The Babysitter reminds me of one time when my daughter was 15, we were walking out to the car in a parking lot, and a young man probably 20 y/o or so drove by, swiveling his head as he passed. I pointed out that he had been looking, and my daughter said "Ewww! He's old!" Teenage girls think their attractiveness is like a bullet, only affecting their intended target, when in fact it's more like a hand grenade, and goes off in all directions.
The movie is different from Robert Coover's short story (Google "Robert Coover the babysitter", there's a PDF titled 184 ° Robert Coover), which was mainly a vehicle for an idea about how a story could take different plot lines as characters choose different pathways. It's not really better or worse, because it's apples and oranges.
The Babysitter is about The Male Gaze. It's about how males of all ages react to a pretty, nubile young woman who's just trying to babysit some kids, and not completely aware of her affect on males, therefore mostly indifferent to it.
Fantasies for each male, from age 10 to age 60, play out during the film, making it difficult to keep track of what's going on in reality. The screen play seems voyeuristic, as if to try to pull you into fantasizing about Silverstone yourself (if you're a male), but time and again her character shuts it down, and reveals just a regular, no-nonsense, non-sexualized person going about her business.
In the end the fantasies of three of the characters become reality, and play out as they would in real life instead of a male fantasy land, so things get messy quickly as the three disrupt their own lives within moments. Two males, the youngest and the oldest, escape perplexed but unscathed.
The end of the movie is a disaster scene, apparently with a single cause, but in reality the confluence of bad decisions by three men. The last line is like a punch line that sums up the entire proceedings of the evening.
The movie is different from Robert Coover's short story (Google "Robert Coover the babysitter", there's a PDF titled 184 ° Robert Coover), which was mainly a vehicle for an idea about how a story could take different plot lines as characters choose different pathways. It's not really better or worse, because it's apples and oranges.
The Babysitter is about The Male Gaze. It's about how males of all ages react to a pretty, nubile young woman who's just trying to babysit some kids, and not completely aware of her affect on males, therefore mostly indifferent to it.
Fantasies for each male, from age 10 to age 60, play out during the film, making it difficult to keep track of what's going on in reality. The screen play seems voyeuristic, as if to try to pull you into fantasizing about Silverstone yourself (if you're a male), but time and again her character shuts it down, and reveals just a regular, no-nonsense, non-sexualized person going about her business.
In the end the fantasies of three of the characters become reality, and play out as they would in real life instead of a male fantasy land, so things get messy quickly as the three disrupt their own lives within moments. Two males, the youngest and the oldest, escape perplexed but unscathed.
The end of the movie is a disaster scene, apparently with a single cause, but in reality the confluence of bad decisions by three men. The last line is like a punch line that sums up the entire proceedings of the evening.