Acquired Tastes: Anthony Lane

In my posted comments on Jason de Villa's elegantly informative entry on magazines worth checking out, I wrote:

Thanks for the heads up on Esquire. I checked out some back issues and in terms of content and fluid layout design, it’s top notch. I still prefer my The New Yorker, but I suppose it’s because I’m horribly sentimental, and a little Anthony Lane is better than no Anthony Lane at all.

To which Jason replied:

John-D: If you weren’t my friend I would say “What a literary snob!” Haha!

Well, allow this literary snob to point you in the direction of a more insightful, bitingly intelligent, and wonderfully witty snob, Mr. Anthony Lane. In his latest review, Mr. Lane takes on Adam Sandler in "Reign Over Me" and Sandra Bullock in "Premonition", much to the delight of this, admittedly, snobbish Lane fan:

Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is thus with a degree of amazement that I find myself nominating “Reign Over Me,” written and directed by Mike Binder, as a movie that might be worth your time.

Later, he makes some rather telling points regarding Sandler's startling effectivity in some decidely un-Happy Gilmore cinematic fare:

I cannot remember laughing at a single scene of his comedies, but here, for once, his chosen persona—the slurring and disconnected goofball—makes sense, although I still think of him as an oddly hollow presence on which to build a movie. His grief is less convincing than his vacancy, and one effect of “Reign Over Me” is to make you ask, Who will improve on Sandler?

I rather like Sandler's occasional flirtation with what could be considered good movies, like Spanglish and the decidedly un-Happy Gilmore art-house movie, Punch-Drunk Love. He might be an actor of very little range, but perhaps it is that sort of "hollow presence" and "vacancy" that allows talented storytellers to use him to tell good stories, where his celebrity is used to attract people to stories largely bereft of the distraction of an overwhelming star presence. Didn't this same quality make Keanu Reeves indispensable in The Matrix?

Illustration of Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle is by Edel Rodriguez, from The New Yorker.