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Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

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Johnny Dickshot Jun 20 2006 12:22 PM

Fresh off her starmaking role as the pudgy-thighed, soccer-playing, heartbreaker of karate-practicing teens good and evil, Elisabeth Shue plays a high-school hottie stuck watching some bratty kids in Adventures in Babysitting. This movie is great if you identify at all with being a dorky, hormone-infested 13-year-old desperate to bang a high-school senior, with an even dorkier, even more hormone infested, 13 year old friend desperate to bang anything. That’s pimply, lovestruck Brad, whose lust for his babysitter comes out as awkwardness and false hope that he can behave his way into babysitter nookie; and his friend Darryl, who’s so horny he has no strategy and cannot behave. Shue plays Chris, a student-council-y but cute high-school senior contracted to babysit Brad and his cute little sister Sara (a smart-alecky 8-year-old who’s into Thor) while their parents go to the city for a function. This being a 1980s teen movie, the city is required by law to be Chicago, and the kids, again by law, are wealthyish white suburbanites without any real cares or wants. Chris is mature and trustworthy, but naïve: The parents completely trust her with their kids but she thinks having a college boyfriend is important. Things get weird on this job when shortly into it, she gets a call from her troubled drama queen friend who’s stuck at a big city bus depot after a failed attempt at a runaway. It’s against Chris’ best babysitting instincts to go get her, but they do, and the film becomes its title, as the group gets caught up in a car-theft ring, gang-wars, organized crime, black people and other calamities that sprawled out suburban rich white knownothings are certain they will encounter in cities. Although they find some sweetness in the city too this was a message I think, lots of 80s movies sent kids: Don’t even go to the city. And if you do, be sure to find a white guy to save you. So this flick is flawed in all kinds of ways, I recommend it for the admirability of Elisabeth She’s Chris, and for Brad’s absurdly awkward attraction to her, which is well-done. Plus the little girl is cute.

Edgy DC Jun 20 2006 12:40 PM

IMDB tells me that Southside Johnny and Albert Collins appear, so this qualifies for the next eighties films/eighties bands trivia thread.

Johnny Dickshot Jun 20 2006 01:10 PM

Yes, Southside Johnny plays a singer at the fraternity party where Darryl finally gets a girl and Chris meets a rugby-shirt-wearing dimpled white boyfriend type. He croons a slow-blues ballad called "I see my future in your eyes," Albert Collins is better as a bluesman who, in an entertaining but hardly believeable scene, makes the fleeing kids -- and their crime-family pursuers -- sing on stage as their race through the city leads them into a blues club.

Vic Sage Jun 21 2006 11:48 AM

i find the film virtually unwatchable. On the other hand, Shue is VERY watchable in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. In fact, I love it when actresses, who were either 1) child performers, or 2) typecast, or 3) otherwise unable to get "serious" roles, decide to make a "career move" by appearing in a movie where they are nearly or totally naked. This practice is described and satirized in a great scene in Blake Edwards' movie "S.O.B.", where the director is trying to talk goody-goody star Julie Andrews into going topless. And she does! Its a sub-genre i have great affection for.

RealityChuck Jun 23 2006 09:43 AM

"Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues." And the "Babysittin' Blues" is just a great song. One of Chris Columbus's better films. He did a lot of drek (except for Only the Lonely) before Harry Potter. Elizabeth Shue deserved a better career.

Vic Sage Jun 23 2006 12:17 PM

One of Chris Columbus's better films. That is ultimate damnation with the faintest of praise. Chris Columbus is what happens when film school grads go terribly wrong. He is the quintessential hack of the Spielberg generation. CC started out as a screenwriter: Gremlins (1984) (writer) Reckless (1984) (writer) Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) (writer) The Goonies (1985) (writer) His first one, GREMLINS, turned out to be a fairly amusing and twisted satire on small-town America, with a cartoonish energy supplied by director Joe Dante. It turned out that he really only had one script in him. The others were soullessly mechanical "coming-of-age and/or boy's adventure"-type movies, but with a dark side to make them creepy. But the scripts were successful enough to get CC his shot to direct, starting with the aforementioned ADV/BABYSITTING. Adventures in Babysitting (1987) (director) Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1988) (writer) Heartbreak Hotel (1988) (writer / director) Home Alone (1990) (director) Only the Lonely (1991) (writer / director) Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) (director) Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) (director) Nine Months (1995) (writer / director / producer) BABYSITTING, in the style of his scriptwork, mined the youth market with its "young protagonists in Jeopardy" formula, and it demonstrated he could direct a studio feature, in a calculated but competent manner. Thus, CC entered his "auteur" phase as a writer/director of H.HOTEL, O.T.LONELY and 9MONTHS, where he seems to be trying to create films out of more truthful emotions rather than the mechanical slapstick and cloying faux-sentimentality of his director-for-hire projects, like HOME ALONE1,2 and DOUBTFIRE. But the only film with which he succeeds in creating recognizably human characters to tell a funny and genuinely touching story is ONLY THE LONELY... and that is probably to the credit of John Candy as much as CC. With 9 MONTHS, he takes on the mantel of producer, too, so that one is totally his baby, as it were. And it marks the beginning of his "impresario" period, which continued with the following list of dreck: Jingle All the Way (1996) (producer) Stepmom (1998) (director / producer) Bicentennial Man (1999) (director / producer) Monkeybone (2001) (executive producer) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) (director / exec.prod) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) (director / exec.prod) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) (producer) Christmas with the Kranks (2004) (writer / producer) Fantastic Four (2005) (executive producer) Rent (2005) (director / producer) Despite the justifiable failure of all his non-Potter projects during the last 10 years, it is not yet time to say "Goodbye, Columbus", it seems. When I heard that he was set to direct DAREDEVIL, my heart sank. Luckily, he left the project. But now, anytime I hear about some new movie project that sounds really exciting, i hold my breath until i'm sure that CC is not involved with it.

RealityChuck Jun 23 2006 01:48 PM

I almost called Columbus a total hack, but the Harry Potter films were decent, as was Rent. However, in both cases, he had a sure-fire property and merely competently brought it to the screen (the post-Columbus Potter films are better than his two, though). He has only had two decent films: Only the Lonely, which is a fine film by any standard, and Adventures in Babysitting, which is promising but not great. Most of his stuff was crowd-pleasing crap; Home Alone is only redeemed from boredom by the final sequence, and Mrs. Doubtfire was treacly, unfunny, dishonest and poorly constructed (e.g., they make a big deal about losing Williams' mask, yet when it's destroyed, he gets another in about ten seconds) . Home Alone 2 had all the flaws of the original with nothing funny happening and Nine Months was just plain awful. And if he was involved in renaming "Skipping Christmas" (a good title) to "Christmas with the Kranks" (a terrible one), it shows he's completely deaf to tone as a writer.