, socially inept buddies, he soon has nowhere else to stay but with his grandmother. She lives in a kind of grandma share house with a mentally disturbed woman with a tackle box of pills and a silver haired nymphomanic.
From hereon in, Alex tries to get the right mix of nanny pampering and stoner gaming. More often than not, he’s too knackered from his ‘chores’, that he’s asleep at his desk at work. As you can tell things get pretty pear shaped and the situational comedy comes on thick and thin.
It has to be said that their adaptation of a games development company seems pretty realistic. Most of the general testers and tragically-geeky-but well adjusted guys. But definitely more so in the two characters that run the joint. The general manager is a complete vegan, hippy freak. But he can’t hold a soy candle to the lead developer, who thinks he’s both a robot living The Matrix dream. It’s with these two nutters that the movie becomes totally believable! If you’ve known people in this industry, you’ll know what i’m talking about. It takes a special kind of insanity to make that kind of genius.
Of course being a Sandler flick, there are the obvious cliches. Linda Cardellini who plays the project manager for the latest game is as achingly perfect and she is beautiful. It just makes you sick what a great chick her character is. Oh and Alex (Allan Covert) bears an uncanny resemblance to Mel Gibson in the early 80s. And of course, what’s his face, Rob Schneider makes a token appearance as the evicting landlord.
No doubt, this will become a modern day stoner epic, in the vein of The Big Lebowsky and Half Baked with a hearty dose of wholesome Adam Sandlerism. I’m glad to say deservedly so. You will laugh, you will cry, you will probably pass the bong . . . I say rock on. 4/5.