Can you believe the Zohan has never been to Israel?

If you know your Adam Sandler films, you’ll spot the missing memorabilia. But as the actor, who is also a mogul producer, has starred in 86 movies,  finding souvenirs from them all requires a team effort .

It’s enough that our edit includes Murder Mystery 2, his 87th movie now on Netflix and as a sequel to Murder Mystery 1,  the pairing of Jennifer Aniston and Adam as married sleuths is always welcome.

Also included in our mix, and also new, is Hustle, in which  Adam plays a veteran basketball scout so accurately, his a performance has been hailed as Oscar-worthy. He got the same critical acclaim for  his portrayal of Howard Ratner, the fast-talking jeweller hedging too many bets in Uncut Gems. But for whatever reason, the increasingly woke Academy of Morion Pictures is not seeing what we see. If they were Adam would have several little gold men on his shelf, courtesy of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love or, more recently, in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories.

It’s arguable that Adam’s  screen debut back in 1989 as struggling cruise ship comic Shecky Moskowitz in Going Overboard  paved the way to such comedy classics as Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy and The Wedding Singer, but this premature typecasting  as the hapless, but
loveable  lead has impacted the judgement of blinkered voters who gave Brendon Fraser an Oscar last month for playing an obese gay man in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Nice for Jewish director Aronofsky and for Fraser, but the jury had no problem seeing beyond his George of the Jungle,  but failed to see the merit in Adam’s lonely, socially-awkward protagonist Barry Egan in Punch-Drunk Love.

No matter because just last week, Sandler, 56, received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humour – and fellow actors turned up in droves to pay homage to the star. See Idina Menzel’s musical tribute  as a taster and there were many others as Adam keeps his coterie of film star pals gainfully employed by his production company Happy Madison (a portmanteau of his first two film successes) which has an ongoing movie deal with Netflix.

He doesn’t employ us or even offer ‘person walking-by’ appearances, but we love him because he wrote The Chanukah Song and keeps reinventing it: plays a lot of characters with ‘Stein’ or ‘Levine’ as their surname and is about to make the film of Fiona Rosenbloom’s book You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! starring alongside his daughters, Sadie and Sunny.

Recently director Quentin Tarantino revealed that he wrote a role in 2009’s Inglourious Basterds specifically for Adam Sandler, but the actor declined as he was already filming Judd Apatow’s Funny People.

Maybe Tarantino, who now lives in Israel, will consider Adam for a role in The Movie Critic, the film he claims will be his last. If he does, he should invite him to visit, as he has yet to put a toe in the Holy Land.  Yes, the actor who so accurately played Israeli soldier turned hair stylist in the 2008 comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan has never been there. It’s on his bucket list along with improving his golf and guitar skills. “I also wish I could speak another language, like fluent Hebrew,” he admitted.

We know a place where that’s achievable.  Next year in Jerusalem, Adam?  Now watch Idina Menzel’s tribute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGOwZCsAC9w