Maria Aspan

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Probably my favorite romantic comedy of the last few years, starring: Frances McDormand, being awesome and broke and hungry and snarky and wise. Ciaran Hinds, proving that an older and thicker Captain Wentworth is still hot (at least until he turns into Bill Clinton). Amy Adams, wearing great clothes as she does her adorably ditzy thing.  Lee Pace, whose character I largely forget but who plays the younger romantic hothead hero with dash and aplomb.

I was reminded of it tonight, at an event where my every attempt to pick up a plate was foiled by something more interesting happening; there’s a running gag in the movie about Miss Pettigrew never managing to eat anything, like a reverse Brad Pitt from Ocean’s 11. 

It’s a wonderful, fizzy period costume piece with just enough sadness to make the happy ending earned. I love the set piece near the end, where McDormand’s Miss Pettigrew and Hinds’ Joe reminisce about the people they lost during the last war and brace for the new one, or the way the movie cares as much about the relationship between Miss Pettigrew and Adams’ flighty, well-meaning chorus-girl as it does about any of the romantic exploits. It’s worth a rewatch on the next snowy Saturday afternoon.

“Scores of silver parachutes rain down on them.”

At the halftime of Georgetown basketball home games, in the middle of Washington, D.C., Chipotle drops white parachutes holding silver-wrapped burritos into the clutching fingers of the stadium crowd.

…which may be a brilliantly meta Hunger Games reference, but is probably a marketing tactic Chipotle is going to want to rethink by the time the Mockingjay movies come out.

The Invisible War

“Those cases weren’t given to women [investigators]. … We were too sympathetic.”

The Invisible War is one of those documentaries that are hard to decide to sit down and watch. It’s about rape in the military, and systematic coverups of rape in the military. It has lots of women facing the camera and telling horrific stories, and sometimes crying, and quietly talking about their depression and their post-traumatic stress and their suicide attempts.

It’s full of infuriating details: more than one woman says that when she went to her commanding officer and reported an attack, she was charged with adultery – not because she was married, but because her rapist was.

One thing that I thought director Kirby Dick did especially well was defining the crimes in his film as violence, human-on-human brutality, disassociated from any relationship to consensual sex. The film is largely framed by the story of Kori Cioca, a Coast Guard veteran whose attacker dislocated her jaw before he raped her. Years later, Cioca waits in vain for the Veterans Affairs office to respond to her claim and fund surgery to treat her. Her story makes it more difficult to sweep the issues away as just a rape problem, just a woman problem, just a sex problem – it’s none of those. One U.S. military officer brutally attacked another, resulting in a lifetime of physical problems, and the U.S. military responded by punishing the victim.

For all of its justified outrage, The Invisible War is effectively low-key – it doesn’t try too hard to tug at your heartstrings, it doesn’t embellish its interviews with swelling music. There are moments of humor, if usually of the bleak variety. (The military’s victim-blaming “prevention” ads, which warned women not to walk around bases without a buddy, got disbelieving laughs at my screening.) It’s a sad and angry film, but not an unrelentingly grim one.

I also saw watched the Oscar-nominated documentary in one of the best possible environments: with an audience in New York, with a panel discussion afterwards, including the director and Jessica Hinves, one of the survivors interviewed in the film. She was funny and cheerful and poised, and quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. when an audience member asked if she ever “thought about taking justice into [her] own hands.” The panel discussion was a reassuring end to the movie in some ways – we the audience could have a cathartic moment, applauding the survivors and expressing our outrage to people we knew shared that outrage. I’m glad I saw The Invisible War that way, and that I saw it at all – I’m not sure I would have picked it out to watch at home, on my own, as a break at the end of the workday or over the weekend. But it is very, very worth seeing.