On DVD: 50 First Dates

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore team up for a comedic love story that is surprisingly charming, witty and funny. Sandler plays a scoundrel living in Hawaii that preys on the desires of female tourists only to dump them when their vacation is over. He meets Barrymore and even though she is a local Sandler is intrigued by her and begins to work his magic. Everything is going well until he discovers that Barrymore has no short term memory, once she goes to sleep and wakes up she has no recollection of the previous day. Sandler and Barrymore have surprising chemistry on screen and they carry the movie real well. Rob Schneider once again shows up in a Sandler movie and plays Sandler's Cousin that ...well basically is Rob Schneider but he delivers some genuine laughs.

50 First Dates is the second of three movies in a row that Director Peter Segal worked on with Sandler. 2003s Anger Management and the current new release of The Longest Yard are the other two. You can tell that Sandler and Segal are hitting on all cylinders and are becoming comfortable with each other. This film was easy to watch with little or no annoyances that sometimes bog down comedies and turn them into loud disasters or one joke movies that drag on way too long. Bordering dangerously close to becoming too warm and fuzzy, 50 First Dates walks the tightrope and injects enough laugh out loud nonsense ( the old man in the restaurant for example) to make this a "Sandler Movie." Im not a Sandler or Barrymore fan but I liked 50 First Dates...mainly because it was funny and true to itself to the very end.

Note: Two other movies involving short term memory loss came to mind while watching this film. The first is 1994s "Clean Slate" starring Dana Carvey as a Private Detective with short term memory loss. Carvey is trying to solve a murder and deal with his condition at the same time, the movie didn't do well in theaters but it is pretty funny, worth renting.
The other is 2000s "Memento" a much celebrated film starring Guy Pearce, Carrie Ann Moss and Joe Pantoliano. Pearce is trying to find his wife's killer and deal with his memory loss and come to terms with the fact that he may be a little darker inside than even he remembers. This is a good movie, but watch it with the remote in hand, it is very clever and interesting to watch how the story unravels and how all the pieces fit together.