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 - Great Hanukah/Christmas Movie!5 out of 5. I Recommend this to Everyone. Adam did a great job on this. From the Voice Acting, To the Animation, to the Script, All were Top-Notch. A Classic. Rating:  - Eight Crazy NightsAdam Sandler is one of our favourite actors,and this is such a funny movie for all ages why would you not want it in your collection.Some may think its a bit much for children under 5,But my children 9+ loved to see Christmas cheers and a drunken fool wake up to the real world and how not everybodys life is bliss.It was a great movie to laugh, watch and learn all in one. Rating: - Jerry Lewis is Alive and WellI make no secret the fact that I think Adam Sandler has inherited the comic mantle of Jerry Lewis, and I think Adam would consider that a compliment. Were the ghost of Lewis to drop in for a holiday screening of this film, however, I think he'd say, "It's a good film, Adam, but it could have been great." How could it have been great? With a little restraint, instead of playing for the South Park/ Family Guy crowd, this could have been a family film. We desperately need a funny holiday special, not more schmaltzy ones, and this could have been it. Adam Sandler knows it too. He very much caught the spirit of Mr. Deeds. He shone in Big Daddy. He brilliantly calls his production company Happy Madison, saying heck if you didn't like Billy Madison (I did by the way), and refusing to be typecast as Happy Gilmore. It also took guts to "play" Davy, not just voice him, as with the usual animation voiceovers. Davy is conflicted and Adam plays him that way. There are hints and tributes to "It's a Wonderful Life," but there are also echoes of a Jerry Lewis film called "The Delinquent". This is a PG-13 film merely for the reason that Adam had the bad luck of working when films and TV lack the restraint and limits that Lewis and earlier comedians worked within and which make for great art. So thanks to that rating, kids won't get to see Davy struggle with tough breaks and big questions. Nor will they see the opening scene of a Chanukah menorah and nativity scene coexisting side by side. They won't even get to hear the third version of Sandler's witty "Chanukah Song". What they'll get instead is more innocuous clones of someone saving Christmas by rescuing Santa Clause from the Martians or whoever his captors are this year. That leaves us with only A Christmas Story. Jean Shepherd, who writes his books for adults, restrained himself to make this movie family- friendly and came up with a holiday classic. Paul Reubens breathed new life into Saturday Morning by making Pee Wee's Playhouse into a kids' show. And when Davy-- I mean Adam-- decides to use his talents for kids, he'll be another Jerry Lewis. Rating:  - very disappointingThe movie is vulgar and not meant for children. It is a typical Adam Sandler movie, with foul language and raunchy humor. Not enjoyable at all. Rating: - A great film if you're in the market for itI loved this film. But you may very well not like it at all. Answering a couple quick questions will help you know whether you should stay away from Eight Crazy Nights: Can anything in an artwork offend you? Be honest here; there's nothing wrong with you if you can be offended by content. If you're the kind of person who might say, "I normally don't mind (or I even like) crude humor, but that just went too far", then the answer is "yes". If you think that an artwork can go too far, if you have any personal sacred cows, then be very cautious of watching Eight Crazy Nights. Next, do you like to think of yourself as being more mature than you were as, say, a 13 year old? I don't just mean, "Are you more mature", but do you pride yourself on that, so that you don't find joy in playing 13-year-old again. If yes, that's another indicator for caution. And finally, for people who actually are teens and who answered "No" to the above questions, do you dislike your crude humor to have any positive messages or sentimentality? If yes, use caution. It's not that Eight Crazy Nights is the most outrageous, risk-taking, potentially offensive comedy ever, or that it's constantly juvenile or ever over-the-top sappy. For offense and maturity, there's nothing here that's not found in the average episode of South Park. But maybe because it's an animated holiday film where many people aren't expecting something like South Park, a lot of viewers--especially the offendable and proudly sophisticated--have turned up their noses. Eight Crazy Nights is actually quite complex and sophisticated on many artistic levels. The animation is exceptionally well done--at least as good and complex as most Disney features. For example, there are many subtle layering and perspective effects, similar to Disney's multiplane approach, and often mimicking "live action" cameras, so that different focal depths will be blurred. The environments are lush and subtly modeled. Characters are fluid and well drawn. There are many difficult sequences, such as action and sports scenes, and they're all very impressive. Script-wise, Adam Sandler achieved a film that both mocks/spoofs traditional holiday films and manages to be one at the same time. It's not that different in theory from, say, Elf or Bad Santa, except that Sandler isn't at all afraid to continually go for the throat in his brand of humor (which isn't to suggest that Elf or Bad Santa are bad films--I love both of them, and especially Bad Santa goes for the throat sometimes, too). The plot has some similarities to A Christmas Carol in that the main character, Davey (voiced by Sandler), has an over-the-top, bitter, bah-humbug attitude about the holidays brought on by past events. Davey is even visited by something akin to supernatural entities at one point. Sandler's music and music performances are impressive. The focus is on silly/funny lyrics, of course, but at times, his singing and songwriting skills suggest that he could have easily had a career in the music business instead. While watching Eight Crazy Nights I kept thinking how much I'd like to see a Sandler penned Broadway show--that would be just the thing to help knock Broadway out of its frustrating musical and content conservatism. A couple characters, especially Whitey (also voiced by Sandler), take some getting used to. Sandler is doing one of his odd, affected voices for the character, and Whitey is designed to be disturbing and disagreeable. But of course the joke is that he's the symbol of positive holiday spirit, so Sandler is again pulling the rug out from beneath our expectations--something he does regularly, in many different ways, throughout the course of Eight Crazy Nights--and that's a good thing.
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