Cynical Cinema

When I first started watching The Babysitters, out today from Peace Arch Entertainment, I was worried.  It’s the story of a bunch of high school girls who get together and form a prostitution ring through babysitting.  Their adult clients hire them for lots of money, they look after the kids, and then they have sex.  I was worried that it might be dumbed-down, and not very sexy, because it’s high school girls.  Then I was worried that it might actually be sexy, which would be creepy because it’s high school girls.  I was also worried about the casting.  Much as I enjoy the works of John Leguizamo, I just didn’t see him as the attractive father who sleeps with his attractive babysitter and gets this whole ball rolling.

I was wrong to be worried, at least about Leguizamo.  He is actually very believable, both as a father who is losing touch with his wife (played by Cynthia Nixon - the one who was pregnant on Sex And The City), and also as an older man who might well fall into the arms of a young teenage girl and who may well have that girl throw herself at him as well.  And there isn’t a lot of sex actually shown, so it isn’t too creepy.  But it’s not dumbed down either.  It’s fairly smart, in terms of the dialogue, and well-acted.  Katherine Waterston is very convincing as the proprietress of this organization of ill repute. 

The big problem with the movie, however, is that it’s very one-sided.  It is (sadly) very easy to believe that all these creepy men would exist in the city, willing to pay for sex with young teenagers.  But this movie also seems to make the supposition that just about any high school girl would be willing to sleep with a forty-something father for money.  And although I have never been a high school girl, and I know very few of them these days, I would like to hope this isn’t the case.  If it is, it’s rather disconcerting.  And that sense of unease stayed with me for the rest of the movie.  I couldn’t really shake it, and that made the movie difficult to enjoy.

Love In The Time Of Cholera is two and a half hours long. The tag line on the DVD box is “how long would you wait for love?” My answer is “not this long”. The movie is based on a novel of the same name by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it takes place in South America. I have always wondered this about period pieces. If the characters are in a time and a place where they would logically be speaking Spanish, why then do they speak English with Spanish accents? It makes more sense that the movie would be in Spanish with English subtitles, or in regular English. Why try to do half-and-half? At least in The Hunt For Red October and movies like that, the movie begins in another language with subtitles, and moves seamlessly into English so that we can watch the movie in that language. Either way, in any language, this movie blows.

Javier Bardem plays a man who is denied his true love (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) as a young boy, and waits 51 years for the woman’s husband to die so he can go after his dream girl once again. In the meantime, he becomes the ultimate ladies man and romantic, and sleeps with six hundred and twenty-two women. On the plus side, we get to see many of their boobs. On the downside, this is two and a half hours of…not much. Benjamin Bratt plays the husband, and somehow his Spanish accent is kind of laughable. Also, because the movie takes place over 55 years, the stars have to get made up to look older and older as the movie goes on. Which sometimes works seamlessly, as it does with Bardem, and at other times looks like…well, makeup and fake moustaches, like with Bratt.

Predictable, and occasionally silly, Love In The Time Of Cholera is occasionally fun, sometimes painful, but mostly boring and slow. Javier Bardem is great, but why watch this movie when No Country For Old Men is out there? Stay away from this one, and rent No Country For Old Men again.