Adventures in Babysitting - 1987

"Adventures in Babysitting" - 1987
Dir. by Chris Colombus - 1 hr. 42 min.

Original Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

It seems like every good movie from the 1980s was set in Chicago.  Even if you just stuck with "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "The Blues Brothers," that whole decade at the movies was like a travel brochure for the Second City.  "Adventures in Babysitting" may not be quite on the level of those other two films, but it's still really funny, and holds up well, and is yet another movie set in Chicago.  And you might think that you don't want to watch a movie about some high-school kid toughing it through a night watching other kids, but you'd be wrong.  There are plenty of surprises along the way, and it does the nearly impossible; this is a watchable all-ages movie that won't bore anyone.

After getting stood up by her boyfriend, Mike (Bradley Whitford), because of an ill sibling, Chris (Elisabeth Shue) ends up getting wrangled into a babysitting gig.  The kids she'll be watching are a high-school freshman who's in love with her, Brad (Keith Coogan), and his Thor-worshipping little sister, Sara (Maia Brewton).  The plans for a smooth evening in are wrecked, first by Brad's goofball friend, Daryl (Anthony Rapp), who shoehorns his way into the evening plans, and then further by Chris' friend Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), who has impetuously run away from home, only to regret the decision, and to find herself without any money, stuck in a downtown bus station full of aggressively colorful characters.  Chris has to save Brenda's bacon, and also has to drag along the three kids for a quick trip into the city.  And, of course, things go smoothly.

There's a lot to be said for making an adventure movie that's fun for everyone.  And, aside from this scene, the humor's held up pretty well over the years:

Vincent D'Onofrio and Chris Hemsworth might disagree.

The entire situation is set up pretty well; all the characters have specific motivations, and are not just generic "kids" that are there to be generic kids.  That might seem like a minor thing, but the character's personalities come into play through the plot.  Even if you work backwards from the things you want to have happen in a story, and then build characters around that, it's satisfying as a viewer to have seemingly oddball personality traits play directly into how the story unfolds.  There are also things that probably seemed terrifying back in the 1980s that come off as charmingly naive, like a trip into the big city being a life-threatening daredevil trick.  But then again, entire movies were built around the idea of downtown New York being Hell on Earth, so things have presumably been cleaned up a bit over the intervening years.

A lot of the movie's charm rests on Elisabeth Shue's performance, and she's game from the opening scene, where she's bedroom dancing to the Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me."

It's a great scene, and a great opening scene, and an amazingly efficient opening scene; a brief moment of anticipation and joy that will come crashing down pretty much immediately.  It establishes Chris' character, she's positive and joyful and charming and girlish and unguarded, in all the best ways, and sets her up as a sympathetic character, which is important when bad things start happening to and around her.  The fact that is all established in something like the first minute or two of the movie (I mean, you might be won over before the scene is concluded, if you're a push-over like me) is a minor masterpiece of a scene.  And Shue has other good scenes as well, the best of which are probably when she defuses a train gang-fight, and when Albert Collins leads her through an impromptu blues song about the difficulties of babysitting in front of a skeptical audience.

"Adventures in Babysitting" is very much an adventure movie, with twists and turns just like an Indiana Jones movie, albeit in an urban setting.  As it turns out, against the conceit of the movie (that the big city is terrifying and will eat you alive), pretty much everyone wants to help Chris and the gang achieve their goal, even if they're otherwise unsavory.  And there are a lot of fun surprises along the way, the biggest of which for me was that Vincent D'Onofrio played "Thor" in this movie, bearing little physical resemblance to his character from roughly a year prior, "Full Metal Jacket."

On the whole, I really enjoyed re-watching "Adventures in Babysitting."  It's been a number of years since I'd watched (since I was a teenager, probably), but I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the whole deal held up.  I don't think it's a matter of nostalgia clouding the matter, either.  It helps quite a bit that the kids aren't 'tude-riddled brats who need a time-out, but have distinct personalities and wants, and behave consistently to those.  The one kid who can't stop cracking wise is regarded as a dork (at best), which is not how this story would have played out if this movie had been made in the last ten years (look at Jonah Hill's "The Sitter" for concrete proof of that).  Instead, this is both a solid comedy and a solid adventure film, anchored by Elisabeth Shue being pretty awesome.  It's also the first directorial effort by Chris Columbus, who would go on to handle movies like "Mrs. Doubtfire" and a couple of the Harry Potter films, so you know that he's got the touch on the all-ages front.  "Adventures" is just early proof of that.

3.5 / 5 - Streaming

Escape Plan - 2013

"Escape Plan" - 2013
Dir. by Mikael Hafstrom - 1 hr. 55 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollfield

First off, Sylvester Stallone has a really lumpy face.  That's actually an asset in films like this, but it stood out upon watching "Escape Plan," and I thought I'd get that out of the way.  Also of note, "Escape Plan" isn't going to go down in the top handful of films that either Stallone or co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger has done, but at the same time, it wasn't "Wild Hogs" or "Space Cowboys," with constant jokes about how old the stars are, and their assortments of balms and ointments.  Instead, this is a straight-up thriller, basically physically solving a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, and makes good use of the people involved, and if you're down with this sort of thing, you won't regret watching it.

Ray Breslin (Stallone) make a living escaping from prisons.  Like, super max security prisons, even from solitary confinement.  He owns a security consulting firm built around selling his particular skill-set to those who would need it, abetted by his "techno-thug," Hush (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), resident female skeptic, Abigail (Amy Ryan), and business specialist, Lester Clark (Vincent D'Onofrio).  A woman comes in with a dodgy offer, claiming to be from the C.I.A., but with impossible and unfriendly circumstances, and yet with a sufficiently attractive fistful of dollars.  So a day later, Ray is abducted and thrown into a very daunting and harsh prison.  Upon landing in the prison, Emil (Schwarzenegger) slowly befriends Ray, and they work together to first figure out where the hell they are, and then to find a way out of where they are.

I joked ahead of time that I was going to be sorely disappointed if there weren't any explosions here, and that nearly happened.  "Escape Plan" relies a lot more heavily on tension, and personal physical violence (and a pressing system) than pyrotechnics.  And even though both Stallone and Schwarzenegger are clearly still in pretty good shape, it's not a shirtless kind of movie, nor a wall-to-wall action kind of movie.  This is about solving a puzzle when there seemingly aren't any clues to start with, and surviving the circumstances.  While I found the set-up interesting (at least interesting enough to catch the movie in the first place), I can't say that the film gives you a chance to solve things for yourself.  Honestly, the solutions are too complicated to do that, but when Ray breaks out of the first prison (to show you that he's really good at this, instead of just telling you that and hoping you'll take their word for it), I think viewers will find themselves more amazed that this character can make something out of nearly nothing than seeing the puzzle and having the character beat them to a solution.

The suspense of the bigger job that Ray is hired for is enough to carry the movie.  Although both stars bust off a couple of good one-liners along the way, this is also not the kind of free-wheeling, blowing up everything while caring not even a little bit kind of film.  I bring this up because a big part of why someone would want to go see "Escape Plan" is also the same reason that the two "Expendables" movies have done well - nostalgia.  And this film is not like a lost production from the 1980s.  To everyone's credit, they are not just trying to repackage an old product and pass it off as being fresh; they've made a movie where the main characters are older because they are, and they're not trying to pretend they're not.  "Escape Plan" also doesn't feel like the sort of movie that could have starred anyone.  If it were Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson here, you might question if either of them were really smart enough to be an escape artist, specializing in impossible situations (no insult to either, but neither man has made a career playing brilliant men to date).  The main annoyance I had was that the people who had weird quirks were immediately obviously bad guys (because they had quirks instead of death glares), but I can't get too mad about it.  This is not a stage production of "Hamlet."

On the whole, I was glad that I caught "Escape Plan," and especially on a big screen.  It's not going to blow anyone's mind, it's probably not going to be in line for any year-end awards.  But it's intended to be a couple of hours of entertainment, preferably for people who have enjoyed Stallone's and Schwarzenegger's work over the years, and who don't feel the need to nitpick things to death.  I mean, it's Rambo and the Terminator side-by-side, and that's pretty cool.  I can't imagine needing to watch it again, but there are always colds and viruses floating around, and oddball movies on cable all around the clock.

2 / 5 - Theatre

Full Metal Jacket - 1987

"Full Metal Jacket" - 1987
Dir. by Stanley Kubrick - 1 hr. 56 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Yes, I watched "Full Metal Jacket" on Christmas.  It's okay - they sing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus himself at one point in the film, so it loosely counts as a holiday film.  Also, even though I'm not particularly knowledgeable or even into war films very much, FMJ is a doozy of a movie.

The plot of "Full Metal Jacket" follows a couple of recruits in the Marines (well. a whole platoon of them, but the focus is on two), Private Joker (Matthew Modine) and Private Gomer Pyle (Vincent d'Onofrio) through their basic training, which involves a lot of how-you-say tough love from their drill instructor, Gunner Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey).  Only one makes it out of basic, and is sent to Vietnam to report on the war, and ends up fighting alongside the unit he's supposed to be covering.

Okay, for a film that's twenty-five years old, I suppose I don't need to tap-dance around spoilers.  Consider that a warning.  As is usually the case, it's not so much the germ of the idea that matters as much as the execution.  And the execution here is absolutely brilliant.  This is something in between two and three films packed into one.  A director could easily make an entire film about basic training, and the first forty-five minutes of FMJ stand on their own as a stunning unbroken barrage.  There's not so much dialogue as there is forty minutes of Gny Sgt. Hartman railing on these recruits endlessly, and five minutes of aftermath.  R. Lee Ermey's performance is iconic, and provides enough verbal material for anyone who would want to provoke bar-fights for an entire lifetime.  And honestly, this entire first part of the film could be carried by Ermey's performance, but it doesn't have to.  Both Pvt. Joker and Pvt. Gomer Pyle have very minimal dialogue; this is appropriate because these Marines are being trained to act and not to talk.  Vincent d'Onofrio does more with reactions and projecting his deteriorating mental state (and virtually no dialogue) than I've ever seen.  He's so excellent in this role (and Kubrick so good at picking out scenes to show how badly Pyle is being broken down over the course of these eight weeks) that as horrific and shocking as Pyle's eventual response is to his situation, you know and feel that it's coming the whole time.

Over the course of these forty-five minutes, it's not so much of an emotional roller-coaster ride as it's the part of the roller-coaster ride where you've crested and start free-falling for a few seconds groundward looped and with no end in sight.  While Pvt. Joker excels, Pvt. Pyle is not only going to Hell, he's arrived there before his death and is taking people with him.  Before we even get to the war itself in Vietnam, the audience is taken through the ringer.

Once in Vietnam, the pressure of basic training is replaced by a different pressure for the two main characters we follow from here - Joker (who has gotten a military newspaper correspondent gig) and his cameraman, Rafterman.  It's not the pressure of having to please a superior, it's the pressure of being somewhere they aren't wanted, and of getting shot at unexpectedly.  There are more iconic scenes here; the "me so horny" bit that kicks off the second major part of the movie and the climax of the movie involving the unit being waylaid by a sniper, and the unit having to take out the sniper.  It almost goes without saying that "Full Metal Jacket" is an intense movie, but it also needs to be said.  Unlike Kubrick's other anti-war film, "Dr. Strangelove...," this is not a comedy.  It's a horror film that is set in a war zone; a battle between two sides that have no correct moves to make.  Everything either side does just makes things worse, but they have no choice but to act.

The climax with the sniper, which turns out to be a young Vietnamese girl, is as brutal and predictable as Pvt. Pyle's end.  And I don't mean predictable as a pejorative, it's the kind of predictable where you can see the mistakes coming and can't get out of the way of them.  This is part of the horror of "Full Metal Jacket," that you know what's coming and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.  Kubrick does recycle one trick from "Strangelove," following up the harrowing scene with the girl begging someone to shoot her and put her out of her misery, with a bunch of troops marching in the middle of the night in front of burning buildings, while singing the "Mickey Mouse Show" theme song.  That juxtaposition of light-hearted music with the horrors of war is a grand anti-war statement: when you have no choice but to behave in an awful manner, the only solace left is subversion and irony.

"Full Metal Jacket" is one of the best war films I've seen.  It holds up, the humor just as dark and awful as ever, the horrors just as bad as any nightmare.  "Strangelove" is still my favorite Kubrick film, but this is right on its heels on that list.

4.5 / 5 - Blu-Ray