Hubie? I Hardly Knowbie | Hubie Halloween (2020) Movie Review
shame 🔔 shame 🔔 shame 🔔 shame 🔔
The cats and I LiveSky film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make our full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of our shenanigans…
I like Adam Sandler. He's good friends with people I deeply respect, not just as writers or performers, but as human beings. Conan O’Brien springs to mind, just as he springs nearly everywhere he goes. The guy is like the world’s most tightly-wound slinky.
O’Brien doesn’t just, like, know Sandler from the SNL days. They’re close friends to this day.
Sandler's been on Conan’s podcast twice (Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend; for my money, one of the best podcasts going), and Conan spoke when Sandler was given the Mark Twain award by The Kennedy Center. Of course, Trump now apparently takes an active hand in the events-planning for the Kennedy Center (and not much else? underlings like Elon Musk seem to be running roughshod over him, and calling the actual shots), but I have a sneaking suspicion that honoring Sandler and his work is one of the things The Kennedy Center did prior to his stewardship that Trump wouldn’t have objected to.
Conan was kidding (natch), but opens his remarks with, “No award has screwed up this badly since a Macarthur Genius Grant was given to Vin Diesel.”
Sandler laughs harder than anyone, and it seems genuine. I like Sandler! He might be in my top 10 of comedians I’d actually want to have a beer with. Mulaney seems like he’d be a lot. Louis C.K. probably wouldn’t like me, and might jerk off in one of my plants, whether I want him to or not (I don’t).
Adam Sandler, on the other hand, gives some of the most positive, wholesome, avuncular vibes in Hollywood, and is beloved of anyone who knows him personally.
If you don’t love Adam Sandler, the man, it would seem, then there’s something profoundly wrong with you.
Conversely, I’d say the same is true if you do love Adam Sandler’s work.
First, let’s parse Conan's gentle ribbing. Was this a mistake? What is this award, even? Who else has won it?
Bit of a mixed bag, I’d say.
Richard Pryor won the inaugural award, so it’s hard not to think that honoring his contributions to American comedy were part of the impetus for having an award at all. Can’t fault that. He’s an icon, and even though I best remember him for Superman III and setting himself on fire doing drugs, he’s a pretty unimpeachable inaugural award. But in 1998? I’d have probably given out a bunch of Lifetime Achievement Awards to guys whose time had long passed and picked someone relevant in 1998 to give the award to, like, say, Adam Sandler, whose The Waterboy was a huge hit that year.
Speaking of problematic performances, like the one in The Waterboy, Hubie Halloween is entirely predicated on one.
Hubie Dubois (there, see? it’s already not funny, and I’ve only said it, like, three times) is a caricature, a lazy mishmash of mean-spirited- teasing impulses that, at one inglorious point in our social history, would have all fallen under the umbrella of ‘retard.’
I say that because that’s literally the only way to properly describe the character as written and the performance, because without the idea of someone being a ‘retard,’ these characters don’t hold together.
Hubie and Bobby Boucher both employ (allegedly) comical vocal performances that might hit your ear a little odd, because it’s a voice that used to be very, very common and you don’t hear much anymore.
If you were to look at diagnosable, classifiable psychological and medical conditions in the general population, you’d find that as we get better at identifying, classifying and treating disorders and neurodivergence, we naturally find more and more of them than we initially thought we might.
So if Sandler were playing an autistic character, there is a wealth of medical and sociological research and documentation he could ground his performances in, but he’s not playing autistic characters because what he’s doing is (still) making fun of retards.
It's a retard-voice. That’s what he’s doing. It’s a voice a certain type of 11–15 year old boy would slip into like a second language when I was growing up (way back in whenever it was, the eighties or whatever). It’s an othering, bullying, hateful voice they employed, and it made a lot of people laugh in the 80s and 90s.
The Waterboy was the biggest box-office comedy of 1998. People ate that shit up. My family, who for all their faults can usually be counted on to have some taste, loved The Waterboy, and it was in the rotation constantly in my household growing up.
There are other examples of punching down. It’s all at the level of this one scene. Somebody, Herlihy or someone, read a tweet about asexual people, and thought, “that’s fucking stupid!” and put this in the movie.
And that’s basically this whole film.
I really don’t begrudge any creative/talent their success, least of all Sandler. And if you measure success in dollars, hoo boy, has Adam Sandler been successful.
Let’s do a little detective work here: Sandler signed a deal with Netflix in 2014 to do four movies for $250 million, or roughly $62.75 million a picture. Netflix re-upped the deal in 2017 and again in 2020, when Hubie Halloween was released. Sandler and Happy Madison have produced (to date) 10 films for Netflix for an undisclosed amount. One is inclined to think that the first deal represents a floor, so let’s say these cost Netflix $65 or $70 million apiece on average.
10 movies at that rate means Netflix has compensated Sandler and Happy Madison to the tune of $700–750 million and counting. Sandler certainly sees a lot of it, because he was 2023’s best-compensated entertainer, beating out Margot Robbie despite not having a movie released to theaters. No box office.
This is the world of hyper-late-stage capitalism we live in.
To an extent, I do begrudge anyone and everyone who accumulates such an enormous amount of wealth while so many people suffer in ways that money could solve, but I’m not at war with everyone wealthier and more successful than I am.
I don’t love Sandler’s art, but at least he is an artist. A creative. He’s not one of the money men. He’s an executive producer dozens of times over, but he’s maybe less like his producer peers than any other credited producer in Hollywood.
So if I’m rooting for anyone to make that kind of money (and I’m not), it’s a guy like Sandler.
I just wish he’d do better with this incredible platform than lazily reverting to his making-fun-of-retards persona from twenty-five years ago. He should! He’s outgrown it, and it’s clearly a case of giving the people what they want.
All due respect to The O’Jays, but you don’t got to.
Sandler has other gears. He’s shown them recently, even. 2023’s Leo was an incredible, touching, sweet, funny, thoughtful crowd-pleaser that kind of blew me away. Bill Burr and Adam Sandler star in this animated comedy, and I love it? Robert Smigel was intimately involved, and I kind of suspect it's mostly his project, but it’s under the Happy Madison label and it’s one of those 10 movies.
But worthwhile, substantive, funny offerings like Leo aren’t easy to make. It’s far easier and likelier to attempt to make one and miss the mark.
You can’t miss the mark in a movie like Hubie Halloween. Just channel your inner Rob Schneider and make fun of people for being different. You literally couldn’t fail to make this kind of schlock if you tried.
Boo. BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I know they’re just paying Adam Sandler for his name and face, and they literally don’t care what fills the runtime, but that doesn’t inevitably translate to an inferior artistic endeavor.
But with apologies to Lauren Lapkus, one of my favorite living entertainers, precisely one of those 10 films was worth a shit or had anything worthwhile to say.
Pretty bad hit rate, though I would say Leo is so good and worthwhile that maybe it’s worth 9 more retardbaiting, hateful, dumb movies.
Your mileage may vary. Though if you bother to sit through Hubie Halloween (don’t), I doubt you’ll be in the mood to give any credit to Sandler, et al.
It’s discouraging to me. Given the fractured, flawed system of trading art for commerce we’re laboring under, I don’t see how this could go any differently, but the fact that there’s a Leo buried in there makes me think that Sandler and Happy Madison could do better (or at least do less petty, mean-spirited evil), and they should.
This shit is pitiful, and it can’t be making us any better off to produce and consume it.
