Grade: B

What’s it about?
Jack Black and Michael Cera are two cavemen who go have adventures in the Book of Genesis.

MPAA Rating:
PG-13. Originally R. Should’ve kept the R and kept all the R-rated stuff!

What’s it Bechdel Test Rating?
I’m gonna give this one a 50%, which I know doesn’t actually make sense. There are three “important” female speaking characters, and they do talk to each other briefly. There is a Princess character (Olivia Wilde) who is the strongest in that she has the most agency and actually makes decisions that move the plot along. She briefly talks to her mother about a famine, which is sort of important to the plot, except that this movie isn’t really about the plot at all. So it wasn’t that great an effort.

What about Minorities?
They were there, sort of, in the background, which I was actually pleasantly surprised by. I didn’t have the highest hopes. The movie is basically adventures in the Holy Land, most of it taking place in Sodom, which the Bible (apparently) says was close to the Dead Sea – so, in the area of modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Given that that’s the case, you’d expect to see a few more brown people than the proportionately tiny smattering of them in the background population of Sodom. I didn’t have a problem with the leads being white. I gathered from the trailer that it was two (pagan) European “cavemen” who went south and had adventures in the Holy Land, which is a super cute premise that I was looking forward to, but I didn’t really expect the Holy Land to actually be representational, race-wise. So… I don’t know, a B- for that? On the one hand backgrounders are better than nothing, on the other hand, the fact that the speaking characters from the Holy Land were all white is pretty stupid and disappointing.

So…

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Grade: B

What’s it About?
A thirty-something couple are going to have a baby, and expect the supportive grandparents to be around and help them out. The grandparents suddenly up and move to Belgium, leaving the couple scrambling to find a new city to live. They visit a bunch of different places, from Phoenix to Montreal, visiting friends and family to find the right fit.

What’s it’s Bechdel Test Score?
100%!
And, the conversations between two women last more than a scant thirty seconds! This is a romantic movie, and that’s basically the only kind of movie where women are the protagonists. However, given that this is that sort of movie, it’s surprising that more of it wasn’t dramatized by the women. There was a particular conversation, about a woman, that really should have taken place between two women as opposed to two men. It felt weird the way it was.

What about Minorities?
Minority protagonist! Letter grade A!
(Maya Rudolph is great, I hope we see more of her in serious roles.)

So…

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A thing about these movie reviews: it’s not that I go out of my way to review movies I think are gonna be awesome. I have no time and no money these days, so I see movies that I can snag free tickets to or that are playing at my place of employment (which only has one screen, and at best two new movies a month, at least half of which I still don’t have the time to see).

With that in mind, here is a review of Land of the Lost.

Grade: C+
Better than I expected, and definitely better than Observe and Report, my last C-grader. But it’s not a full-pricer. More like a “if it’s on your flight give it a chance” kind of thing.

What’s it’s Bechdel Test Rating?
0%. Utter, utter failure. There is only one female character, who is degraded throughout, though it doesn’t go as far as I thought it would. She’s also a pretty lousy character – Scarily intelligent! Fearless! Can learn languages instantly! Yet is somehow only there because she is obsessed with Will Ferrell! Her character design was totally dumb.
Also I kind of wish that instead of Danny McBride doing his trailer trash thing, we could’ve had Jaime Pressly doing her My Name is Earl trailer trash thing. I would’ve found something like that a lot more amusing, and I am totally sick of Danny McBride.

What About Minorities?
F. Fantastic failure. Except for a few kids in the beginning, there were no people of colour. Given the source material, though*, I didn’t expect any.

*Land of the Lost is based on a children’s adventure series from the 70s, which was also briefly remade in the 90s. It was about a father and two children who fell into the cracks of an earthquake and ended up in the titular Land of the Lost. It’s actually sort of surprising how many people didn’t know this used to be a show – but maybe that’s just the people in my neighbourhood.

So…

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