Posted: 08/30/2000

Adventures in Babysitting

(1987)

by Robin Effron

Another fun film that just happens to take place in Chicago, a very cool place to just, uh, hang around.

Every kid has a movie that they insist on watching ad ifinitum. For me, that movie was Adventures in Babysitting, an inauspicious comedy/adventure that belonged to the mini-genre of Cool Teenagers Who Hang Out In Chicago Without Their Parents (Ferris Bueller and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, anybody?).

Elizabeth Shue stars as a babysitter who finds herself on an adventuresome chase through the mean streets of downtown Chicago along with her three babysitting charges.

I can’t recall exactly what made me want to watch it so many times. Perhaps I envied the young woman who so suavely tamed both urban chaos and suburban brats. Or maybe I felt some sort of a cosmic connection to Elizabeth Shue (she is the niece of my father’s college roommate).

Ultimately, Adventures in Babysitting is a fun, campy film that peppered many a slumber party in the ‘80’s. Now I can only sigh and shake my head as pre-adolescent girls fawn over Amy Heckerling movies and applaud their own sophistication. I can just shake my head, secure in the knowledge that my existence is somehow better for watching 3 kids crawl along the outside of that diamond shaped glass building in the Chicago skyline.

Robin Effron a is a writer living in Manhattan, where she occassionally shows up at Columbia University as a student of philosophy and political science.

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