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 →
Archive | Feminist Matters
‘Testament of Youth’: Women at War
Cinema may forever be reminding us that war is hell but rarely does it offer us female experiences of that hell. “Testament of Youth,” a sweeping adaptation of Vera Brittain’s memoir of World War I, goes a long way toward correcting that inequity, even if its Masterpiece Theater sensibilities don’t quite measure up to the sparkling acuity of its source material.
The film opens on Armistice Day, 1918, as Vera (Alicia Vikander), drawn and bleak, staggers among the celebrating throngs. Flashback four years, when she’s a bourgeoisie bluestocking angling to attend university against the wishes of her regressive parents (Emily Watson and Dominic West; wherefore art thou, McCuddy?), and playing one of the boys with her brother, sensitive musician Edward (Taron Egerton), and his school chums Roland (Kit Harington, showing 100 percent more range than he does in “Game of Thrones”) and Victor (Colin Morgan). With his brooding good looks, realms of poetry, and suffragette mommy, Roland’s got the makings of more of a pal, and the first bit of this story dwells on their burgeoning romance as she makes her arduous way through Oxford’s gates. It all changes just before she begins her studies, when Britain declares war on Germany, and a concern that has only faintly shadowed Brittain’s upper-class life becomes critical. All three boys enlist, and Vera finds the collegiate life she’d craved so trivial that she enrolls as a military nurse, working domestically and then on the French frontlines as she grapples with tragedy after tragedy. Continue Reading →
The Low Notes of ‘Pitch Perfect 2’
Here at Word and Film, we are not in the business of grading movies. But if I were to grade “Pitch Perfect 2,” the much-anticipated follow-up to the breakout 2012 musical comedy, I’d give it a solid B. As sequels go, that’s not bad, and the film deserves extra points for sidestepping the meta-movie trap into which so many comedic sequels fall. (Here’s looking at you, “22 Jump Street.”) But, though I’m a huge fan of its pop-feminism and hip a cappella (no, that’s not an oxymoron), “Pitch Perfect 2” doesn’t quite hit the high notes of its predecessor. Chalk that up to a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen plot and a disappointing profusion of micro-aggression. Continue Reading →