REVIEW!!! The Help

Always better to read the book AFTER seeing the movie

Well, good people, I saw The Help this week. While I sat there watching the story unfold, I had a nagging, confused feeling. Reading this review by an American journalist, Valerie Boyd, (after the jump) cleared up my nagging feeling and made me realize something very striking!! It's 2011, y'all. We're in a new century, a new millennium. Notice how we haven't had a major studio movie like Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill (Sam Jackson's paternalistic fury in that movie was golden) in movie theaters until this one?? The Help falls significantly short of the disgusting, hard-to-watch, heinously evil and yet historically accurate depictions of inequality in the South in feature films.

Then again, this movie focuses on the lives of Southern WOMEN, not men. Notice that??

The rest of my thoughts, along with the link to Valerie Boyd's review and Official Featurette of The Help (Video) after the jump...

While racism and discrimination in The Help is wildly apparent to the trained eye, it is passed onto the audience rather comically and it rolls off our backs when we hear the line "Eat my shit." I won't lie, I laughed during parts this movie, even when the scenes were glaringly laced with racist undertones. The fact is that women tend to express their anger in a passive-aggressive manner and this movie is full of "Mean Girls" bullying antics. There's so much more to say, but after reading the article below, I have a much broader understanding of the mistakes made by the production team of this film, The Help. Yes, the movie is based on a book of fiction, thus making the historical inaccuracies somewhat forgivable. Even so, a movie with such themes and undertones should have been made with a little more courage, especially in this day and age!! I'll remain hopeful that one day soon, we'll see Hollywood revert back to telling Afrocentric his- and her-stories in feature films with unabashed fearlessness. 


But - don't take my word for it. 


Go and see it for yourself.

CLICK HERE TO READ JOURNALIST, VALERIE BOYD'S FILM REVIEW

Enjoy!