Couch

well i was excited when i heard that p.t.anderson had made a short with adam sandler. i saw it on tv. i never thought pta would make anything like that put i wasn't disappointed. it was quite silly and pointless but funny. it made me laugh.

The two minute "Couch" (2003) starring Adam Sandler is perfect in it's simplicity in the same way that the Lumiere Brother's twenty second "A Sprinkler Sprinkled" (1895) is. Basically, a man (Sandler) searches a furniture store for the perfect couch. The search ends with a presumably perfect couch, a Lay-Z-Boy, which the man seems very comfortable in...until the films punchline.

You can see this pleasant little short at adamsandler.com, so I won't spoil the punchline. But it's short and sweet and free, so why wouldn't you check it out? Adam Sandler plays the part of "the man" very much like Chaplin's Tramp--with just a bit of Waterboy thrown in. And in a way, that's what this little film is: a throwback to those perfect little silent comedy shorts of the first twenty years of cinema.

I saw this when it was "Premiered" on Comedy Central's "Night of Too Many Stars". Sure, I laughed, but it wasn't anything special. The screaming and moaning that Sandler did kind of reminded me of Fatty McGee on Adam's album "They're All Gonna Laugh At You". So if you liked that track, you'll like this very, very short film (less than 3 minutes long).

So let me get this straight: this short is terrible, but Sandler fighting Bob Barker is classic comedy? There are two ways of looking at this flick. The first is the obvious one; to see the short as something pointless and random that PTA and Sandler put together because they could and because they had a good time doing it. But I prefer the other interpretation; this is PTA's own way of giving the people what they want. After suffering through two hours of great acting and subtleties in Punch Drunk Love, Sandler's fans finally get what they ask for from him: mugging, stupidity and screaming. The short isn't funny, that's the point. The joke is on the Happy Gilmore fans. Now that's hilarious.

This film is only 2 minutes long. Unfortunately, it's not even worth those two minutes. Adam Sandler sees a couch in a store. He walks in and sits on it. It falls over. He gets up and sits on a reclining. It folds up on him. Amazingly, that's the whole movie. Nothing really funny about it at all.