Reign Over Me

[Edgy MD]

Successful New York dentist, frustrated by lack of personal life apart from work and family, runs into his old college roommate, severely traumatized years after losing his family in the 2001 terrorism attacks. They begin tooling around town together.

Your dentist is Don Cheadle, whose presence is funny in retrospect, as the film has a lot of parallels with the award-winning turn taken two years later in The Soloist by his Marvel Universe superior Robert Downey. The film is also flecked with several Marvel references, though Cheadle hadn't yet debuted as Col. Rhodes.

Adam Sandler, who seems to have played a lot of mentally ill/emotionally ill guys, is your lost roommate.

Lots o' classic rock references and classic rock music (mostly Springsteen and [you might well guess] The Who) happening in the soundtrack.

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[Edgy MD]

Solid, unspectacular film with familiar themes. Great shots of New York streets � where the crowds are just small enough and there really isn't a lot of threat and aggression lingering in the air, allowing you to just notice stuff. In other words, a New York that doesn't really exist except from about 4:00�6:30 AM.

Solid presences of veteran actors, including Melinda Dillon � the mother in A Christmas Story � obsessing over a lamp. I don't think this was an intended irony, but it turned out to be one. Like in JFK, Donald Sutherland and his commanding voice show up to move things along when they start dragging.

[Frayed Knot]

So it sounds like it has the advantage of being a movie with Adam Sandler that's not an Adam Sandler movie.

[Edgy MD]

It's certainly that, but, well... he does get off his leash, if you know what I mean.

He also tools around on a motor scooter...

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... with a hair style he seems to have picked up at a Bob Dylan yard sale.

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A lot of notable supporting actors, including Liv Tyler, who still seems in every scene like she's on the verge of crying.

[Vic Sage]

Sandler, like Jim Carrey, has a few films in which he steps outside his comic persona to, you know, act. He's not bad here. And Don Cheadle can make almost anything watchable. This is a case in point.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

This was on some shitty cable channel I never heard of the other night. I saw about a half hour of it and thought it was pretty ok.