With a stunning 0 percent so far on Rotten Tomatoes the day before it hits theaters one might think Sandler had made a film that was completely, utterly and irredeemably lacking in laughs and entertainment value.

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But – taking into account that this isn’t pretentious art-house, Oscar-aiming fare – “Jack and Jill” is just another sad example of most critics’ single-minded agenda to give Sandler a smack down for daring to make movies that, while engaging in some crude humor, nearly always wind up upholding old-fashioned values like solid families, respect for elders (especially grandmas with meatballs!) and true love.

This time around, he includes a strong anti-bullying angle, and dares to have not one, not two, but three broad-sided smack downs of an atheist character – so be fully aware that while this isn’t a perfect film, it is damn funny. The packed audience I saw it with laughed their heads off while the few critics in attendance groused afterwards about what an atrocity it was.

In dealing with the film “Blue Valentine” back in January, I noted that most critics were treating it like the second coming of Christ set to celluloid. Depicting an awful relationship that goes from wonderful to sick within six short years, the nation’s alleged arbiters of taste declared it a masterpiece, while I pointed out that most people don’t want to spend their hard-earned money on date night watching a husband practically rape his wife before she kicks him out screaming “I have nothing left for you!” I predicted it wouldn’t even make $10 million, and I was right.

Meanwhile, I pointed out that only 10 percent of critics dared to say Sandler’s “Grown Ups” – featuring intact families with fathers regaining their leadership roles – was any good, despite the fact that, again, a packed house of regular folks had just exploded with laughter around them for 90 minutes. “Grown Ups” made $160 million. It wasn’t Oscar fare, but for Pete’s sake, it did its job by making people feel good.

So, know going into this review – or better yet, the film itself – that the critics who dog it are lying. They are completely disregarding the simple truth that the movie delivers plenty of laughs and good, solid values. They know Sandler is an openly Republican Hollywood figure, and they are out to take him down.

Now, about the movie: “Jack and Jill” is a typical creation from Sandler’s Happy Madison production company. He plays both Jack and Jill, brother and sister twins who have argued since birth. When Jill, who is single, lonely and in her 40s, comes to visit at Thanksgiving, it’s supposed to be for four days. But complications repeatedly ensue, dragging her visit all the way through a New Year’s week cruise with Jack’s family.

Along the way, the siblings fight constantly, but Jack puts up with her presence because he needs to get Al Pacino to act in a Dunkin Donuts ad for his advertising company, and Al surprisingly becomes smitten with Jill. Ultimately, Jill learns to value herself through the attentions of Al, and Jack’s wife helps win him over to seeking reconciliation with his sister.

“Jack and Jill” is unmistakably silly, and Sandler looks like he’s having more fun than he’s had in years in playing the twins, diving into his dual personas with comic gusto in addition to engaging in physical comedy including a “double Dutch” jump rope routine with his alter ego.

The real surprise here, however, is Pacino, who satirizes his over-the-top, angry public image by falling for Jill and seeking to win her heart in order to regain his artistic courage. In scene after scene, he’s completely, daffily absurd, and yet his joy is infectious. Katie Holmes as Jack’s wife also does a nice job, but the biggest and best aspect of the film for Christians and families is that the film places a high and unmistakable value on the beautiful power of families and sibling bonding, while also criticizing dishonesty and meanness, mocking atheism and making belief in God look cool. Most importantly, the film shows true inner beauty can lie within anyone.

Yeah, the movie’s got a few fart jokes. Yes, Sandler looks ridiculous in drag. But “Jack and Jill” has heart and plenty of laughs, and if you’re an honest human being – unlike my robotic brethren of critics – you’ll enjoy it. A lot.

We start with “The Kennedys.”

For those of you new to planet Earth, Surnow’s the Executive Producer of “The Kennedys,” a $30 million, eight-part miniseries that just completed a successful cable run on the Reelz Channel. It starred Hollywood heavyweights Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Tom Wilkinson, and Katie Holmes and was originally set to air on the History Channel, until a last minute decision was made by the parent company’s board (Hearst, ABC Disney, NBC Universal) that the series didn’t meet History Channel’s standards.

No one bought that excuse for a second because at the center of this political storm sat Surnow, one of the rare, openly conservative players in Hollywood. From day one, the leftist knives were out and the narrative created that a conservative producer was determined to produce a hit-job against liberal Camelot. As early as last year, a left-wing documentary filmmaker launched a direct attack on the series that garnered a lot of attention and likely led to some of the the surviving members of the Kennedy family to successfully pressure History’s board to dump a completed project. 

Apparently, History lost millions ejecting the mini, but eject it they did, stating, “we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.” 

Keeping in mind that this is the same History Channel that airs “Pawn Stars” and two hour celebrity-laden love fests to Howard Zinn, one of the most dishonest historians ever, there’s really no way to interpret what “a fit for the History brand” means. But in part-one of my two-part interview, I go right at the central issue: the historical accuracy of “The Kennedys.”

As you’ll read below, the historical vetting process was not only intense but something Surnow welcomed and agreed with:

Big Hollywood: The place I want to start with is at the end. I want to know how you feel about things now.  I don’t want to use – it’s probably not a fair use of the word because you didn’t do anything wrong — but with the ratings and the reviews, you must feel somewhat vindicated. 

Joel Surnow: I think you’re right, I don’t know if I need to be vindicated by the people who tried to stop this from airing. But we knew we had a really great show.  Some of the reviews that trashed us were just outright ludicrous, and clearly agendized.  They were not in touch with reality or critical analysis; they were just personal towards me, and some towards Katie Holmes. That’s the nature of reviews. 

We’ve had everything from four stars to the other, but I would say on average we were given pretty strong reviews all the way through, and just anecdotally, the response from people — especially the people I care about, people who I work with, who are my peers — is that they seem to really be enjoying the show.  So it is sort of a vindication.  It’s a vindication because any time you do this you wonder, “Will anybody even wanna watch this?” 

BH: That’s the normal part of it but, obviously, there was another element added here. 

JS: Another degree of difficulty for sure. 

BH:  Now, you’ve made a distinction that I wanted to make sure we get to up front. Everyone, including me, has been saying, “The History Channel, The History Channel, The History Channel.”

JS:  The History Channel are our allies.  They got as screwed on this as we did.

BH: And they’re owned by ABC, NBC, Disney?

JS:  And Hearst. I know that NBC has the smallest share, but they’re all on the board.

BH: And these are the same people, I think, that snuffed the Path of 9/11?

JS: Yeah, the Disney people did.

BH: That’s another very troubling part of it.

JS: It’s very powerful.

BH: And partisan…

JS: Yes. 

BH: Let’s talk about the historical accuracy issues. I’ve read about the detailed process you went through in getting The Kennedys’ scripts approved. Cyrus [Nowastreh] went through the same thing with Path to 9/11.

JS:  Which is fair…

BH:  Totally agree.

JS: You should have your history right on the History Channel.

BH:  Did the same people who said, “This script is approved. Go ahead and shoot it,” are they the same ones who later turned around and said, “We don’t want to air it. It’s not right for our network”? Is that a fair representation?

JS: No.  The History executives and historians were the ones who approved the script.  The ones that said we don’t want to air it were the people above History – the corporate board.

BH:  So the board had never approved the script, but the History executives had?

JS:  The board doesn’t get involved in stuff like that.  That wouldn’t be a function of the board. However, having said that, I’m sure that History felt a great deal of pressure to ensure the board what they were putting on the air was historically accurate. 

BH:  Certainly. Especially with the level of scrutiny you were under. And and I agree that’s a good process and probably makes for better storytelling, and you mentioned that one thing you had to prove to a historian was that a gun was part of the White House decoration.

JS: That was when we were shooting, that was the dailies. There was a rifle on the Oval Office wall, and [the historians] were microscopically looking at dailies.  They saw [the firearm] and said, “We don’t want JFK sitting in front of a rifle – it’s sending the wrong message.”  And then we had to dig into the pile to find the photographs to find JFK sitting in front of a rifle. 

BH:  So they were scrutinizing dailies, as well?

JS: Absolutely.  They not only approved the script, they approved the shows – the cuts of the show.

BH: Wow. I think a contextually fair historical representation is always important.  But then you look at what Oliver Stone gets away with – and I’m totally fine with this, because I believe in artistic freedom and am a huge Oliver Stone fan — but the double standard is glaring.

JS:  There’s been even more than Oliver Stone.  There’s a lot of people who do a first-level of accuracy and then make up a lot of stuff.  And you’re right; it’s fine.  But in fairness to Oliver Stone, I thought Nixon was a pretty solid piece of history.  And I think he went under the same scrutiny from the right from those who didn’t think that he could do an honest depiction, and I thought he actually did. I thought he pulled it off.  JFK was a fantasy, but it was interesting.

BH: Yeah, JFK was one my favorite movies of the ‘90s.  I thought it was brilliant.

JS: Yeah, but I don’t think it was real history.

BH: More like a rationalization.

JS: It was. But in a sense that becomes the legacy of the assassination, because it was a movie.  And I think that’s why the Kennedy family was concerned about circling the wagons [with The Kennedys] – because once something is imprinted on film, it lives in the upper imagination a lot more than a book.  There have been a million books about the Kennedys’ and all the questionable, iffy things that they’ve done.  But once it’s a movie or a TV show, it seems to live larger in public imagination.

BH: Do you know if the Kennedy family saw this, or did you offer to show it to them?

JS: I don’t think they did.  I heard one quote from Robert Kennedy Jr. trashing us and then saying he never saw it. 

BH: A lot of people are comparing what you went through to The Reagans. [a miniseries that came out in 2003 and after a conservative firestorm over accuracy ended up being bumped from CBS to Showtime].

JS:  That wasn’t at all comparable.  There’s a singular distinction involving the only thing that’s really important: The Reagans got canceled because the advertisers backed out.  The advertisers didn’t believe in the product.  And in our business, that’s the ultimate metric by which everything is judged.  Quite the opposite happened on The Kennedys.  Our advertisers pledged to go with us wherever we went because they loved the show so much. So there’s really no comparison.  And, by the way, I never saw The Reagans, so I don’t know anything about it.  I don’t even know if it was agendized or not, I just heard it wasn’t very good.

BH: Yeah, I didn’t see it either, but I think someone won an Emmy.  Another distinction, in my opinion, was that The Reagans was going to broadcast on the public airwaves; it was going to air on CBS, and it had no problem finding a home at Showtime.  You were going to be on cable –

JS: It started on basic cable, and went to basic cable.

BH: Exactly.  There’s a big difference between the public-owned airwaves and cable  But I didn’t even know about the advertisers. 

JS: That’s a big difference.

BH: Obviously, The Kennedys screened on Reelz, but it sounds as though it’s going to eventually be available all over the world. 

JS: It was sold in over 40 countries.  I think it goes onto Netflix starting [this] week.  And then the DVD comes out May 15th, so it’s going to be platformed everywhere.

BH: That’s terrific.  Is it going to be streaming on Netflix?

JS:  I don’t know if it’s going to be streaming.  That’s a good question.  It’s already the number one series buy on iTunes, which is great for us. It’s ahead of Walking Dead and Weeds and The Killing, all those shows that are out recently, and shows that have done well in the past.

BH: Do you know if History or AETN lose money on the decision to dump the series?

JS: Yeah, I think they lost a lot of money.

Tomorrow, Surnow has a very frank discussion about life as a Hollywood conservative in the midst of our ongoing culture wars.

And if you’re Tom Cruise, that means you are not only qualified to advise women on how to deal with postpartum depression, but you are also qualified to act as marriage counselor.

That’s right – Tom “Couch Commando” Cruise is, out of the goodness of his heart, David and Victoria Beckham’s new “relationship guru” – because you know with all of their money, they can’t afford a certified therapist:

After an evening with David, Tom decided to have a friendly chat with Victoria about the family’s future, saying it was because he cared so much about all of them,” revealed a source.

“They love each other dearly but Tom is a big believer in talking about issues . He could see they were both worried about the future and what it might hold.”

The Mission Impossible actor is understood to be concerned that the former Spice Girl – who runs a successful fashion empire from her home in the US – will want to stay in Los Angeles while her husband, 35, heads back to Europe.

“He talked to her about David ageing, his football career, the pressures of disgruntled fans, his loneliness when away from the family and how time apart is how marriages can fall apart,” adds the source.

That’s kind of creepy. Tom Cruise giving marriage advice? The man whose current wife is on such a tight leash she can’t even go to work without him there, watching her every move? The same man who, according to reports, rarely lets ex-wife Nicole Kidman see the children they adopted when they were married? The guy whose first wife, Mimi Rogers, reportedly split with him because he was seriously thinking of becoming a monk and felt he had to remain celibate?

Wow, that’s the man I want giving me marriage advice, for sure.

But Cruise is more than just a good friend; he’s a big cheese in the strange world of Scientology and is given credit for the “conversions” of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett. He’s also planning a big recruitment drive while he accompanies Katie on a four-month movie shoot in Australia, which begins this month. (There he goes again, not allowing Katie out of his sight. What, is he afraid she might find someone her own age?)

Remember the Scientology recruiting video starring Cruise, where he claims that Scientologists have “the ability to create new and better realities and improved conditions”? Is this the guy you’d really want giving you advice on anything, let alone how to keep your marriage together?

Run, David and Victoria, run…before it’s too late.

Nathan Lane and John Goodman are selling tickets hand over fist for their revival of “Waiting for Godot” but neither received the honor of a nomination.  Same with David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella, Mary Louise Parker and Matthew Broderick. 

It was no surprise that Jeremy Piven was included out of the Best Actor category after his famous sushi defense for missing performances in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” but not honoring John Lithgow’s brilliant turn in “All My Sons” in the same category is a crime against humanity!  It ranks up there with the snub of Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman.” Brian Dennehy was honored with the Best Actor award when he did Willy Loman in 2000, but that goodwill did not anoint him worthy of a nomination this year for his turn in “Desire Under the Elms.” 

Add to the list of the egregiously overlooked: Diane Wiest, Kristin Scott Thomas, Daniel Radcliffe, Tovah Feldshuh, Joan Allen, Jeremy Irons, Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersol, Patrick Wilson, Susan Sarandon and Katie Holmes. 

As an industry, Broadway seems to take an odd pride in the moniker “The Fabulous Invalid” and I have lamented this mindset on these pages before.  Broadway’s ability to eat its young and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory has become legendary and not a little bit annoying. 

Here we are at the end of a season where the biggest headline was about how horrible things are on Broadway and how every show is closing and how there are nothing but empty theatres, and right when the industry has a chance to turn that story around and promote the fact that not only has every theatre been occupied but incredibly high-wattage stars have come out to perform live in intimate, beautiful theatres, they turn around and kill their own lead. 

Wouldn’t it have been great to have a nationally televised theatre awards show with ratings better than an NHL playoff game? 

Now, I understand the argument that everyone can’t be nominated, and I recognize that some pretty big names were honored like Jeff Daniels, Geoffery Rush, Marcia Gay Harden, Jane Fonda, Stockard Channing, John Glover and Angela Lansbury.  But, really, if the industry is in the trouble they say it’s in, and you have a chance to showcase Daniel Radcliffe, Katie Holmes (and maybe Mr. Holmes?) and Rupert Everett on national television as honored performers from the prior season, shouldn’t you figure out a way to do it? 

Here’s a modest proposal:  Expand the acting categories!  Where is it written in stone that there should only be five nominees for each category?  In some pretty thin years in the not-too-distant past they have nominated LESS than five in some categories.  (I know that the doom-sayers on Broadway all think that this is the worst it’s ever been, but seriously, in 1989 the THREE nominees for Best Musical were “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway”, “Black and Blue” and “Starmites”!).  So in a crappy year, they change the rules and only nominate three, but in a year packed with stars, they hold to the arbitrary five nominee rule and the story becomes “Who Got Snubbed”.  It makes no sense at all. 

I know that none of this seems to follow a “Right versus Left” storyline that many of you may be used to here at Big Hollywood, but hang in there with me for a few more thoughts.  The fact is, the left on Broadway (meaning the vast majority of actors, designers and staffers in the production offices) relish the fact that they give a big “up yours” to the Hollywood types who dare to come to Broadway.  In this context, the Hollywood actors are “rich” and the New York theatre people are the poor, starving artists giving up riches for their craft.  They want to see the Hollywood star fail.  It’s classic class warfare, just like it is played out in the political world of America. 

The same mentality that celebrates the increased taxes on “The Rich” and rails against “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” yet fails to recognize the damage done to our society when these productive members of our economy are punished by ever-burdensome taxes and regulations is at play when they watch in bitchy glee as Hollywood movie stars are snubbed in favor of a “real” actor from their ranks.  But they fail to realize that those Hollywood hacks are the ones who are selling the tickets and keeping the “Theatre Community” employed.  If Hollywood actors ever get the message and stop risking rejection and embarrassment by performing on Broadway, it will just mean more unemployment for the theatre purists. 

But, that’s OK, they’ll just blame Middle America for not being smart or cultured enough to truly appreciate Thomas Sadoski in “Reasons to be Pretty” instead of wanting to see Tom Cruise’s wife or that guy from “3rd Rock From the Sun.” 

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