'October Baby': Leftist Critics Ignore Artistry, Attack Politics

'October Baby': Leftist Critics Ignore Artistry, Attack Politics

Excellent column by The Great Brent Bozell:

It’s more than a little shocking when someone makes a movie that deals harshly with abortion. This is Hollywood after all. Abortion is a feminist sacrament. The movie “October Baby” just debuted on 390 screens and registered in eighth place for the weekend, with an estimated $1.7 million gross.

“October Baby” is a drama loosely based on the real-life story of Gianna Jessen, born with cerebral palsy after she survived a failed abortion procedure and now a celebrated pro-life speaker. In the film, the lead character, Hannah, discovers her adoptive parents hid from her that she was never meant to be born.

Naturally, the critics just couldn’t judge this movie by artistic standards. It had to be savaged because it is so politically incorrect. New York Times film critic Jeannette Catsoulis bared her ideological fangs at this improbable movie, “Not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women’s health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.”

Ouch. A celebration of life is “essential ugliness.” One of the film’s most powerful moments was assailed by Catsoulis as propaganda. Jasmine Guy plays the clinic nurse who assisted at Hannah’s birth. “Her pivotal speech, a gory portrait of fetal mutilation and maternal distress, conjures a vision of medical hackery that is clearly intended to terrify young women — and fits right in with proposed state laws that increasingly turn the screws on a woman’s dominion over her reproductive system.”

Notice how the Times couldn’t focus on the movie without imagining the horror of conservative state legislators reducing a “woman’s dominion” over the termination of unborn children, no matter how advanced the pregnancy.

What is it that the nurse says that is so offensive? “I didn’t see no tissue, just the face of a child.” This is not a Hollywood talking point.

Full piece here.

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