Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

Oh my god! That was Vincent D'Onofrio! And Bradley Whitford! And Penelope Ann Miller! Holy crap. Wait, does this mean that I'm a lot closer to their age than I thought? In 1987, I was 15 and Elizabeth Shue and Penelope Ann Miller's characters are supposed to be 17, so maybe they were between 17 and 20 (okay Wikipedia says they're __ and __ respectively). They're only two to five years older than I am? I always thought it was more on the scope of ten. And I had never seen Whitford or D'Onofrio with so much hair, well D'Onofrio's may have been attached to the hat he was wearing. I thought both of them were 10 to 15 years older than me (okay, Wikipedia to the rescue again, they are __ and __ respectively).
This was a totally silly movie. Highly improbably, Blah blah blah. But, it was totally fun. There were lots of doofy and incompetent villains to harass the kids. There were plenty of minor villains with a heart of gold, too. Everybody got what was coming to them, whether they deserved good or bad. It's kind of nice to every once in a while watch a film that is completely predictable, yet still entertaining in it's execution.
If I had seen this film when it came out, I would have had the biggest crush on Elizabeth Shue. Now, it seems kind of wrong. Sure, Shue is my age, roughly, but in this film where she's totally a cute girl, she's way too young. When she and I start dating, we can watch this and joke about how young she was, then it will be okay, or something. No, I don't live in a fantasy world. It's more of a fantasy universe to be precise.
The friend who recommended this to me was quoting it to me this afternoon. I knew that they were quotes from a movie I had never seen, because I'm not totally oblivious, but we did then discuss Thor which I thought may have been flowing from discussing the next Iron Man movie, but now I realize that she was really making allusions to this movie but lacking the context, I plugged them into the other readily available framework. Just when I think I know what's going on, I don't.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I thought the coolest cat in this movie was the car thief, Joe Gipp, who is one of the aforementioned minor villains with a heart of gold. With his long hair pulled back in a pony tail, lack of facial hair (including sideburns) and non-flashy leather jacket, he was very un-80s. He was also cool because he was nice to the kids because it was the right thing to do, and he wasn't an in-your-face-thug like almost all of the other young people met in the city. It's funny the things that you take away with you from a movie.

Adventures in Babysitting on IMDB

The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

Goddammit! I always knew that stoners and virgins would be the end of us all.

Wouldn't have been funny if that was all I wrote? And if I did it without the title of the movie? Just like a note in cyberspace saying, "hello! crazy guy here!" Normally I wouldn't go with two exclamation points, but I made the exemption this time because I think it deserved it.
I loves me some Bradley Whitford. The West Wing. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I know millions saw the first one and just like twelve of us the second one, and two of us were in the same household. I know that Aaron Sorkin had a lot to do with both of these, but I think I only watched like one or two years of the West Wing with Sorkin as the show runner, so I'm going to give a lot of credit to Whitford. Man, I'm still tripping that he's married to the mom from Malcolm in the Middle, and also a bit embarrassed that I can't remember her name - is it Jane Kaczmarek? I think I may have just made up that last name. (Thanks to a very devoted reader, I know that this is correct - because I had the wrong name initially. Sadly, Wikipedia is telling me they are divorced now. Shows what I know.)
Of all the ways that the world ends, I think I like Joss Whedon's version best. My least favorite way is by a rogue asteroid or a super solar flare. Unless we get lots of warning and personal melodrama, or at the very least televised melodrama. If it were say a 8 month long debate about whether or not the asteroid was actually going to hit, or narrowly going to miss the earth as it passes between us and the moon, and as we get closer the calculations get more accurate, but they interpretted more widely so that we end up with two camps, the we're-all-gonna-die-in-a-horrible-impact-that-leads-to-nuclear-night-style-death-but-don't-think-we'll-sneak-through-this-one-because-the-atmosphere-will-be-knocked-away or the other camp, the a-lot-of-people-are-going-to-die-through-natural-disasters-caused-by-the-near-miss-but-all-the-main-characters-will-survive-because-that's-a-given folk. The first camp would be really popular if the holocaust were covered on HBO, because you could have lots of naked people and each week it would be like, "I can't believe she fucked *him*" and then they'd  be all, "well, we are all going to die in a couple of months." and then the first person would be all like, "oh my god! you fucked him too, didn't you?" And there would be that sorry schmoe that everyone felt sorry for because even though the world was definitely ending, probably, he still would get any and he would just spend all of his blogging about it just in case someone survived yet forgot what happened and somehow had electricity to read his stupid blog. But I swear if Bruce Willis or Ben Afleck tries to save the earth, I will personally take them out, because the death of billions is preferable to seeing them trying to save us. Seriously. Can you guess who I am in this apocalyptic scenario?
Part of my brain is telling me this is a novel idea, I should see what Sorkin or maybe Kevin Smith are up to and pitch it to them. But another part of me is whispering, "you're going to feel so guilty if you wake up tomorrow and NPR has announced super killer solar flares coming in late May." And I totally would. And then I would start blogging about and all the crazy shit and how I still...oh too much personal information here.
My only critical comment about this whole movie is that the very last scene - the arm shouldn't have looked so human, it should have been more amphibian. Also, and this is not a critical comment, more of a, "hmm" kind of thing, when did Sigourney Weaver pass from the bad-ass heroine to be the director of the evil angency? Aliens 4 and even Avatar, she was bad-ass. Then, in Paul and now The Cabin in the Woods, she's the director of the evil agency. I guess it works for her though.

The Cabin in the Woods at IMDb