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Boys Town

by DICK CHENEY

The Ridiculous 6
dir. Frank Coraci
114 minutes

There is a moment in The Ridiculous 6 when you feel like it is 1995. Rob Schneider portrays a Hispanic-American posing as a drug lord at a high stakes poker game also frequented by Wyatt Earp and Mark Twain. A woman appears at the doorway. Her name is Susannah, and cast in the role is Whitney Cummings. Susannah's cleavage overflows from her corset. She identifies the only African-American present, Terry Crews, and beckons him to the bedroom she normally shares with her husband Ezekiel (Jon Lovitz). There she regales him with the kind of sexual debauchery Adam Sandler only experienced in dreams or the mid-1990s.

There are two other women in The Ridiculous 6. One is the young Apache that is Adam Sandler's love interest, Smoking Fox (Julia Jones, 34). The other is a whore.

It seems like it is about time for the angry white man to come in vogue again. This is the role Sandler played so well, when most of comedy consisted of him screaming at women and children about how disappointing he found his life with them. This makes it all the more baffling that he cast himself as White Knife in The Ridiculous 6, who is a sweet-natured Caucasian-American raised by the Apache tribe.

Sandler used to make films about the sheer indignity of being white and having everything you ever wanted handed to you. Then his audience gradually realized this wasn't a satire or joke: this was actually Sandler's view of the world, and after becoming so wealthy from films like Happy Gilmore and Big Daddy, his major day-to-day activities consisted of sitting by a pool, snorting or smoking whatever drugs his friends brought by, and wondering aloud to himself, "I wonder what life would be like if pressing a button on the remote control changed the world!"

Netflix signed Sandler to a multifilm contract after no one was particularly interested in bringing The Ridiculous 6 out in cinemas. The movie is not all bad: at least it does not feature a scene where the protagonist takes some aboriginal plant and hallucinates insights into his present condition. It also explores a fairly novel subject for any genre, which is the discovery of a father by a son who was abandoned by that parent.

Sandler's character speaks in a measured, reasonable tone throughout. He is actually the straight man here, and the comedy comes from the half-brothers he unwittingly rounds up to find his father Frank (Nick Nolte). Taylor Lautner plays a virgin, Terry Crews is a piano player, Luke Wilson is an alcoholic, Schneider has a donkey, and Jorge Garcia is the fat and disgusting brother who is unable to speak English.

About 50 percent of the jokes are of the gross-out variety, including a scene where Steve Buscemi applies creme to a horse's ass and then Taylor Lautner's lips. The remaining 50 percent are not jokes in any real sense, more facial expressions and stunt casting.

How was $60 million spent on this piece of shit? Mostly the wide-ranging cast. Every single role, no matter how small, features some form of stunt casting, as if Sandler's only purpose in life was to provide work for his friends from Saturday Night Live.

I don't know why David Spade was in this movie, except that too many of Sandler's other friends from the period are no longer alive, turning The Ridiculous 6 into a kind of roll call to ensure we know who is still kicking. Norm Macdonald, Will Forte, Nick Swardson, Blake Shelton, Vanilla Ice, John Turturro, Chris Parnell and Chris Kattan also make appearances.

There are no women characters of any of any note here. For Sandler, women are strange, capricious creatures. He has been married to the same woman since 2003, and as such, she has become a part of him. Mr. Sandler met his wife on the set of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, and she converted to Judaism for him, because why wouldn't she? Jackie Sandler makes an appearance in The Ridiculous 6. She plays (you guessed it) a promiscuous Apache woman.

Upcoming Netflix projects include:

— a biopic of Gloria Steinem where she is played by Ryan Gosling

— a remake of Lost where every character is played by Kate Upton in a different costume

— a comedy series based around Meryl Streep living and whoring out of a dumpster

— a movie about a white guy who was nice to his slaves

— a Gilmore Girls remake where Alexis Bledel still has no taste in men

Netflix has a large new Los Angeles office that is fully supporting these artistic efforts to set women back to the Stone Age. The company seems insistent on the maxim that sexism sells. If the industry at large is increasingly afraid of relegating women to their roles as prostitutes, babymakers and prudes, Netflix is there to pick up the slack.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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