Steve Buscemi has been playing the lead on an HBO drama for four years now, but he’ll always be a character actor to me (I think that’s a Billy Joel song). Presumably, once Boardwalk Empire, which returns this Sunday (I’ve seen the episode, and like every Boardwalk premiere, it’s slow but hints at more exciting times to come), wraps up, he’ll go back to playing scene-stealing weirdos. If nothing else, he can always call up his good buddy Adam Sandler. They’ve been in nine movies together, and because I’ve got Buscemi on the brain, I decided to rank his appearances in Sandler’s movies, not including Airheads and Hotel Transylvania, because those aren’t REALLY Adam Sandler movies.
7-6. Grown Ups/Grown Ups 2
I’ve seen both of these movies, in the sense that one sees a dog turd roasting in the sun, and I don’t remember Buscemi being in them. I had to look up his appearances online, and what do you know? In Grown Ups 2, he played a white guy who wants to be Flavor Flav. I don’t care what he did in Grown Ups, because I just had to explain that Mr. Pink “played a white guy who wants to be Flavor Flav.”
Buscemi was paid in whatever Kevin James didn’t eat.
5. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
Here’s an out of context quote from an interview Buscemi did around the time I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry was released: “If you were born in the year of the rat, you’d be charming and cunning and intelligent and brutally honest. And rats are resourceful, too. They know how to take care of themselves and they know how to get what they want.” I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry isn’t a good movie.
4. The Wedding Singer
The Wedding Singer is unquestionably one of Adam Sandler’s better movies, and Buscemi is a big reason why. He is every wedding’s “drunk as sh*t” best man spewing out jealously because he’s got nothing while his buddy has everything. Although only one of them is the best guitar player in the world. I hope that when Buscemi dies, he’s buried in that pink-and-green ensemble.
3. Big Daddy
Big Daddy Buscemi is actually a great name for a gangster. Anyway, Big Daddy was the first Adam Sandler movie where I recognized Buscemi as someone other than, “That guy from the other Adam Sandler movies.” It’s a brilliant performance of messy regrets. Literally messy. He lives in trash outside of a McDonald’s (I once peed in that McDonald’s!). But Homeless Man is still proud of his country — “Yes, considering we’re in America! I mean, if you don’t like spaghetti and meatballs, why don’t you just get the hell out?” — and isn’t that what living in the U.S. is about? Yes, and Sausage McMuffins.
2. Mr. Deeds
Uzo Aduba won an Emmy for her role as Crazy Eyes on Orange Is the New Black, yet Buscemi didn’t even receive an Oscar nomination for playing a character of the same name in Mr. Deeds? They say time heals all things, except Crazy Eye’s snub.
1. Billy Madison
Because if those were movie titles, I’d watch them all.
