Grandma’s Boy

My main concern about Grandma’s Boy (2006) is why my son wanted me to watch it. At first he said he would not enjoy the film if he watched it with me, though later he relented. It was apparently produced by a company associated with Adam Sandler--the company is called “Happy Madison.” In certain ways Grandma’s Boy reminds me of Billy Madison and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. More to the point, it seems in the same category as Clerks, Office Space, and the television series The Office, though Clerks is a much better and more interesting film. The plot involves a 35-year old man, Alex, forced to move out of his apartment after he fails to pay the rent for 6 months. He moves in with his grandmother and her two roommates but tells his coworkers that he is living with three hot women who enjoy group sex. His colleagues believe him—see following paragraph—though the deception is revealed when his grandmother and her roommates visit him at the office.

Alex works for a video game design company. His colleagues are a motley assemblage of geeks, freaks, and demented dorks, plus their beautiful blonde manager. As one character explains to her, there are a lot of virgins in the office. There are jokes about sex with old women, jokes about masturbation, jokes about zoo animals, jokes about yoga. There is a prolonged party scene in which Alex’s grandmother and her friends mistake his bag of pot for tea, and the resulting drink they brew offers numerous opportunities for drug jokes. There is an unusual amount of farting. Shirley Jones is funny as the lusty roommate of Alex’s grandmother, played by Doris Roberts from Everyone Loves Raymond.

This film is aimed at a teenage audience that loves the kind of humor summarized in the foregoing paragraph. In particular, this is an audience that believes that unemployment and video games after 30 are a higher state of nirvanic euphoria.

Will Alex prove his mettle? Will he prove that the video game his colleague stole from him is really one he designed? Will he sleep with the beautiful blonde?

I don’t know. The film isn’t over yet. Well, actually, it just ended. The answer to these questions: yes, yes, and eventually. Even compared to films like Billy Madison, this one is not very good.

Among the cameos are Kevin Nealon as the New Age owner of the video game company, Rob Schneider as Alex’s landlord, and David Spade as the waiter at a vegan restaurant.