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Me, Earl, the Dying Girl & Millenniamania

June 14, 2015 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

I have a theory that Sundance standouts are not necessarily the best films. Instead, they’re the ones that dare to be emotional, even sweet, since they offer a welcome contrast to the disaffected fare that proliferates the indie circuit. Take “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” which won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s festival. A whimsical tearjerker about Greg (Thomas Mann), a loner of a teenage filmmaker, and Rachel (Olivia Cooke), the titular dying girl, this is the stuff of which Sundance dreams are made; it even boasts a protagonist guaranteed to resonate with critics and festival-goers.

So am I indirectly saying I don’t like it? I am not. This movie is an endearing, charismatically stitched effort from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and screenwriter Jesse Andrews, who adapted his own eponymous YA novel. But it is also undeniably twee, and afflicted with the micro-aggression that continues to rage unchecked in Hollywood comedies. I can’t help but wonder if its thunderously positive early buzz stems from “Sundance Goggles,” that unique myopia caused by seeing five movies a day at very high altitudes. Continue Reading →

Taking Back ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

June 13, 2015 in Book Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

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 →

‘Testament of Youth’: Women at War

June 6, 2015 in Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

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 →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy