How Adam Sandler Has Replaced John Hughes

A while back, I wrote about how I though John Hughes was the greatest philosopher of the late 20th Century. If you’re interested, go look through the old entries. If anything makes sense or raises a question, please comment on that “old” entry and I will respond.

The Valentine’s Day before I married my wife we went to see The Wedding Singer. Funny thing is that before and after that viewing, we’ve never been big “move goers.” We go, just not that often, but we wanted to see this movie.

Now that we’ve decided on a name for our daughter, we laugh about “Julia Goulia.”

We bought the VHS tape (yes, this predated our DVD era) from Blockbuster on a “pre-viewed” basis. Kind of like the two cars we own now (we’ve bought into the CPO hype). I still like the previews for Jackie Chan’s Mr. Nice Guy.

Anyway, we like to watch that film. Every time I watch that, I have the incredible urge to “just” be a good person.

One complaint I’ve had about films like Nic Cage’s Family Man is that he gets both the money and the family in the end. That didn’t happen in this film. Adam chose the family and went back to his “poor” state of life. That’s a little more “real world” for me. You can’t have it all.

I’ve been trying to bring my entries about Abraham’s Faith to a conclusion, but I keep getting sidetracked. In Click, Adam gets his goals but misses out on all the things that happen in between. I kept thinking about the 3-hour playdough party I had with J2 a few weeks back. I’m relatively certain he will never do that with me again. What else have I been missing?

Oh, and Adam Sandler knows what he's doing. Next time you watch The Wedding Singer, listen to the music. The final love ballad plays throughout the flick at the appropriate times. In Click, the "first song" that plays when he kisses his wife-to-be is "Linger." In a story about fast-forwarding through life, lingering during the first kiss is important. Reminisce sometime.

Is Abraham’s faith a symbol of his strength or a gift of Grace?

Going back to earlier chapters, it is my position/ belief (at least right now) that Abraham’s faith is what allowed him to become the “Father of Nations.” That gift, though, is not something borne of his character, but it is Grace.

The Greeks believed that a hero was a hero because he was selected to be one. This likely had something to do with the way they viewed comedy versus tragedy. Anyway ... Odysseus was not special due to anything other than the fact that certain gods favored him. He was “chosen” to be special.

Most of what I’ve read and studied introduce this as a dichotomy, a fundamental shift from pantheism to monotheism. But is it really? Isn’t the ability to love the moment a gift? Isn’t the ability to be “special” a gift?

The “fundamental” shift is not that we cannot achieve it without divine intervention. The “fundamental” shift is that we’ve all been given the gift, but that we need to embrace it. here are not a "selected" few who have been "chosen" to receive the gift. It is there for the taking.

It’s here. The Kingdom of Heaven is upon us. Take that plank out of your eye and look around.

One of the great criticisms come from the little green man in my living room: “Never his mind on where he was. Eh. What he was doing. Eh.”

If you just hit fast-forward to where you wanted to be, imagine how much you would loose.