Just the Ticket #43: Sit and Rotate

Okay, so I lied a little about the whole once a week review thing. The orchard got rained out today so I have the day off. Figured I'd use the time to get an extra blog in.
Yeah, the title of today's issue is just a bit crude, and it doesn't matter because it fits in perfectly with one of the movies up for review today.

But before we get into The Sitter, let's talk about propellers (which rotate...get it?) and the 2004 survival drama, Flight Of the Phoenix. FOtP is a remake of the 1965 film of the same name (but with a "The" tacked on the beginning) that starred Richard Attenborough and Mr. Smith himself, Jimmy Stewart, along with a few other classic film legends.
The update stars Dennis Quaid in Stewart's role as cargo pilot Frank Towns, whose plane crashes in the Sahara (or actually, the Gobi) while flying an oil-drilling crew back home. As hope of rescue dwindles, pitting friends and strangers against one another, it turns out one of them is an aeronautical engineer who hatches a plan to build a new plane from the salvageable pieces of the wreckage.
At a time when movie theaters were being assaulted with one-damned-thing-after-another disaster schlockbusters like The Day After Tomorrow (another Quaid flick), Phoenix was a breath of fresh air that kept the storms and violent spectacle of nature to a minimum, focusing more on the tempestuous dynamics of the survivors (who also consisted of Transformers star Tyrese Gibson, rapper Sticky Fingaz, House's Hugh Laurie, Supernatural's Jared Padalecki, and an unexpectedly versatile Giovanni Ribisi as the man with the plane--uh, plan, that is) and the looming threat of nomadic smugglers.
That's basically the meat and plot-taters of Flight Of the Phoenix, so all that's left is to talk at some length about the man who stole the show: Ribisi. Up to that point, Giovanni Ribisi's career had consisted of frequent typecasting as a jittering, shrieking junkie paired with an equally negatively typecast actress like Evan Rachel Wood. But in Phoenix he shines, looking mousy in his bleach-blonde hair and too-large geek goggles, but also carrying himself in a way that he is able to demand attention so successfully that you'd swear he commanded it instead. Watching Ribisi's whiny, creepy, enigmatic engineer at work, and getting lost in the character's speech patterns is like experiencing a pint-sized Michael Emerson (of JJ Abrams' hit shows Lost and Person Of Interest) in all his subtle and cunning glory. I've seen the remake at least seven times and it never gets old.
A-

On to the sitting portion of our show. In The Sitter, Jonah Hill plays Noah, a character typical of Hill's career thus far. Noah is a slacker who says inappropriate things that he immediately denies saying and practically lives on his mother's couch. One day he stumbles his way into a seemingly impossible babysitting gig that leads to him running afoul of a pair of crazy drug dealers (Iron Man 2's Sam Rockwell and 'Til Death's J.B. Smoove), pissing off old girlfriends, and committing multiple felonies while trying to keep the three Omen children in line. As in most comedies, everything ends up picture perfect and the douchebag main character learns some shallow, undefined life lesson and lands a hot girlfriend. The acting is generally over-the-top and horrible (especially on Rockwell's part), and the laughs are merely infrequent chuckles between public displays of child abuse, grand larceny, and the occasional exploding toilet. In essence, The Sitter is Adventures In Babysitting for the "Toke On, Tune Out, Drop Dead" crowd. That didn't keep me from watching it, though.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but the movie is shit, so get off the pot.
F+

I'm not sure when because it's looking like rain all this week (a week to rest my sore muscles. Yay!), but next issue will be a review of the sci-fi people-disintegrating movie, The Darkest Hour. Stay tuned, stay alive, and stay off the pot.