Review of The Sitter (2011) by Shiira — 02 Jan 2012

A real blues audience would have torn Chris Parker apart. On stage with her charges, it's not hard to miss the condescension in the suburban girl's words. She tells the bandleader that "we didn't mean to interrupt your little concert here.

" What gives her the right to call the concert "small"? Instead of being peeved, the bandleader says, "Nobody gets out of this place without singing the blues," because in Adventures in Babysitting, black people are either criminals or entertainers, and stupid ones to boot.

Released in 1986, the Chris Columbus film arrived in theaters just as the Beastie Boys made rap safe for the 'burbs with their debut album License to Ill. Sure enough, we see black music being appropriated with a white sensibility, in which Chris wails about her boyfriend and how "it's so hard babysitting these guys.

" Just like Gary Busey, who as Buddy Holly, wins over a skeptical audience at the Apollo with a killer rendition of "Oh Boy" in "The Buddy Holly Story", Chris also gets the crowd on her side, despite the fact that she turns the blues into the stuff of novelty.

It's hard to believe that her middle-class angst would win over these hardcore fans. The ease in which the sheltered girl trades hi-fives with audience members on her way out the door seems to indicate a lesson learned about racial equality.

At the outset, before Chris starts to testify, she raises the mike(read: black people are small), and Daryl make a clumsy attempt at the black idiom, adding, "Ain't no doubt," to "The Babysitting Blues".

But, alas, all those good vibes evaporate once they're outside the club. When asked about where they're going, Chris sourly answers, "Anywhere but here." Nothing has changed. Earlier in the evening, when riding with a car thief, Chris asserts her racial superiority, declaring, "I'm still in control here," then insults the driver, obviously harmless, by making him promise that he won't hurt the children.

As a correction to the racist overtones that plague Adventures in Babysitting, this time, the car thief, also black(in The Sitter), has a good reason for stealing the minivan. When both Tina and Noah went to high school together, the white boy threw up in an urn containing the ashes of the black girl's grandmother, and judging by her retaliation, she never received a proper apology.

The Sitter is less blurry about race. Adventures in Babysitting made it perfectly clear that Chris had very little, if any, contact with minorities. She leaves the safety of the suburbs only to rescue Brenda, her best friend, who is stranded at the bus station, after getting cold feet about running away from home.

Without her eyeglasses(of course, a homeless black woman steals it), Brenda picks up a giant rat, mistaking the rodent for a cat, but not before we unmistakably make out the fuzzy Coke machine in a POV shot.

Coca-Cola becomes cocaine in The Sitter. Noah heads toward the city so he can score drugs for his girlfriend, with kids in-tow. Whereas Chris was pure as snow, Noah is flawed, which gives the filmmaker some leeway in portraying African-Americans in a less-than-flattering light.

The filmmaker, as an act of self-penance for this common practice(the marginalization of blacks), directs like an apologist for its cinematic progenitor, by having Noah, later on, at a bar, inviting the wronged former classmate to punch him in the face.

While Noah may not be truly sorry(maybe he just wants the vehicle back), perhaps, the filmmaker is. Sadly, the man behind All the Real Girls and Snow Angels once aspired to portray African-Americans as real people.

While the NYC of The Sitter is a far more progressive diegetic space than Elizabeth Shue's Chicago, it's a far cry from the North Carolina utopia shown in the filmmaker's 2000 debut "George Washington", where abject poverty eradicates the color line.

Still, echoes of his auteur days abound in The Sitter, starting with those dinosaur eggs that Karl, a drug lord, uses to stash away the coke. Compared often to Terrence Malick, the T. rex eggs simultaneously references The Tree of Life(Malick's Park) and the alleged acolyte's George Washington, where the dinosaur manifests itself in the form of a mask that Buddy wears while delivering a soliloquy, and in death.

Also, firecrackers link the mentor and student, but whereas George Washington features sparklers(held by Buddy and a grown-up), Julio, of The Sitter, blows toilets up with firecrackers, as opposed to wildlife, a frog, that the father's oldest son kills in The Tree of Life.

Evidently, Malick is not his hero anymore. In the 1986 film, the young girl entrusted to Chris' care, worshiped Thor. Blithe, her counterpart, doesn't believe in such magic; she'd rather be a celebrity, just like the filmmaker, perhaps.

Those halcyon days in Winston-Salem are long-gone. Back when Nasia babysat a cat named Nancy for a vacationing friend. It was an adventure in filmmaking.