The Help (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)
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An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the african american maids point of view on the white families they work for and their hardships they go through on a day to day basis. Studio: Buena Vista Home Video Release Date: 12/06/2011 Starring: Emma Stone Viola Davis Run time: 146 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Tate TaylorThere are male viewers who will enjoy The Help, but Mississippi native Tate Taylor aims his adaptation squarely at
The Help (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)
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Hot Humid Sensual South & an Oscar brews faster than sweet iced-tea,
Now we see this film wins award nominations aplenty. Biggest winner was the public. Leads of Davis and Spencer that stole the spotlight. DVD to own, not rent.
The only drawback with the DVD is the sparse bonus material. 4 min. of 2 deleted, and a 5 min. music video of one of the film’s songs. Pathetically weak bonus, but then it is a 5.5 star film. Everyone asks to borrow our copy, I should have bought 2.
Oh yes, there are SUBTITLES.
We attended the opening matinee; we’ll view it again, that good. Is `The Help’ the soul of 60s era race relations? This worthy film based on Kathryn Stockett’s #1 best-seller is equally a first-class view as true for the read. The story of 3 daring Mississippi women is as absorbing as any you’ll see this year. The plot is writing a book which attempts to tell the truth about B/W relations in the city of Jackson, between wealthy whites and `the help’; but doing it anonymously. Without being fired or lynched.
There is humor in the way the Jackson Belle socialites operate, and eventually react to the book publication. Bryce Dallas Howard is the personification of Bad Girl, Hilly. Although beautiful, I loathed Hilly in the film and book, as you are supposed to. And Jessica Chastain (Murder on the Orient Express) has all it takes to be the scene stealer while playing Celia. Truly believable!
Humor erupts in how the help secretly reacts to their treatment. There’s sadness at some injustice.
Viola Davis plays a slimmer/sexier Aibileen than was my mental image while reading the book. Octavia Spencer is right on as Minny. Both girls pack their roles with perfection.
The film has intrigue through the months of secret interviews.
There’s a mystery related to Skeeter’s (Emma Stone) own childhood maid’s story, which is a larger part of the story in the book.
Skeeter, Aibileen, & Minny are the key book writers. The casting is near perfection. Should be some Oscar nominations someplace.
Some other stars too, like, Sissy Spacek, Cicely Tyson, & Mary Steenburgen (Proposal, Joan of Arcadia).
I remember reading the book and doing it as quickly as possible toward the end; and praying that all the `help’ have a happy ending, but expecting some casualties. With the movie, it is evident when the story is climaxing, and then you just wish that you could make it last another hour or two. An excellent story, but then we all knew that from the book.
It is a tribute to the story that you forget it is fiction. How much is real, a docu-drama of the early 1960′s of the south (& north)? We need reviews from the real-life `help’ of the early 60′s. Only they know!
If you view only one film this year…this should be it. See it soon, & as the film’s dialogue states, “Before the whole civil rights thing blows over.” That line brought a theater audience LOL.
As Aibileen believes, quoted from the book, “We done something brave and good here. And Minny, maybe she don’t want a be deprived a any a the things that go along with being brave and good.”
`
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|The Help: The best novel adaptation in a loooong time.,
“Oscar season”, as it’s typically referred to, is a period of time, usually beginning in late November, and ending in late January. This year, it starts early, with “The Help”.
“The Help” is based on the well-known novel by Kathryn Stockett, someone who I had never heard of before discovering this film and book. For the most part, when I hear about a film that I want to see, I try to read the book prior to viewing the movie, to enhance the whole experience. Usually I get bored, or stop mid-way through one of these said books, before I end up watching the movie.
But “The Help” grabbed me. Stockett kept me on a leash, dying to know what happened next, and I ended up finishing its 530 pages in a few sittings. And, I’m glad it did, because “The Help” is not only the best movie I’ve seen this summer, but it very well could be the best one I see all year.
The film centers on Aibileen, Skeeter and Minny (Davis, Stone and Spencer, respectively) three very different women in Mississippi, in the year 1962. Skeeter is returning from college with a journalism degree, whose beloved childhood black maid Constantine has disappeared, and no one will tell her where she has gone. Aibileen is a maid who has raised 17 white children in her life. The word “maid” is pretty blandly used. She’s a nanny to these children, if not a surrogate mother. Her outspoken friend Minny has never been able to keep quiet, or, because of this, hold onto a job very long, and she is hired on the sly by Celia (Chastain), a white-trash rich girl who has some grave secrets of her own. Skeeter decides to write a tell-all book of interviews from the maids of Jackson, Mississippi, which, as you could imagine, was a very taboo, and perhaps even illegal thing to take on in the time of Jim Crow, and segregation.
One of the reasons that this film succeeds is that not a single character is miscast, and there is not a single caricature. In the book, Stockett paints a vivid picture of each character, and the actors clearly got lost in their characters. Emma Stone is becoming a very important actress. I haven’t seen her in a role that I didn’t love her in. After getting her first notable role in 2009′s “Zombieland”, and then livening and carrying the otherwise bland teen comedy “Easy A”, this is her first dramatic role, as Skeeter, one of the lead characters. While she sometimes blends into the background in this movie, she shines beautifully with the rest of the cast. She’s definitely one to watch.
While Stone is great, this movie belongs to Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. Davis’s Aibileen is perfect. She has a silent sadness about her, a lot of pride, and a great sense of anger, her expressive eyes displaying a silent protest, while never raising her voice the whole film. She handles emotional scenes beautifully, reducing the audience to tears in more than one scene. She’s a early in the year front-runner for Best Actress this Oscar season.
Spencer also does a beautiful job as Minny. Octavia Spencer was the original inspiration for the character of Minny, who voiced the character’s section in the audio-book. She was clearly made to play this role. She does a lot more for this movie, than just adding comic relief, however, she does plays the comedic side the best. The “terrible awful” that her character does in the book, is made into the funniest thing in the whole movie.
The supporting cast is dead-on too. Bryce Dallas Howard plays the town’s snobby ringleader, Hilly. She’s absolutely chilling, nailing the evil character. Her mother, played by Sissy Spacek is a hoot. The town’s secretive lush, and Minny’s boss, Celia, is played by scene-stealing newcomer Jessica Chastain, who wowed earlier this year in “The Tree of Life”. She was completely like I envisioned her character in the book. Chastain would be perfect to play Marilyn Monroe. Just saying. There’s not enough typing space in this review to describe how much I loved the rest of the supporting cast. Everyone was dead-on.
I was under the assumption that this would be yet another disappointing film of a book loved by many. The reason for this was the director and writer. I had never heard of this Tate Taylor, and because of that, I wasn’t sure that I trusted him. He had a large part in making this movie all that it was. One of the big reasons that “The Help” works as a movie is because it feels authentic. It was filmed in Mississippi, where it’s based, it is set in the 1960′s, and every feeling about the movie hits the right note.
I later discovered that Taylor was a childhood friend of the book’s author. Not some Hollywood hack. I forget the many disappointing film adaptations of books I loved that were made by the Hollywood elite. “The Da Vinci Code” by Ron Howard, “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Rob Marshall, “Eat, Pray, Love” by Ryan Murphy. Enough said. After seeing this film, I couldn’t…
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