That Fresh Blog Scent; Adventures in Babysitting

Tom Says; So here we are again. This time myself and my gal Friday are doing a joint blog of the unwatched movies in our collection. Since we are watching together we will both throw in our two cents. We will also be rating out of five, which is new, and if we decide to ditch the movie leave a comment and it is yours. You've been warned.

As I am me we must begin at the beginning. We skipped 12 Monkeys and 40 Yr Old Virgin, so I feel like I should give some account of those movies. 12 Monkeys rules, as does Terry Gilliam. As someone who has worked a lot of shitty jobs with a lot of people much dumber and emotionally vapid than myself, and as someone who lost their virginity rather late, 40 Year Old Virgin hit a bit too close to home for the concept to be funny, while not being otherwise funny enough to compensate. A Mighty Wind is really fantastic. Which brings us to Adventures in Babysitting.

I had never seen this movie. I didn't watch a lot of movies before college, and the few I was forced to watch on class trips tended to make me hate the movies I tend to think of as "Light Hearted Middle Class Family Comedies." Predictable pedantic putridity wherin the mores of "conventional" society are challenged by unfamiliar situations that push characters out of their comfort zone, only to return them safely without ever challenging the economic or social basis of those conventions. A lesson is learned that tends to make the protagonist more selfish or hedonistic.

Adventures in Babysitting is hardly the worst offender in this category, but being a product of the Disney Corporation it doth sit at the right hand of the master. The story revolves around a painfully naive, painfully suburban Chris Parker who ends up babysitting because her date is canceled. Apparently this is the fate of all single women. Anyway, her best friend runs away from home, to the Chicago bus station, and asks Chris to pick her up. The fact that her friend is freeing from what is broadly hinted to be an abusive home is played for laughs. The Chicago bus station is played as a gateway to the realm of madness.  The kids blackmail Chris into taking them along. Hilarity ensues.

I feel like it is not necessary to continue a detailed plot synopsis from here because, while there are numerous twists and turns, they manage to be largely predictable in context. For example, Chris' date says he can't make it because his sister is sick. Spoiler alert! This is a lie. The scary large tow truck driver with the hook hand? Friendly! Things are not as they seem! Your stereotypes are challenged! Wacky!  

Despite my intense initial rage at these movies, they are also more than the sum of their parts, and there are good entries in this genre. A lot of it is down to pacing, and this movie does a really good job of keeping things going while still allowing character moments. While never really seriously examining the background of the suburban/ urban divide and its implications on American culture, and while it does reinforce this divide while also encouraging distrust of the mentally ill and poor, I just watched a bunch of James Bond movies, so I will say that it manages to avoid overt racism. Although the only black people in the movie are criminals, even if some of those criminals are nice at heart. And they weren't forced to be criminals, either, they chose that lifestyle because they "like the danger." Let me start over.

Adventures in babysitting is not as classist or racist as Mein Kampf, or the Tea Party. The cloying, subconscious racism is not usually very distracting, while the classism is the type of thing you just have to get used to or else put your tv through the head of a Fox commentator. Back to nice things.

The twists are thoroughly predictable, but there sure are a lot of them, and that helps with the pacing. The film is only as sexist as it is racist, but it gets points for a heroine who is assertive without wearing a catsuit, and a little girl character who is obsessed with superheroes.

This is really what saves this movie. Much as Ferris Beuller is only watchable because of Ben Sein and its killer soundtrack, Adventures in Babysitting is saved by a cast of charming characters. From the homicidal fugitive tow truck driver with a heart of gold to the car thief with a heart of gold, there are a plethora of unique characters here, which is good because there are so many they would probably run together otherwise. I was kind of left wishing the protagonist, who was so boring he didn't even get mentioned in the above synopsis, had just been left out so as to give his perverted best friend more air time.

This movie is basically a tightly edited and scripted mess. A product of its time that has not aged well in many ways, good pacing and likable characters keep the whole thing together. The acting is not stellar, but manages to just not be apparent which is what you probably want in a movie like this. I am unlikely to watch this again, but if you really want a light comedy to watch you could do worse. You horrific capitalist bastard.

3/5


Gal Friday here! I think Tom gives a great synopsis and description of the good and bad of this movie, but I have a slightly different take, having watched it as a kid (numerous times), and not seeing for the first time tonight. Most of what prompted me to pick this up in the 2.99 bargains was that nostalgia factor that I thought this movie was badass when I was a sheltered little suburbanite getting a taste of what the big scary "city" was like. Unfortunately, that just reinforced cliches about race relations and socioeconomic divisions between the suburbs and the inner city.

This is, of course, not at all what I consciously took from this movie as a kid. To give a little background, this movie came out in 1987, so I wasn't even 10 when I saw it for the first time. I suppose I identified with Sara, the Thor-worshipping babysittee, though I didn't read comics at that time, and I was confused as hell about all the Thor references, to be honest. I didn't actually understand them until tonight (gasp!). Pretty much all the dangerous events (save one major one) are met by Sara with giggles and "This is great!" which made it less horrifying for kids, I suppose? There were several points tonight when I mused aloud that I couldn't believe my parents let me watch this as a preadolescent, not the least of which was when the 17-year-old babysitter (played by then-24-year-old Elisabeth Shue) threatened two gangs with a knife while stuck with 3 kids in her care on an El-train, saying "Don't FUCK with the Babysitter!"

While I mention the 7 year age discrepancy in the protagonist's age, I should also mention that my feelings on Brad, the elder sibling of Sara's, were that I equated him with Wil Wheaton; or to be fair, Wesley Crusher. That young, out-of-place but deserves more respect than he gets, nice, unassuming '80s guy. Yup, him. There's an unrequited love subplot, but I gotta agree with my coreviewer that Brad's most important role in this movie is to play the straight man to Anthony Rapp's Daryl. Wait, did I say Anthony Rapp? Why yes, Mr. Mark Cohen, of the original Broadway cast of RENT, as a Playboy-stealing, smartmouthed teenager. Poor Brad is overshadowed by basically every dude in this movie. It wasn't until Keith Coogan (Brad) played Kenny in Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead (wow, he had a babysitter-filled career) that I thought of him as hot.

Until he cut off his hair, but that's a different story. I should point out here that he also was the voice of Tod in the Fox and the Hound, just to make you uncomfortable with my last declaration.

So to get back to that socioeconomic divide, something I found interesting to see this now as an adult was that while all the people we see from the suburbs are wealthy and white, not all of the city cast is not. The skeeviest of the bad guys is white:

Creepy Motherfucker.

...and the nicest of the "bad" guys is black. And also cute: 

Yum.

So, how did the movie hold up for me nostalgia-wise? Well, it was interesting; it still hit the points I liked as a kid for me, but there was that added awareness that did detract a bit. There were so many cliches, and it is campy and predictable in a weird way. Would I watch it again? Probably, but not often enough to necessitate keeping the DVD. I'd agree with the prior rating of 3/5.

Verdict: Free to a good home.