For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - The Sitter
The Impression:
I don’t know about David Gordon Green anymore. He started
like an indie-art god, pumped out two pseudo-hilarious
stoner comedies (one far better than the next) and is now
teaming with Jonah Hill for a modern take on Adventures
In Babysitting. I want, badly, to love this film. I
fear, badly, that I won’t.
The Reality:
The Sitter is the biggest let-down of the year. The
second film this week that suffers brutally from the
exacting chop, The Sitter is the skeleton of what
might be a good film. David Gordon Green isn’t stretching
his narrative wings terribly far in the film, telling a
simple story of a fucked up night in the boring life of
baby-sitter. Jonah Hill is almost good, in his final fat
film, as Noah “Jaybird”, a loafing asshole with daddy issues
that is drawn in to a convoluted drug buy in pursuit of
getting fucked. He drags three children through the city on
a series of what I believe someone thought were escalating
adventures but truly are mundane stops along a truly insipid
journey. These sort of films seem so easy to me: you set up
all the trouble in the beginning and along with that trouble
you set up the solutions buried amongst the trouble. David
Gordon Green and company never accurately forecast the
solutions, instead just using the power of deus ex machina
to force them in to the script and the character’s
existence. There are three kids in the film and each of them
manages to invoke a few chuckles but let me say that Spike
Jonze’s reasons for keeping Max Records in yelling mode for
most of Where The Wild Things Are become quickly
apparent in this film. What’s the most painful about this
movie is the slap-happy way Green and Hill toss the
emotional beats in to the film. Without character
development or even a modicum of character growth, learning
that one character has sexuality issues and another daddy
issues, seems cheap and remarkably boring. I can only hope
that David Gordon Green made a film so graphic and
horrifying that the boys at the top sliced it in to nothing,
leaving us with the shitpile that is The Sitter. This
might not be the worst film of the year, but it certainly is
the most disappointing.
The Lesson:
David Gordon Green, I’m approaching your films with caution
from this point out.
- Noah Sanders
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