I keep having this recurring nightmare where a director repeatedly makes lazy stoner comedies crammed with pseudo-shock paedo jokes, lazy emotional cliché and paper thin attempts at nonsense that show all the imagination and energy of a depressed koala.
Hang on a second… David Gordon Green is real?! I thought he was just comedy’s Freddie Krueger! I always seem to fall asleep in his films and have the ugliest cinema-dreams. But if he’s real, then God help us all.
‘The Sitter’ is his latest bore fest, which has barely escaped total box office humiliation in the USA thanks to the dubious honour of being the final film in which Jonah Hill could stomach playing the fat loser who ‘comes good in the end’.
Fair play to Hill for his audacious typecasting jail break, I just wish he’d realised before he signed up for this bilge.
The premise is a simple one, Noah Griffith (Hill) is a fat loser. He doesn’t seem to have a job, or a life, and he’s being duped by Marisa (Ari Graynor) into believing he’s her boyfriend just so she can boss him around, send him for drugs and get oral sex now and then.
One evening, however, Noah’s single mum Sandy (Jessica Hecht) gets a date. It’s been a while, and she does deserve a break but, wouldn’t you know it, the babysitter cancels. So, after a mini emotional tug-o-war Noah ‘does the decent thing’ and steps into the breech.
Unfortunately for him, the three kids he must look after are lazy scripting stereotypes destined to get him into ‘all sorts of trouble’. Slater (Max Records) suffers from anxiety, Blithe (Landry Bender) is a star-struck tween who loves make-up and gossip, and adoptee Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez) is a maladjusted rebel with a penchant for cherry bombs and public urination.
The only thing that could make matters worse is if Marisa demanded Noah go on a mission to get her some drugs, a mission that involves facing off with a zany drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) and a host of other issues.
As Noah goes through the motions, hurdling every lazy gag along the way, I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone at all was bothering. Every gag was so contrived, so painfully obvious in its attempt to combine the idiosyncrasy of ‘The Big Lebowski’ with the crass ‘out there’ humour of other David Gordon Green train wreck that it forgot to actually be funny.
And as if everyone realised that, they tied the whole package of crap together with some forced morals that can easily be summarised by the glib truism ‘be yourself’.
In fact, David, if you’re out there, you should take your own advice. You don’t need to keep making shitty films for people to like you. In fact, if you just gave up and decided to be a zookeeper, we’d respect you more.