Translated material
Ferret Chronicles
"Odnoklassniki" on Moscow screens
As children, they played basketball in a neighborhood team and idolized their coach, who, after the time allotted to him by the supreme referee, went to another world. And the already grown-up “children from our yard” gather for cremation. Lenny Spader (Adam Sandler), a Hollywood agent who works with either Brad Pitt or Hulk Hogan and is the father of three children who sold their underage souls to computer games with gratuitous violence... Kurt (Chris Rock), voluntarily and without alternative who has taken on the role of a householder in the family, who does not take off his chef's mitt, and most of all resembles the whiny alter ego of Arkady Raikin in the famous miniature, where the domestic tyrant and his wife swapped places... Eric (Kevin James), a pot-bellied hardware merchant. .. Marcus (David Spade), a drinker and a rake, without charm, but with a mustache... Finally, Rob Hillard (Rob Schneider), an esotericist, a vegan and a gerontophile. Everyone, with the exception of Marcus, is married (wives are a separate discussion) and is burdened with children and household members (and it is better to remain silent about them altogether). And so they decide to spend the next weekend in a house by the lake, in the places of everyone’s childhood, where on the old basketball court at the school they can have a rematch with their old opponents, who have forever remained “local”.At the moment when Judd Apatow took a break after “Pranksters,” the film by Denis Dugan (last season, who shot armor-piercingly with the exemplary shameful and incredibly funny film “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” where the same Adam Sandler played the main role) seemed like the perfect entertainment for viewers permanently experiencing a midlife crisis, who had just satisfied their reflexive needs on “Hot Tub Time Machine” and were ready to endure another weekend in the on-screen company of their own kind. But the weekend turned out to be hopelessly ruined. It's hard to imagine a film that features if not the best, then certainly highly professional comedians, fed mainly by the excellent TV show Satarday Night Live, but which at the same time turns out to be so outrageously, unprecedentedly, maliciously unfunny. Not a single, let alone funny, standard gag. And instead of the expected reprises, albeit secondary, with a beard, even overly obscene, there is a predatory and unkempt triumph of human insignificance, hovering over the screen like the smell of unwashed socks. “Odnoklassniki” are not at all charming losers in whom you can laughingly recognize yourself or your friend, but some kind of hopeless rodents, reveling in their hopelessness, giving up their hands and completely forgetting about self-respect. I don’t want to imagine them not only as childhood friends, but even as neighbors in a boarding house or dispensary, or people standing in line behind you for procedures or attractions. Together they form a merciless network that envelops everything around, as if it were all made up of “gaps in humanity.” You get entangled in it, you strain your vital organs, you choke, trying to catch the air with your mouth, already hopelessly spoiled by someone’s grandmother sitting in a rocking chair on the veranda (old women with an upset stomach are an indispensable attribute of this kind of comedy), but all in vain. An everyday wolfhound rushes onto your shoulders, barking shrilly and spreading the scent of flea shampoo around you.
And only when you completely despair of finding at least someone among the characters with whom you could identify yourself (in Apatov’s films, this took a maximum of five minutes), you realize whose reactions are at least approximately adequate to your own. And it turns out that the only sane person here is Roxanne, Spader's wife, played by Salma Hayek. She doesn’t shine with any special comic talent here, but anyone will be able to get into her position. Since watching “Odnoklassniki” is absolutely adequate to the situation when a person was going to an exclusive fashion show in Milan, but instead was forced to spend the weekend in the company of unattractive subjects who strongly prefer tactile manifestations of strong male friendship to basic hygienic standards.