“I came for my motherfucking keys to my motherfucking minivan, and that’s what’s up!“
Jonah Hill has been acting since 2004 when he first debuted in a short, and very memorable, scene in I Heart Huckabees. Since then he’s gone on to star in Accepted, Knocked Up, Superbad and Cyrus where he’s made a name for himself being another foul mouthed teen/young adult who just makes me laugh by being overly crude in every scene. So all the Hollywood big wigs got together thought of a scenario where being crude and outlandish isn’t exactly the most P.C. thing to do, maybe babysitting a bunch of children and taking them out on a cocaine deal, and thought getting Jonah Hill would be a sure fire thing; I’m here to say that they are wrong.
If the measure of a drama is how often I cry then the measure of a comedy is how often I laugh, then that means that The Sitter fails completely as a movie in every way. The Sitter is one of those – not so rare anymore – cases of a writer thinking he’s the greatest writer in the world and no one out there being man enough to tell him he isn’t; I also believe that 80% of the blame can be heaped on the studio’s belief that allowing Jonah Hill to riff for minutes on end in scenes is all you need to make a movie funny.
David Gordon Green was a name that was held in high regard in the art film circles. With films like All the Real Girls and Snow Angels he was a filmmaker that found ways of making small stories into something monumental. Then he made Pineapple Express, which in every way I believe is worth considering to be a great movie, the only problem with that is that it made studios shoe-horn himself into this ridiculous style of comedy which generally sits on the edge and if you push just a little too far into that ridiculous it just doesn’t work.
The Sitter is the kind of film where I want to start pointing fingers to decide who to blame but at the end of the day seems more like a systematic failure than anything else. It’s the product of what big studio marketing teams try to quantify the art of cinema to find all the factors that make a good (profitable) movie and end up doing the complete opposite. Part of me hopes that this movie bombs just as much as Your Highness did earlier this year so as to give Green a chance to return to his roots as a filmmaker and do something special again.
I hate what DGG is doing these days. I want him to go back to the kind of films he used to make. They were so much better. I'm glad this film isn't doing well.
Truly they are… but at the same time I wouldn't want to give up Pineapple Express at all.