Movie Box Review

Jonah Hill is awfully lucky to have made Moneyball this year.  In that film, fueled by a brilliant Aaron Sorkin/Steven Zaillain script, he gave a marvelous performance as half of the year's most unlikely comedy team with Brad Pitt, but since then it's been downhill.   His aggressively unpleasant FOX animation series ALLEN GREGORY has one more episode to run, dumped on a night otherwise filled with reruns, and now there's THE SITTER, a dismally bad and unoriginal formula comedy.

The movie's pitch meeting must have lasted about 15 seconds:  "It's Adventures in Babysitting meets Date Night... but it's dirty!"  "We love it!"  Hill plays Noah, a schlubby college dropout who spends his days living at home with his mother (his prosperous dad, having left them to start a new family, doesn't pay his alimony or child support) and his nights casually abused by Marisa (Ari Graynor, in a variation of her Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist role), who he'd like to think is his girlfriend.  Guilted by mom into babysitting for a neighbor's kids so she can have a night out with a potential romantic interest, Noah is trapped with the seemingly Asbergian Slater (Max Records, from Where the Wild Things Are), aspiring young celebrity-slut Blithe (Landry Bender), and adopted, violent Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez).  When Marisa calls to offer Noah the promise of sex if he'll just buy some drugs for her and bring them to a party in the city, he can't resist even if it means bringing the kids with him, kicking off the evening's run-ins with danger, corruption and supposed hilarity.

The saddest thing about The Sitter is that the script credited to Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka doesn't even let Hill do what he does best.  Despite its R rating and dirty mouth, The Sitter is at heart squeaky-clean; it never lets the children get into any serious danger, and before long Noah's attitude to them is therapeutic, making them better youngsters even as they transform him into more of a responsible adult.  (In the movie's single most bizarre sequence, Noah rediagnoses Slater's compulsions--apparently accurately--as stemming not from a personality disorder requiring medication, but something entirely different.)  Noah even finds true love as his reward for becoming a more mature human being.  Hill's comic strength has mostly come from sarcasm and unjustified hostility, but Noah is a lump and then a reluctant role model, which simply isn't a very funny template.  (Oddly, it's not dissimilar from his role in Get Him to the Greek, where he was straight man to Russell Brand's rampaging id; if Hill is going to develop his own vehicles--he's a producer of The Sitter--he needs to do a better job of figuring out what works for him.)  The movie is so cowardly that it doesn't even have the nerve of the most recent Harold & Kumar movie:  in this picture, when a container of cocaine explodes in the car with Noah and the children, miraculously the kids don't inhale a single grain of it and are entirely unaffected.

The Sitter also poses the question of what the hell is going on with director David Gordon Green.  Green started as the artiest of indie directors, with movies like George Washington and Snow Angels that were seen only by film critics and festival attendees.  He'd always wanted to be in the comedy world, though--Danny McBride, an old friend, played a supporting role in Green's All the Real Girls--and in 2008, he completely switched gears and directed the breakout hit Pineapple Express.  Since then he's been wholeheartedly in the Hollywood camp, directing many episodes of McBride's Eastbound and Down series and concentrating on comedy.  But his taste and skill have been steadily degenerating:  Your Highness was a slack parody all too thrilled with its own inbred cleverness, and The Sitter is much worse, a piece of second-rate hackery that's uninteresting to watch (even though Green's customary cinematographer Tim Orr is behind the camera) and choppily edited (by Craig Alpert) to barely reach feature length at 81 minutes. 

The movie isn't complete misery:  Sam Rockwell (who in a different life was a star of Snow Angels) livens things up whenever he's on the scene as Marisa's murderous drug supplier, because that's what Sam Rockwell does, and occasionally Hill gets to riff for a few seconds when someone like J. B. Smoove shows up.  But The Sitter is largely tiresome and almost completely unfunny, a vanity project for Jonah Hill that doesn't even show him to best advantage.  After this and Allen Gregory (also developed by Hill), he may want to go back to his Moneyball model and put himself into the hands of people who are smarter and more capable of burnishing his talents than he appears to be.

Michael Lewis' book Moneyball was a marvelous read, but seemed like dim source material for a movie. Credit, then, is due to the creators of the film version--the various producers, screenwriters Steven Zailian and Aaron Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller--for finding a compelling narrative spine in a true-life story about the change in an industry's way of thinking.

Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt on screen), General Manager of the Oakland A's, had a seemingly insuperable problem: how to operate a baseball team that could compete with the Yankees of this world on roughly a quarter of their budget for team salaries? In solving that dilemma, he and the young economist he discovered (Jonah Hill, playing a character called Peter Brand but actually a fictionalized version of Paul Podesta), changed the way baseball teams are put together. 

Beane and Podesta/Brand pioneered a statistics-laden method for measuring player worth that ignored time-honored criteria like body type in favor of the ability to get on base. (These theories had started before Beane, with statisticians like Bill James, but had never been put into practice.) To the disdain and disbelief of his scouts and coach, Beane built an "island of misfit toys" of a team, and the movie is the story of the first season they played. 

The triumph of statistics in sports is an unlikely subject for an underdog story (the film is almost entirely about the front office--we just get glimpses of the players through the movie), but it works. Largely this is due to Pitt and Hill, who make a dynamite team. Pitt is both dogged and funny, and Hill underplays as he never has before, to excellent effect. (The two share a sequence together gaming the season's trade deadline--straight from Lewis' book--that's thrillingly smart and hilarious.) The rest of the cast fades in comparison, although Philip Seymour Hoffman is of course tasty in a briefer role as doubting coach Art Howe.

With its wordy exposition and near-abstract disputes (not to mention Sorkin as screenwriter), the obvious point of comparison for Moneyball is last year's The Social Network. Moneyball doesn't quite measure up--Beane isn't as fascinating a character as Network's Mark Zuckerberg, and Miller, although grand with actors, doesn't have the visual or pacing skill of David Fincher. Like the Oakland team it describes, Moneyball's triumph is managing to get to the playoffs at all, whether or not it wins the title.

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People complain that Hollywood doesn't take risks, but Universal went and hired the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks to make a movie about a musical-minded, free-spirit digitally animated character who upturns the life of an ordinary guy... talk about pushing the envelope!  (In fairness, Alvin was a chipmunk singer, while EB is a bunny who plays the drums, so you couldn't actually confuse the two.  And Alvin had brothers.)  Facetiousness aside, the only hit Universal's had in the past couple of years was Despicable Me, and so the new HOP is not only produced by the Despicable production company, but it combines strains from Alvin, Despicable and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory for a hybrid that's predictably synthetic but mildly, inoffensively entertaining.  

In the mythology of Hop, the Easter Bunny is a hereditary title, passed to the next generation along with magic powers and control of a giant candy factory.  (Which is located on Easter Island--there's wit for you!)  The visuals of the factory look like the Everlasting Gobstopper room must be just around the next corner, but instead of Oompa-Loompas, the menial labor is performed by chicks, who act more or less like the Minions in Despicable Me.  The current Bunny In Chief (voice of Hugh Laurie) has an untrustworthy chicken assistant (Hank Azaria), who schemes to take over when Bunny's plan to turn over things to his son EB (Russell Brand) are scuttled when EB flees to LA so he can pursue his dream of being a drummer instead of running the family business.  By now, you're probably wondering who wrote this thing:  script by Cinco Paul, Ken Dauno (both of whom also wrote Despicable Me) and Brian Lynch.

In a year that's given us Mars Needs Moms and Wimpy Kid 2, Hop is at least moderately pleasant to watch.  Brand is actually a good choice as an animated lead--obviously the PG rating doesn't let him do much of what he normally does, but he has the ability to make his lines sound a bit spontaneous. The humans, though, are utterly bland:  Marsden, who was--sorry--charming as the clueless Prince in Enchanted, can't get anything going here, and even reliable actors like Gary Cole and Ellizabeth Perkins are left hanging.  Don't ask about the cameos by Hugh Hefner (bunnies, get it?  I said BUNNIES) and David Hasselhoff.

A Hollywood irony:  although the whole focal point of Hop is Easter (albeit a totally non-sectarian one that according to the dialogue started 4000 years ago), Universal clearly didn't have any faith in the picture competing with Fox's Rio, which opens April 16.  So Hop is reaching theatres 3 weeks before the holiday, and will probably be mostly gone by the time that day arrives.  It's never too soon for the kids to learn about release schedules.  (For more on what goes into movie scheduling, see Mitch Metcalf's article here.)

(HOP - Universal - PG - 95 min. - Director:  Tim Hill - Script:  Cinco Paul, Ken Duano, Brian Lynch - Cast:  Russell Brand, James Marsden, Hugh Laurie, Hank Azaria - Wide Release)