Volume 67, Issue 7

The Grinch Who Stole Chanuka
By Evan Alan Schottenstein

Eight Crazy Nights
Animated
Featuring the voices of Adam Sandler (Whitey Duvall / Davey Stone / Eleanor Duvall / Deer), Jackie Titone (Jennifer Brodsky), Austin Stout (Benjamin “Ben” Brodsky), Kevin Nealon (Mayor), Rob Schneider (Chinese Waiter/Narrator)
Directed by Seth Kearsley

Yeshiva students should enjoy Adam Sandler’s hilarious new Chanuka movie, “Eight Crazy Nights”; the thirty-three-year-old comedian’s first animated film includes all the crude humor – complete with burping, swearing, and tons of poop jokes – that we students know and love.  And it’s a film for us, with a Chanuka setting!

“Eight Crazy Nights” was designed by Sandler to fill us with the holiday spirit of Chanuka and make us laugh.  Like other holiday movies, the film pertains to the redemption of a town grinch – but not a Christmas one.

The films protagonist, Davey Stone (voiced by Sandler), is a thirty-something loser that behaves like a drunken, perverted college student, a condition facilitated by a childhood spent in an orphanage.  Downright depressed from life without a family, he decides to make the Chanuka holiday miserable for everyone else enjoying it with their kin.

In the first ten minutes of the film, viewers have the privilege of watching Stone, in a state of drunkenness, belching in his neighbors’ faces and engaging in other, similar acts of mischief that can’t be printed in this newspaper, all of which culminate in his destruction of the town’s Santa Claus and menorah sculptures.  In these acts of drunken vandalism, Stone sings, transforming this unusual cartoon into a musical, replete with a spoof of “Fiddler on the Roof,” an updated version of his famous “Chanukah song,” and some slower, sweeter, original songs written by Sandler.

Wait a second – sweet songs in a movie featuring toilets as a dominant theme?  That’s right.  Apparently, the holiday spirit spurs people like Stone to change their misbegotten ways.  With the help of some cheerful holiday tunes and an old ref named Whitey Duvall, Stone moves in the direction of the holiday spirit and gets back together with his girlfriend, Jennifer.  And they all live happily ever after.

But these Disney-esque aspects of “Eight Crazy Nights” still do not make it a kid’s movie.  Remember, this film is rated PG-13, aiming to please those Jewish young adults who have always wanted a Chanuka cartoon featuring loads of scatological humor but never got one.  Sandler knows this; he did this one for us.¨

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