The Sitter

Posted on December 8, 2011 at 6:22 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, drug material, and some violence
Profanity:	Constant crude and strong language, sometimes in front of children
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug use, drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, some involving children, guns, explosions, chases, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, some racial and gender stereotyping but supportive discussion of sexual orientation
Date Released to Theaters:	December 9, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004LWZW5G

Basically “Bad Santa” crossed with “Adventures in Babysitting,” “The Sitter” stars Jonah Hill as Noah, an ambitionless doof living with his mother who cannot be bothered to answer the phone, much less find a job.

Overlong at 80 minutes, it is the intermittently comic story of a wild night when, pushed into agreeing to babysit three children, he decides to take them out so that he can pick up some cocaine to bring to a girl who has promised to have sex with him. Noah’s charges are Blithe (Landry Bender), a little girl obsessed with celebrity who disturbingly calls things “hot” and wants to go clubbing, Slater (Max Records of “Where the Wild Things Are”), a 13-year-old with anxiety medications in his fanny pack, and Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), a recently adopted firebug who enjoys throwing M-80’s down toilets. Ignoring every direction from the children’s mother and every basic tenet of good sense and responsibility, he puts them in the family car and takes off for the big, bad city.

Noah picks up $150 worth of cocaine from a drug dealer named Karl (Sam Rockwell) who surrounds himself with body builders and stores his drugs in irreplaceable and very fragile dinosaur eggs. When Rodrigo takes one of the eggs and spills $10,000 of cocaine all over the car, Karl gives him an hour to get the money. Noah and the kids have encounters with a store clerk who wonders why Noah is hanging around the little girls’ underwear department (you don’t want to know the answer), the gala Noah’s mother and the kids’ parents are attending, a fancy restaurant, a bat mitzvah party, Noah’s estranged father and his jewelry store, and a skeevy bar. Noah runs into a former classmate and the ex of the girl he is trying to, let’s use the polite word here — woo.

Even for a silly comedy, the carelessness of the racial and gender stereotyping is distracting. A sweet inter-racial romance and a heartening pep talk to a kid struggling with being honest with himself about being gay is not enough to make up for not one but two sassy/angry black women, a pool-hall full of black gangstas who are way too easily impressed with Noah, and Rodrigo, a pint-sized Scarface-in-training. The script is just a lazy series of set-ups and its two premises collide uncomfortably. The comedy, slight as it is, of the first half of the movie is based on Noah’s disregard for the most basic notions of decency and responsibility. He then somehow turns into SuperNanny, resolving all of the kids’ issues with cheery little pep talks, as though he is about to start singing about a spoonful of sugar. But this is no jolly holiday.

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The Greening of Whitney Brown

Posted on November 22, 2011 at 12:03 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for brief mild language
Profanity:	Brief mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 23, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005TTEG0M

A middle schooler who thinks she has it all figured out finds herself tossed from 1 percent-ville to 99-percent-land in a cute new film in limited release called “The Greening of Whitney Brown.” Sammi Hanratty plays the title character, a spoiled prep school princess who is elected school president on a platform that is all about throwing the biggest, best, and most expensive party. But then her father loses his job when his company goes bankrupt and her parents (Aiden Quinn and Brooke Shields) take her to a place in the country that is all they have left. Everything is old and broken, there’s a horse that follows her around like Mary’s little sheep, she gets no cell phone reception, and everything she thought she knew about what makes someone popular turns out not to apply in her new school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeklp2nRXe4

Whitney has to start over more than once, especially after it turns out that the friend she trusted to watch out for her at her old school is more competitive and less loyal than she thought. As Whitney’s parents begin to figure out a path to a new career out in the country, Whitney begins to understand that things she once thought were important don’t matter and things she once dismissed without a thought are where the real value lies.

Into the Abyss

Posted on November 16, 2011 at 12:43 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material and some disturbing images
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	References to drugs and alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	The movie concerns the violent murder of three people and the aftermath, many references to violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 16, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0067EKZ62

Werner Herzog continues his exploration of the darkness and the light within the human spirit with “Into the Abyss,” a documentary about why and how we kill each other, in violation of the law and directed by it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uV1_Yc8OSw

In Texas, where as many as two prisoners are executed each week, Herzog speaks to the people connected to one crime, the senseless murder of three people by a couple of teenagers, who were just trying to steal a hot car. Herzog remains off-camera as he interviews the men, now in their 20’s, who are in prison, one just days from his scheduled execution, the woman whose mother and brother were two of the victims, the chaplain and the correctional officer who are the last people the condemned prisoner sees, the police officer who investigated the crime, and others who help to tell the bleak story of loss and limits.

Herzog lets each of them tell us not just what they think but who they are. He lets us discover for ourselves the telling details like the sign that says “Dream” over the fireplace in the living room of the corrections officer as he tells us that after over 100 executions he just could not do it any more and the tree growing through the floorboards of the car once deemed worth three lives, now rotting in the police impound lot. We meet the father of one of the two prisoners whose only gift to his son was pleading with the jury not to sentence him to death. A woman describes falling in love with one of the men in prison and marrying him there. Both have surprises that confound our expectations. Many of the interviews present a bleak portrait of limited vistas and opportunities alongside limitless need for love.

Indeed, no matter what views you bring to this film, you will come away enlarged, moved, changed as much from the compassion and generosity of Herzog himself as from the people he interviews. Herzog, who had just an hour with each of his subjects and shows us his first and only conversations with them, has made a film that expands his consideration of the human struggle for connection and meaning.

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The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 10:51 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Date Released to Theaters:	October 27, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	1591141222

Documentaries made by adult children about their fathers have become a significant new genre. My Architect is the story of Louis Kahn by the son he never publicly acknowledged. In Tell Them Who You Are, filmmaker Mark Wexler trains his camera on his cinematographer father, Haskell. And in “Five Wives, Three Secretaries, and Me,” Tessa Blake uses her million dollar trust fund to make a movie about her multiply-married father, Texas oilman Thomas Walter Blake, Jr. All of these films, in their way, are about secrets. But this film, about the head of the CIA, is about family secrets and national security secrets, too. Can a man whose job is keeping secrets share enough of himself to be a good father? Does a man who loves secrets even want to be? “I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt,” says his son, Carl.

Part family story, with insightful comments from the woman who was wife to the movie’s subject and is mother to the movie’s director and part “Fog of War”-style exploration of America’s role in post-WII international affairs with a Who’s Who of Cold War policy-makers, this is a riveting and important film that does not rest too heavily on the connection between its subject’s personal emptiness and the moral failures Colby would come to regret. He kept so many secrets he lost touch with the reasons. Its elegiac tone concluding in Colby’s mysterious death — alone — in a boating accident, ties together the sense of personal, professional, and national loss.

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Margin Call

Posted on October 20, 2011 at 6:50 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	Constant profanity and bad language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations, job loss, betrayal
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 21, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	May 1, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005FITIGO

Investors can make bets by promising to buy stock at a higher or lower price than the current day’s valuation. If all goes well, they never actually have to buy the stock. They can keep buying and selling the bets with borrowed money without ever having to buy the underlying securities. But if it does not go well, the investor gets what is known as a margin call and has to come up with the cash.

The financial meltdown of 2008 was like a margin call for America, and we will be paying off that debt for a long time. This movie, as tightly wound as a thriller, takes us through a fictionalized version of the night when it all tipped over from going well to not going well at an enormous Wall Street company, and it was time to pay the piper and a lot of others as well.

“You guys ever been through this before?” asks Will (Paul Bettany), as some serious looking people in suits start tapping people on the shoulder and saying, “I’m afraid we have to speak with you” to the people in cubicles “Best to ignore it, keep your head down, go back to work. Don’t watch.”

“The majority of this floor is being let go today,” says the serious woman in a suit. She speaks of “certain precautions that may seem punitive.” She glances down at the paperwork when she speaks of “your — 19 — years” with the (never-named) company. And then we see people carrying cardboard boxes of belongings out the front door of a shiny skyscraper, their eyes blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight.

This is nothing new, as Will’s comment informs us. It is a routine, if brutal pruning of the staff. This is a cutthroat business and periodically some throats get cut. And periodically Will has to speak to those left behind: “These were good people and they were good at their jobs, but you are better. We will not think of them again.” Back to work watching all those screens with all those numbers.

But one of the departed has left something behind. There is evident irony in the name of the division that has been gutted. It is the Risk Management group. And the 19-year veteran who has been shown the door has been working on a new analysis of the firm’s position. He turns his thumb drive over to the young colleague who has been kept on, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), a literal rocket scientist with “a PhD in propulsion,” who plugs a few holes in the formula that reveal that the firm is in their terms, “projected losses are greater than the current value of the company.” In other words, on the verge of collapse. That is when it gets interesting. Sullivan has proven that there are going to be some devastating losses. The question is who will pay for them.

The rest of the long night will be devoted to answering that question. It is like a long game of musical chairs, except that these people get to decide when to stop the music so they can get to the chairs before everyone else.

The guy at the top is John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). Given a choice between reputation and money, he has no hesitation in choosing money. He tells the head of sales, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) to sell the ticking time bomb securities by assuring their clients that they are solid investments, even though Rogers points out that no one will ever trust them again. “You’re selling something you know has no value.” “We’re selling to willing buyers at fair market value so that we can survive.”

Rogers is not the only one who raises concerns, moral and financial. But writer-director J.C. Chandor lets us see when and how each of them topple, and what makes them topple, which turns out to be money. Dale repeatedly says there is nothing that can get him to go back inside the building and yet there he is, back in the building. Rogers says he will not sell these risky securities to clients because “you don’t sell anything to anybody unless they’ll come back to you for more.” But he does.

This could just as easily be set in the scuzzy world of the real-estate salesmen of “Glengarry Glen Ross” or the “leave the gun, take the cannoli” world of “The Godfather.” Chandor keeps enough of the real story to keep things vivid and meaningful but does not get mired in jargon. Crisp performances by everyone keep things taut until a surprising detour at the end. For the first time we leave the world of glass and concrete for an intensely personal moment of loss and grief. “Our talents have been used for the greater good,” one character says, reminding us that the very selection process that takes people who are capable of more tangible contributions are unable to resist the big money that pays them a many-times multiple for financial engineering over mechanical engineering. And reminding us, too, that if we let people who care only about money make the decisions they will make decisions that are only about money for them.

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