American Idiot: Why 'Billy Madison' Is Still Adam Sandler's Best Movie. Our latest 'Be Kind Rewind' looks at the star's master class in manchild comedy. Search for cheap gas prices in Seattle, Washington; find local Seattle gas prices & gas stations with the best fuel prices. Looking for local movie times and movie theaters in Everett, WA? Find the movies showing at theaters near you and buy movie tickets at Fandango. Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 in Portland, Oregon – November 27, 1991 in New York City) was a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian. American Idiot: Why 'Billy Madison' Is Still Adam Sandler's Best Movie. Every few months, Rolling. Stone. com shines a spotlight on a forgotten, neglected, overshadowed, under- appreciated and/or critically maligned film that we love in a series we're calling . For the first few minutes, you could be watching any raunchcom that carbon- dates back to the late Eighties or early- to- mid- Nineties (in this case, 1. The fact that he's also singing to a bottle of sunscreen (. The guy soon goes tearing across a mansion's lawn on a golf cart past his wasted buddies and some stuffed- shirt servants, eager to thumb through the latest copy of Drunks Chicks by his mailbox. And then it appears: a 1. As our inebriated hero begins to chase after the running flightless bird, it starts to dawn on you that this is not your typical gross- out, use- party- as- a- verb movie. You are watching something that's truly, madly, deeply WTF warped. When Billy Madison hit theaters 2. Adam Sandler was already a breakout star on Saturday Night Live; movies were the next logical step, so the comedian and his ex- roommate — SNL writer Tim Herlihy — came up with the story designed to jumpstart a big- screen career move. The gist: A spoiled, silver- spoon party animal is set to inherit the family's lucrative hotel business, despite having zero interest in anything not involving daiquiris, Nintendo or nudie mags. In order to prove he's a better candidate than the company's sneering yuppie vice president, however, Billy has to repeat kindergarten through high school again. For our dimwitted hero, this is damned near a Herculean feat. Anyone now familiar with the cinema du Sandler might hazard a guess about what lays in store: aggressively coming on to/charming the romantic interest (Bridgette Wilson, pre- Sampras), knocking kids out with dodge balls, line- readings that go from toddler- ish falsetto sing- song to SUDDEN! But for every hint of the lowest- common- denominator assault that Sandler would later unleash on moviegoers, there are glimpses of a once- in- a- generation comic weirdness in its pure, uncut form. It's not just the least curdled and thus, by default, the best . It's also a preview of . His early stand- up act featured a tangent involving an Elvis Presley who was eight inches tall, living in Adam's refrigerator and prone to stealing heads of lettuce. He might be an atypical lead character for a big- screen comedy circa 1. The director — Basquiat cohort, Beastie wife and boho royalty Tamra Davis — recently told the Washington Post that she didn't . So that's how I felt about Billy Madison. I said, 'OK, Herlihy, he doesn't like this one. Let's write another one.'? And this is your bid for stardom? But it's those way- left- of- center elements that signify the film's actual sense of humor — the surreal jokes were not the spice here but the real meat. The story is merely an excuse to get Sandler dancing down a staircase to Culture Club's . Or to allow for Theresa Merritt's matronly hired help to get lecherous over her employer's son (it's still impossible to tell whether this character is a skewed variation of the mammy stereotype or a crazy subversion of it). Or an elaborate set- up for a punch line in which a family of redheaded bullies — . Or as an opportunity for Jim Downey, the undisputed deadpan MVP of the movie, to declare, post- Billy's . I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. What you don't usually hear is someone waxing poetic about the homophobic jokes involving Josh Mostel's principal sending Billy a valentine saying . The film's douchiest pro- bro exchanges here are the runts of the comic litter. Which didn't stop the star from gravitating in that direction starting with his next movie. From Happy Gilmore on, the alpha- mook aspects in Sandler's movies would get more and more toxic, and even the accented beta- male eccentrics would take on a meaner, hyper- testosterone–ish edge. If you watch The Waterboy or Little Nicky, you can detect faint echoes of the old Billy underneath all the dick- swinging and the occasional desperate stabs at sentimentality; everything else was an everydude sitcom pumped up for multiplex screens. The star had chosen his path, and he was sticking to it. His comedies would lose the rough edges and up the lockeroom towel- snapping roughness. As for the . Sandler would turn the whole aggro- American idiot persona into a type. Cue decades of box- office success and diminishing returns. But for one glorious moment, that early, semi- innocent Sandler, the guy who made Halloween costumes out of rolled- up newspapers and demanded candy, got to let his freak flag fly. And 2. 0 years later, that's the Sandler you want to remember: an immature knucklehead who showed signs of being a real comic genius, not the guy who makes Grown- Ups 2. Still, we'll always have Billy, the self- proclaimed smartest man alive who keeps chasing that penguin across the lawn, forever dreaming of touching the heinie. Harry Everett Smith - Wikipedia. Harry E. Smith. Smith c. Born(1. 92. 3- 0. May 2. 9, 1. 92. 3Died. November 2. 7, 1. Nationality. American. Occupation. Visual artist, filmmaker, ethnographer. Awards. Grammy. Harry Everett Smith (May 2. Portland, Oregon – November 2. New York City) was a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic, and largely self- taught student of anthropology. Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City, and his activities, such as his use of mind- altering substances and interest in esotericspirituality, anticipated aspects of the Hippie movement. Besides his films, Smith is widely known for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, drawn from his extensive collection of out- of- print commercial 7. Throughout his life Smith was an inveterate collector. In addition to records, artifacts he collected included string figures. As child he lived for a time with his family in Anacortes, Washington, a town on Fidalgo Island, where the Swinomish Indian reservation is located. His mother, Mary Louise, originally from Sioux City, Iowa, came from a long line of school teachers and herself taught for a time on the Lummi Indian reservation near Bellingham. His father, Robert James Smith, a fisherman, worked as a watchman for the Pacific American Fishery, a salmon canning company. Smith's paternal great- grandfather John Corson Smith (d. Union colonel in the American Civil War, brevetted Brigadier General just as the war ended and had served from 1. Lieutenant Governor of the state of Illinois. He had also been a prominent Freemason and had authored several books about the history of the order. Although poor, they gave their son an artistic education, including 1. For a time, it is said, they even ran an art school in their house. Smith was also a voracious reader and he recalled his father bringing him a copy of Carl Sandburg's folksong anthology, American Songbag. During World War II he took a job as a mechanic working nights on the construction of the tight, hard- to- reach interior of Boeing bomber planes, for which his short stature suited him. It also enabled him to formally study anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle for five semesters between 1. He focused on American Indian tribes concentrated in the Pacific Northwest making numerous field trips to document the music and customs of the Lummi, whom he had gotten know through his mother's work with them. As a collector of blues records he had already been corresponding with the noted blues record aficionado James Mc. Kune, He now also began seriously collecting old hillbilly music records from junk dealers and stores which were going out of business and even appeared as a guest on a folk music radio show hosted by poet Jack Spicer. Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances; and San Francisco abounded in night spots and after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard. At this time he painted several ambitious jazz- inspired abstract paintings (since destroyed) and began making animated avant garde films featuring patterns that he painted directly on the film stock and which were intended to be shown to the accompaniment of bebop music. He said that . And, 'I wanted to hear Thelonious Monk play'. Instead, Asch proposed that the 2. Smith use the material to edit a multi- volume anthology of American folk music in long playing format – then a newly developed, cutting edge medium – and he provided space and equipment in his office for Smith to work in. The recording engineer on the project was P. These dated from the abbreviated dawn, sometimes called the . Originally issued as budget discs marketed to regional, rural audiences, these records had long been known, collected, and occasionally reissued by folklorists. LP discs could hold much more material than the old three- minute 7. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three, boxed albums with a total of 6 LPs. Each box front a different color: red, blue, and green – in Smith's schema, representing the alchemicalelements. Priced at $2. 5. 0. For the money- challenged, Moe Asch maintained a retail record store in the 1. Union Square Park where he sold all 6 of the Anthology records for $1 each, as well as others from his catalogue. The $1 records were sold without their original jackets, and with a hole punched through the label area to indicate that the record was remaindered and not to be sold for the rull retail price. A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long- time assistant, Marian Distler, and never completed by Smith. It was issued in 2. CD format by Revenant Records with a 9. Smith. Rock critic Greil Marcus in his liner- note essay for the 1. Smithsonian reissue, quoted musician Dave van Ronk's avowal that . His annotations avoided localized historical and social commentary, consisting instead of terse, evocative synopses – riffs – written in the manner of telegraph messages or newspaper headlines as though from an otherworldly realm, seemingly both timeless and avant- garde. For example, for Chubby Parker's rendition of . In 1. 94. 6 Smith reportedly lived for a time in small room with a separate entrance on the first floor of Bronson's Berkeley residence, and it is thought he may have received informal tutelage in folk music through his acquaintance with the scholar. Shortly after that, two Carter Family recordings, . That album would come to stores that wouldn’t ordinarily have Carter Family records. John Cohen: In that album John and Alan Lomax made hillbilly music respectable enough to have it sold along with art music and symphonies. Smith explained that he had selected material based on what he thought would be of interest to scholars and to people who might like to sing them. I'd been reading Plato's Republic. He's jabbering about music, how you have to be careful about changing the music, because it might upset or destroy the government. Everybody gets out of step. You are not to arbitrarily change it because you may undermine the Empire State Building without knowing it. Of course, I thought it would do that.. I imagined it as having some kind of social force for good. Ed Sanders writes: It was a joy to his many friends to see him clambering up the Grammy steps wearing a tuxedo. Plato was right, music can change the direction of a civilization, for worse or better. A regular visitor to the Peace Eye bookstore, in Manhattan's East Village on 1. St. When Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed the Fugs, they rehearsed at Peace Eye. He asked for a bottle of rum, which Sanders bought for him, and then proceeded to smash the bottle against the wall, to . These included, . He produced extravagant abstract animations. The effects were often painted or manipulated by hand directly on the celluloid. Themes of mysticism, surrealism and dada were common elements in his work. He frequently reedited them (hence the different runtimes), incorporating on various occasions reassembled footage of different film to be viewed with varying music tracks. For instance, the handmade films now known as No. May 1. 2, 1. 95. 0 when they premiered as part of the Art in Cinema series curated by Smith's friend Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Art, though Smith had originally intended them to be accompanied by recordings of beat favorite Dizzy Gillespie. Later he showed the films with random records or even the radio as accompaniment. Smith stated that his films were made for contemporary music, and he kept changing their soundtracks. At the urging of his friend Rosemarie . After Smith's death, artists such as John Zorn, Philip Glass or DJ Spooky provided musical backgrounds for screenings of his films: Zorn at many screenings at Anthology Film Archives (where he is composer- in- residence) as part of his Essential Cinema project, Glass at the 2. Film- Makers' Cooperative and DJ Spooky at several venues in 1. Harry Smith: A Re- creation, an embroidered compendium of Smith's films put together by his close collaborator M. Henry Jones who tries to screen the films in the manner intended by Smith - as performances - using stroboscopic effects, multiple projections, magic lanterns, and the like. Thus this filmography is in no way a comprehensive list of all the films he has ever made, all the more as he is known to have lost, sold, traded or even wantonly destroyed some of his own works. The dating of the film presents another puzzle. Since Smith frequently worked for years on them and kept little to no documentation, the information varies considerably from one source to another. Therefore all available information has been added to the following list, inevitably resulting in a loss of clarity but having the advantage of giving the whole picture. The films are also known by variant designation, i. Film # 1 or simply # 1. Since the 1. 97. 0s Smith's films have been archived and preserved at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. The Academy Film Archive preserved . He did not destroy his work on film (although he did misplace a few) and this legacy supplements the nature and design of his paintings. Smith created several later works, some of which have been serially printed in limited editions. Much of his imagery is inspired by Kabbalistic themes such as the Sephirah, where the Planetary Spheres are distributed like musical notes upon a staff. Occult interests. He recorded Lummi songs and rituals using homemade equipment and notation of his own devising and developed an important collection of Native American religious objects. Tarot cards were another of Smith's interests. The store also had a publishing house, Weiser Books, which used Smith's designs for its paperback edition of Aleister Crowley's Holy Books of Thelema. I knew Harry would know what to do so I conferred with him.
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