Remember the 1990s? Adam Sandler sure hopes you do, as the trailer for his upcoming Netflix film Sandy Wexler shows. Sandler plays a hapless talent manager in this, the latest fruit of the development deal that brought you The Ridiculous 6. But the real star isn’t Sandler; it’s the lavish attention paid to period-accurate pop-culture details. Over the course of the trailer, director Steven Brill sneaks in sly references to the following musical touchstones of the era:
- Purple, Stone Temple Pilots
- Smash, The Offspring
- Green Day
- Divine Intervention, Slayer
- Monster, R.E.M.
- Live Through This, Hole
Wait—I’m being told these five references are all in a single shot, never mind the entire trailer, much less the film. Another shot crams in billboards for Timecop and The Shadow, plus a Variety headline referencing Touched by an Angel. Then there are deeper cuts, like an establishing shot of Inglewood’s Forum when it was still called the Great Western Forum and a few cuts that can only be described as fathomless, like a Variety headline about the time NBC tried to get the Federal Communications Commission to shut down Fox. Move over, Matthew Weiner!
But what does this vast bricolage of cultural debris and historical research add up to? Well, folks, check out the trailer: It’s an Adam Sandler movie. Remember when that was good news? In the 1990s?
