The Help

2011 movie

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 15/20)

Plot: A woman who wants to be a writer but apparently has nothing at all to write about gets a housekeeping advice column gig at a small-town newspaper. She has a maid write the column for her. That gives her a brilliant idea--collect a bunch of maids, have them share their scatological stories, and then make that into a book. She waffles, thinking maybe it's a better idea to go with her original plan and just copy The Old Man and the Sea word-for-word and put her name on it, but eventually decides to have the maids do her work for her. Oh, I get it. They help her! The Help!

I don't imagine that I'm the audience for this movie. No, this movie is made for white women who have a whopping two hours and twenty minutes to spare, probably a white woman with a maid because white women without maids aren't going to have the time to watch the thing. This is the sort of bloated Hollywood thing made to win some awards and jerk some tears, and everything is just right about the thing. The actresses (The Help trivia: The total amount of time male characters appear on screen for this is a record low one minute and thirty-seven seconds.) act just like their supposed to, the 1960's segregated South looks just like it's supposed to, and the music sounds just like it's supposed to. And the movie takes no chances, fails to challenge, and has almost no depth, just like it's probably supposed to. You don't need substance when you're just there to provide light amusement for housewives, right? Just throw a few "raggedy asses" into the script and a poop joke that would also appeal to most fourth grade boys even though they wouldn't watch this movie on account of all the cooties. They also force-feed the audience a cutesy little catch phrase, something you can put on all the posters maybe (The Help trivia: If you cut out all times a character says "You is kind. You is smart. You is important.", the movie would actually only be forty-three minutes long.), but it just made me want to correct grammar. This is just the type of movie that people will say moved them because it was artificially constructed to do just that. I was just bored out of my mind for way too long and will likely remember nothing about this movie in a few months other than it had a lot of black people in it.

Jen let me know repeatedly that a lot of these scenes "ain't never was in no raggedy-ass book," and I think the dulcet tones of her voice kept me awake.