Elisabeth Shue – Christian Sauvé

Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-09-292023-03-19 Movie Review

(In French, On TV, September 2019) Despite what you may think, Adventures in Babysitting isn’t a John Hughes film. On the surface, it sure looks like one: The story goes from the Chicago suburbs to the big city itself with middle-class teenage protagonists getting embroiled in adventures in the big city à la Ferris Bueller, alludes to cartoonish villains of Home Alone vintage and spends a significant amount of time making its characters grow up in absentia of any parental supervision … like much of the Hughes oeuvre. But it’s a Christopher Columbus film made from a David Simkins script, and the differences do start to become obvious once you look closer. It tries to have a broader appeal than Hughes film with protagonists going from 8 to 18, is far less structured in its one-thing-after-another approach. (Call it a “picaresque journey through 1987 nighttime Chicago, sanitized for family entertainment”) and it doesn’t hit the sentimentalism as hard as Hughes does. (But do remember that Columbus and Hughes would soon collaborate on 1990’s Home Alone.) The result, spearheaded by Elisabeth Shue with noteworthy early roles for Vincent d’Onofrio and Penelope Ann Miller, is a bit scattered but amiable enough: it’s not trying to make a grand statement, but the way things quickly spin out of control from a simple premise is amusing enough. Clearly geared toward family entertainment, Adventures in Babysitting remains watchable even thirty years later—there’s some timeless material here about teenagers getting away with awesome thrills while their parents aren’t looking in their direction, and just enough excitement without falling into danger.

Movie Review

Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

ByChristian Sauvé 2016-08-032017-03-09 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, August 2016) While Nicolas Cage’s stature as a dramatic actor has fallen tremendously in the past few years, it’s useful to go back to Leaving Las Vegas to remind ourselves of how good he could be when provided with a good script, an attentive director and enough opportunities to show what he could do. Here, he plays a washed-up screenwriter whose alcohol problems have led to divorce, ostracism and, in the film’s first few minutes, a self-imposed exile to Las Vegas where he intends to drink himself to death. This, as the film quickly points out, is not a matter of hours but weeks. There’s one complication in his plan: the appearance of Elizabeth Shue as an escort who finds common ground with him. Their relationship evolves into a spectacularly dysfunctional mess of co-dependency, twisted affection, impossible rules and headlong rush to self-destruction. The ending is not uplifting, but it’s entirely appropriate. Writer/director Mike Figgis (working from a novel) shoots the film using low-grain super-16 stock, lending a muddy quality to the images that works in the film’s unpolished favour. Leaving Las Vegas, given its downbeat nature and harsh scenes of humiliation and pain, is not an easy movie to love—but it’s easy to respect and it plays well even twenty years later, especially as a reminder of Nicolas Cage at the height of his dramatic capabilities. Given his propensity to take up roles in direct-to-video thrillers and the disappearance of adult thrillers from the Hollywood landscape, I don’t think we’ll ever see anything quite like this from him ever again.