Short diatribe against Adam Sandler’s Netflix children’s film

Simon Meier

13 is an average age. I know this because at thirteen I was always the girl still in gymnastics. And on the playground. The girl whose best friend always became another best friend in record time. 13 is sort of a vanguard of that mainstream girl for whom America invented the cheerleader mascot. Cheerleaders are the horror par excellence: sporty, good-humored, loud and like to go out in a group. My idea of ​​hell.

Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler) is also 13 and definitely more connected than I ever was, and Stacy — like all the Jewish girls at her school — has one dream: she wants the perfect party. So the perfect Bat Mitzvah, the celebration of her religious maturity. She wants a pink dress, preferably celebrity guest appearances, and everything should resemble a pink disco ball or soap bubbles reflecting unicorns or… Okay, is that how 13-year-olds really party in America? It seems like.

Now Stacy Friedman, who ruins her best friend’s bat mitzvah because there are suddenly problems with a boy, is obviously not a documentary, but a film adaptation of a novel. A coming-of-age fiction. And then not quite. Because above all, the new Netflix hit movie ‘You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’ is an Adam Sandler family project, in which Adam Sandler can prove himself to be an ultra-cool dad, both in the movie and in life, as both his daughters After all, Sunny and Sadie also appear in the movie His Daughters. And wow, all the critics write that Adam Sandler is not only a funny guy, but a phenomenally warm-hearted guy.

To Adam Sandler’s credit, his Hollywood Nepo babies seem comfortably sober and don’t get over the contact with Sofia Coppola’s daughter, who was grounded for trying to use her father’s credit card to charter a helicopter to get to the fly dinner. with a friend.

‘You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’ is definitely a hugely innocent kids movie. You have to think back to your early teens to find a glimmer of grandeur in Stacy and her friends’ troubles – or to really hate them. As befits a Jewish comedy, the adults’ jokes are often very funny, but the adults simply don’t play a major role.

For example, the Netflix series ‘Sex Education’ shows that funny coming-of-age entertainment can certainly go deeper, because despite all the fun, gritty, difficult, complex and therefore lifelike young stories are told. «Sex Education» is a British series. That’s the whole secret. The Adam Sandler-produced movie, on the other hand, is one of those high-gloss American courtesy products that can be found in abundance on Netflix right now.

This is, of course, nagging from an adult perspective. It’s quite possible that non-sociophobic 13-year-olds will view “You Are So Not Invitationd to My Bat Mitzvah” as the pinnacle of movie fun. The point is, don’t intentionally underestimate them. After all, they try to serve them something better than fast food elsewhere. But maybe Adam Sandler can’t do anything else. It has always been flat rather than smooth.