Archive | Essays
Taking Back ‘Rosemary’s Baby’
Ever since the Australian import “The Babadook” came out last year, I’ve been rethinking “Rosemary’s Baby,” which celebrates its forty-seventh anniversary on June 12. On the surface, a mother and child haunted by a children’s book character has little to do with Roman Polanski’s 1968 opus about a woman who’s been knocked up by the devil. But both are those rare films that herald rather than demonize mommies. From “Psycho” to “Mama” to “Alien,” motherhood and its associated female biological functions have always loomed as the ultimate horror in American cinema. Continue Reading →
Together, Alone: Movies on Message
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, that cinematic arm of the New York-based research and advocacy program, has always boasted selections that are worth watching purely for aesthetic reasons. It’s impossible to do so, though. Each of these films examines the limits of human behavior with a radical compassion that confronts the failings of the world that we all share nowadays, regardless of whether we care to admit it.
It is a truism of modern life that the more accessible everything is, the more isolated we each become. Technology affords us the ability to visit with each other, order our supplies and entertainment, and do our work without ever venturing outside our homes. We are more globalized than ever before in the history of humankind; we can view lands, people, and events that are 6,000 miles away as if they’re in our backyard. Yet there’s no replacing firsthand experience. I learned that during Hurricane Sandy. While we New Yorkers were stripped of heat, running water, and electricity, friends as close by as Boston and Pennsylvania prattled on to us about cute puppies and bad hair days. To them, our hardship was not real. I didn’t blame them. Although we enjoyed the illusion of intimacy afforded by social media and smartphone technology (at least when we New Yorkers managed to charge our phones), it was nonetheless difficult for outsiders to grasp our dire straits, even when they were only a couple hundred miles away. Continue Reading →