Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights Movie

Come celebrate the joy and togetherness of the Hanukkah season with Adam Sandler -- yeah, that Adam Sandler -- in this raucous animated comedy written and produced in collaboration with the noted funnyman. Davey Stone (voice of Adam Sandler) is a twentysomething man with a short temper and a reputation for causing trouble who lives in the small New England town of Dukesberry. Davey has a particularly bad attitude about the holiday season, and on the first night of Hanukkah, he goes on a tear that lands him in front of a judge (voice of Norm Crosby). The judge, who has dealt with Davey before, is prepared to send him to prison, but Whitey (also voiced by Sandler), an eccentric but kindly old man, persuades the judge to give him a chance to turn Davey into a more responsible citizen. Davey doesn't think much of Whitey's charitable nature, but when his trailer home burns down, he's forced to move in with Whitey and his perpetually nervous sister, Eleanore (also voiced by Sandler...spotting a trend here?). Between Whitey and Eleanore's nonstop kvetching and the reappearance of his old girlfriend Jennifer (voice of Jackie Titone), Davey is being driven to distraction by the Hanukkah season, but in time Whitey learns the truth about why Davey has such a problem with the Festival of Lights. Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights also includes eight new songs co-written by Sandler; he duets with bluegrass star Alison Krauss on "Long Ago."

If you're looking for the arrival of the first classic Hanukkah movie -- well, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights isn't it. But that's not because it isn't sort of funny and sort of sweet, in between the more frequent times when it's sort of gross. It's because the movie is only about Hanukkah in a limited sense, enough to piggyback it onto Sandler's perennial hit "The Hanukkah Song," whose lyrics get a third incarnation here for the closing credits. Eight Crazy Nights instead follows a looser "redemption during the holidays" theme, but don't let that or the fact that it's animated suggest that it's for kids -- while its PG-13 rating is shy of the R given to the South Park movie, it's in that same category. The pre-repentant Davey Stone boozes, pretends to dry-hump a car, and knocks an outhouse down the hill, leaving its occupant covered in feces. If this all sounds pretty puerile, it is, but there's still a good heart and a couple laughs at the center of Eight Crazy Nights. Sandler's old man impression isn't that much different from how he'd sound if castrated, but he does a wickedly nasally take on the old man's sister, matching the character design humorously -- and disguising his own voice enough to create doubt that it's him. Another South Park similarity is that Sandler gets good mileage from the song he co-wrote with Allen Covert, including Whitey's primer on rules ("Technical Foul"), a musical intervention staged by mall mascots, and "Bum Biddy," an opera spoof performed at an awards banquet. The critics who trashed Eight Crazy Nights undoubtedly made good points, but it doesn't take a Sandler fan to find some fun in it.