I hate to be a curmudgeon (been feeling especially so after not liking About Time, recently) ...
Ha! I never had the heart to respond to any of the raves about About Time either. The way it treated the female characters really rubbed me the wrong way (especially because the film is so obviously unaware of it and appears so "nice"). But the ladies here liked the film as well, and I thought it would be bad form if an old guy like me comes along and plays feminist.
I'm glad you said this, goodguy; the portrayal of/treatment of female characters bothered me, too, but I wasn't sure if I was just being overly sensitive.
I certainly wouldn't mind hearing a feminist critique of About Time. I rarely think about movies in that light and I'd be interested in the arguments one would have about such a thing. Also, goodguy watches normal movies!
I'm not sure I can offer a feminist critique, and I'm not sure I can even define or characterize exactly what bugged me, but hmm, let me try to articulate something. It's something to do with the way the film centers around the men, around the men controlling events and other people because they have this extra information and can therefore manipulate events/people - most notably, manipulate the women characters, viz. Rachel McAdams's character, Mary, and the sister character. And yes, I get that part of the film's neat "lesson" is that you shouldn't try to manipulate anything - you need to just live in the moment - but there are scenes, nonetheless, in which it's played as if it's perfectly ok to control or try to control/shape something if it works out to the main character's advantage, no moral dubiousness whatsoever of such manipulation seems to be even hinted at. The first love scene, for example, is played, essentially, for laughs, and it just felt icky to me. Gleeson/Tim gets to have several tries - more memories, additional experience - in order to get it "right" (right for whom, btw? right for his sexual ego, as far as I could tell), and he's essentially using her body/person over and over to achieve that while she retains no memory of those past experiences. Ick. The whole general aura of the men having this knowledge of events and people that these people themselves, again, specifically, women, do not have, that dynamic of power, is supposed to feel sweet because, I guess, Tim is a "good guy," but it just has this very paternalistic feel to me - in part because while Tim says, "it was always about love for [him]" (or something like that), in fact, it isn't really about love if the woman in such "love" relationship is such a pawn - merely a piece in his story - and ultimately, Mary is a very shallow, flat character whose motivations and desires are ignored/never developed (and many of her reactions are completely unbelievable, eg. her responses to Tim during the art exhibit scene - it would have made sense for her to respond to him as one would a stalker, but for some reason she's charmed?). Mary, really, is almost completely sidelined by the father-son relationship. And fine. I'm all for father-son relationship movies, but when, again, the female characters are merely there to serve that relationship and/or, more ickily, serve the male character's individual development, especially when it's supposed to be about "love," then, no, I really can't feel much for that father-son relationship (however much I love Bill Nighy).
And of course, there's the whole sister thing, too. Tim, essentially, "fixes" her by setting her up with a man (whom he chooses based on his apparently superior judgment - she, herself, on her own, had made the bad choice, poor dear). Bleh.