Fright Night

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr. Dennis (3 stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438176/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv096.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110817/REVIEWS/110819985

Fright Night (directed by Craig Gillespie, screenplay by Marti Noxon, original story/1985 film by Tom Holland) does not aim to be a profound movie.  Instead it aims to be a “b-movie” for an American teenage audience.  And with that audience in mind it hits its mark reasonably well.  Interestingly, it did get an R-rating, even though there was no nudity in the film though plenty of sexual banter and some gore (enough to understand why the CNS/USCCB gave it a “O” (morally offensive) rating).

Still, a movie is generally more than any particular aspect of it, and this is often especially true of b-movies and even b-horror movies.  For instance, according to Steven King, an undisputed master of this genre, part of what makes a good horror movie is its _context_.  And in the case of this movie, the setup is _outstanding_:

The movie is set in a _completely artificial_, tiny (only a few blocks _square_) suburban subdivision on the outskirts of Las Vegas.  In fact as seen from a screen shot filmed from the air, once one gets out of the few square blocks of “suburbia” one’s _in complete desert_ for about a mile or so before reaching next _completely artificial_, (only a few blocks square) subdivision.  And so it goes...

Now Las Vegas has _long_ been famous _architecturally_ for epitomizing some of the crassest trends in American architecture over the last 50-60 years as attested to by the seminal book on postmodern architecture and design entitled Learning from Las Vegas.  This is because in Las Vegas “anything is possible” because truly _nothing_ was there before except for a bunch of dirt, tumble weeds and cactuses.  So if one wants to build a “vision of Paris,” “New York,” or even “Venice” (_gondolas_ and all, _in a desert_ ... ) it’s possible.  And if after a while, a hotel concept “no longer works,” one can famously demolish it and build something else in its stead. 

However, the people who work in a casino, say the Luxor (shaped liked the Great Pyramid at Giza) still have to live somewhere.  And people want to live “nice.”  So while desert it may be, mixed perhaps with nuclear fallout from the nearby Nevada Test Site, tumble weeds, rattle snakes, and secret bases (Area-51) and now others remote-control flying drones over Afghanistan, why not?  Let’s build a subdivision in the middle of this buzzing “middle of nowhere” that looks like suburban Ohio.  And so it is.

Now in recent years, with the housing crash, Nevada along with Florida and Arizona have been the hardest hit with foreclosures and “underwater mortgages.”  So this tiny, square subdivision in the desert outside of Las Vegas seems even “ghostlier” even more of a mirage than before.

Then of course, there’s Las Vegas’ “Sin City” reputation (certainly not lost on Stephen King in his American apocalypse, The Stand) along with its “city that never sleeps” reputation, and honestly, what a fit!  Can one think of _a better place_ to set a contemporary vampire movie in the U.S.A. than in Vegas?  Indeed, arguably it’s been the casinos and the banks that have been the “grim reapers” and “blood sucking vampires” of our time.  So this is then where Fright Night is set...

To the story: High school student Charlie Brewster (played by Anton Yelchin) somewhat embarrassed about his “nerdy” past, lives in said suburban subdivision at the edge of the desert outside Las Vegas with his mother, Jane Brewster (played by Toni Collette).  Jane is a real estate broker and in the opening scene she’s piling “For Sale” signs, each held-up with a rather large stake, into her car.  Jane expresses concern about their new neighbor, who’s been living in the house next door but never seems to be around.  All that one sees of him is a big dumpster on his drive way, which doesn’t look attractive and in Jane’s view only lowers real estate values on the street even further.

It’s the beginning of the school year.  Over the summer, Charlie apparently bought himself a used motorcycle but hasn’t figured out how to start it. His hot new girlfriend,  Amy (played by Imogen Poots) drives by with her Volkswagen convertible and a couple of her girlfriends and asks if he’d want a ride.  First, he tries to get his bike started.  Unable to do so, he feels embarrassed, Amy tells him “just get in ...” This also allows Charlie to not have to “skateboard’ his way to school with his former best friend and still nerd, Ed (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse).  There are other guys, Mark (played by Dave Franco) and Ben (played by Reid Ewing) who Charlie’s trying to suck-up to in trying to leave behind his “uncool” past.

It’s ever-nerd, Ed, who voices alarm that Charlie’s new, rarely seen (except when it’s dark...), neighbor may be a vampire.  Charlie, _really_ doesn’t want to “go there” but when Ed disappears, Charlie gets worried.  It turns out that Ed was right. And in a rather sad scene, neighbor Jerry (vampire, played by Colin Farrell), catches Ed spying on him and cornering him, tells him: “I know you’ve been spying on me.  Well, I’ve been spying on you as well.  You’ve been an outcast all your life.  So why don’t you join the other side, and live forever...” Despondant and uable to resist, Ed gets bitten, and there it is.  Now there appear to be at least two vampires, Jerry the neighbor, and now Ed, in the neighborhood unbeknownst to anyone ... yet.

Charlie starts to see things as Ed used to, and, like Ed, _nobody_ in the neighborhood believes him.  Charlie remembers, however, that Ed used to watch a late night television show on Vampires being broadcast out of Las Vegas by “Peter Vincent, Vampire Slayer” (played by David Tennant).  So Charlie goes to seek his help.

Much happens.  It turns out that neighbor Jerry the Vampire had spent his nights excavating a lair under his house and he proceeds to bite / “turn” a good number of Charlie’s friends and neighbors.  It’s up to Charlie to save both his mom and his girl.  Is he able to do it, save them all?  Well, see the film ;-).  And mom’s real estate signs with those stakes on the end do prove rather helpful in the end ... ;-)

Again, Fright Night is not a profound movie.  It does have its cheesiness, some of which the CNS/USCCB rightfully objects to.  But overall it's not a terrible film, and I do believe that the film makers did do a great job in setting the movie in a nameless "ghostly" suburban subdivision at the edge of Las Vegas.  After all, suburbanites are notoriously "transient" and we often no longer know who exactly our neighbors are or what secrets lurk in their basements. ;-)


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One Day

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 ½ Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1563738/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv094.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110817/REVIEWS/110819983

One Day (directed by Lone Scherfig, book and screenplay written by David Nicholls) is an intelligent young adult love story that’s part Brigit Jones' Diary, part Unbearable Lightness of Being and part St. Elmo’s Fire that I do hope is remembered come Oscar time this winter as I do believe it deserves at least consideration for a whole bunch of Academy Awards from Best Film/Director/Adapted Screenplay to Best Actor/Actress in Leading Roles and even Best Actor/Actress in Supporting Roles (the male leading character's parents).

The story begins on college graduation day, July 15, 1988 at the University of Edinburgh.  Emma (played by Anne Hatheway) and Dexter (played by Jim Sturgess) are part of a group celebrating.  As the group begins to break up, since neither seems to find themselves attached to anyone, Emma invites Dexter to come with her to her dorm room/flat.  When they arrive, Emma, not at all self-assured, quietly panics and excuses herself to the bathroom “to brush her teeth.”  In reality, she’s practically gasping for air.  She apparently stays in the bathroom long enough to both regain her own courage and too break the mood.  When she returns, she finds Dexter putting his clothes back on to leave.  She convinces him to stay, but they decide simply to cuddle.  In the course of the gentle but very cautious pillow-talk, Dex tells Emma that the day is St. Swithin's Day, a sort of random Saint’s Day that follows them, year after year, for the rest of film.  Indeed the rest of the movie is about what these two characters are up to on this particular day, July 15th, during the 20 years that follow.

The device is wonderful because it becomes clear fairly quickly that in 1988, college graduates though they may be, _neither_ is really ready for the other.  Emma is still growing into who she becomes, and Dex begins as something of a cad.  The phenomenon chronicled in this film, which has been the bane of both Catholic vocation directors and parents alike, is what has come to be called Emerging Adulthood.  Indeed both of Dex’s parents, Allison (played by Patricia Clarkson) and Steven (played by Ken Scott) were excellent in expressing, in different (if often pointed/poignant) ways their frustrations with Dex’s apparent laziness in growing-up. 

To the movie’s _credit_, the pitfalls of “not growing-up” or “taking one’s time to grow-up” are amply shown in the film:  Both life and tragedy go on for Dex’s parents as he meanders his way through his 20s.  At one point, Dex marries a girlfriend simply because he knocked her up.  A child, Jasmine (played by numerous child actresses during the course of the film) is born, but the marriage ends in divorce.  In the meantime, Emma gets involved with a man from her work who she does not really love ... but is available and around.  When Dex and Emma are finally ready for each other, the biological clock has ticked-away a good part of its course.  

The movie is _honest_ and _often very, very sad_ as we, the audience, see missed opportunity after missed opportunity.  But do we look at our own lives as critically and as closely? 

Parents: There is _some_ passing nudity, but obviously many references to premarital sexual activity.  For that reason alone, many parents would not find it suitable for kids or young teens.  But beyond that, I simply don’t think that someone below college age would find the movie very interesting at all.  However, for the college aged and above, I do believe that the movie would make for an excellent discussion piece among friends and (in a _good and heartfelt way_) _with one’s own parents_.


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Conan the Barbarian (2011)

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (1 ½ stars) Fr Dennis (1/2 star, if only that the movie can serve as a reminder of what kind of world we'd live in if the Aryan extolling Nazis had won WW II)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816462/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv093.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110817/REVIEWS/110819987

Conan the Barbarian (directed by Marcus Nispel and screenplay written by Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood) is the screen incarnation of the character Conan the Barbarian invented by Texas (Southern) pulp-fiction writer Robert E. Howard in 1932.   The previous screen 1982 incarnation featured Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role.

To be honest, I am surprised that Conan’s character keeps surfacing because while it would be difficult to absolutely prove that Robert E. Howard and German Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg influenced each other, it is more or less obvious that Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Rosenberg’s infamous Myth of the 20th Century (the second most influential book of the Nazi era only surpassed by Hitler’s Mein Kampf) were inspired by the same brew of race-based “violence in defense of honor” extolling milieu that existed at the time. 

I’ll leave it to readers here to compare Robert’s Cimmeria from which Conan was supposed to have come and Rosenberg’s pre-history of the Aryan peoples in his Myth, noting only that Rosenberg was tried at Nuremberg Trials after World War II, found guilty of fomenting the crimes of the murderous Nazi regime and hung as a war criminal.

So why watch a movie that’s arguably a Texas-baked American version of Nazi-era myth?  Good question.  In good part, I went to see it because I remember seeing Schwarzennergger’s Conan in the 1980s when I was in my 20s (I despised the 1980s version then and despise the new version now) and wanted to see if the new version was just as bad as the old.

I also believe, frankly, that there’s some value in seeing what the world would have been like _without_ the arrival of Christianity and _especially_ “frilly” Catholicism (Protestantism was fundamentally a step back to a black draped, pale Taliban-like austerity):  Yes, we _could have_ ended-up living in a blood and mud covered Hell of eternal decapitations on barbaric “fields of honor.”  Indeed, compared to the blood drenched world of Conan, the frilly angels of Botticelli’s Florence of the Renaissance and the sweet strains of the baroque music of the harpsichord are an absolute breath of fresh air.  There is a lot to be said for looking for God in Beauty rather than in the swing of an iron-age blade aimed at the throat of a nameless “other tribe/raced” opponent.

Anyway, I find little positive in this new blood-drenched 3D version of Conan the Barbarian (the title role played now by Jason Mamoa) except to possibly see what we _could have been_ if Christianity had not arrived ... or what we could have become once again if the Nazis had won the Second World War.

ADDENDUM:

An interesting discussion on the influences entering into Robert E. Thomas' creation of Conan's world can be found on the IMDb's Discussion Board for Conan the Barbarian (2011).


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Sarah's Key

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (2 ½ Stars) Fr Dennis (3 ½ Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1668200/
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/REVIEWS/110729982

Sarah’s Key (directed and cowritten by Gilles Paquet-Brenner along with Serge Joncour based on the novel by Tatiana De Rosnay) is a French-English language film (appropriately subtitled) about an American-born journalist Julia Darmond (Kristen Scott Thomas) living in Paris with her French husband Bertrand Tezac (Frédéric Pierrot) and their daughter, about 12-13 years old.  In the midst of writing about the 60th anniversary of the infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of Paris’ Jews during the Nazi occupation, she discovers that the apartment that she and her husband inherited from her husband’s parents and were in the process of remodeling had belonged to a young Jewish family, the Starzynskis, prior to the round-up.  Investigating further, she discovers that while parents, Mme and M. Starzynski (played by Natasha Mashkevich and Arben Bajraktaj) had subsequently died in the Holocaust, their two children 12-year old Sarah (played by Mélusine Mayance) and 4 year old Michel (played by Paul Mercier) never appeared on any deportation list and therefore could have survived.

What to do?  With Julia’s mother-in-law very ill in an assisted living facility, she tactfully broaches the matter with her father-in-law Édouard (played by Michel Duchaussoy) who tells her a part of the story.  He had been a young boy when his family had moved into the apartment sometime soon after the Starzynskis had been deported and, yes, 12-year old Sarah, along with and older French peasant couple had come back to the apartment some time after that, with Sarah hysterically screaming for her brother – Just prior to their deportation, Sarah had hidden and locked her little brother in a false compartment behind a wall BUT COULD NOT COME BACK TO GET HIM OUT WHEN THE REST OF THEM WERE TAKEN AWAY BY THE AUTHORITIES. 

The movie’s about the repercussions of this 60+ year old secret playing out in the lives of several families to the present day. 

I’m from a central European (mostly Czech) background.  So I too grew-up with the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin being persistent if unwelcome guests at pretty much every family gathering when I was young.  So I know something of historical tragedy fatigue.

Still, this is a French take on a truly awful chapter in our shared history.  Each culture has a need for a national catharsis, and each culture has something to offer to others through its stories and its willingness (or unwillingness) to face the past.  The particular horror in this story was first that it was the French police who carried out the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of Paris’ Jews (at the German occupiers’ behest) and second that there were French families who benefited from the confiscations.  Still these stories/tragedies with local variations played-out across Europe to this day.

[A recent Czech take (lighter but its way similarly challenging) on the Nazi Occupation / Holocaust years was a movie called Musíme si Pomáhat, which played with English subtitles under the title Divided We Fall but the title translates better to the plea, "We have to help each other," about three acquaintances, one ethnic-Czech, one ethnic (Sudeten) German and one Jewish living on the same apartment block in Prague during the years surrounding the war.  Did the three help each other?  Could they have done more?  How well did the country as a whole do?  And is there some shame that the _only_ one of the three who'd be left on that block today would probably be the ethnic-Czech?  Again, each country/ethnicity has its stories to tell and its own shame to exorcise.]


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The Guard

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (3 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1540133/
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110803/REVIEWS/110809995

The Guard (written and directed by John Michael McDonagh) runs like a rural Irish inversion of the famed Eddie Murphy movie Beverly Hills Cop.  Thoroughly competent/professional African-American FBI man Wendell Everett (played by Don Cheadle) comes to rural Galway in the western reaches of Ireland to work with Irish local and national authorities to intercept an anticipated half-billion dollar drug shipment.  When he arrives, to his horror, he’s forced to team-up with an amiable but thoroughly “unprofessional” seeming rural cop (member of the Irish Garda) named Sargent Gerry Boyle (played by Brendan Gleeson).  After a disastrous initial meeting at a briefing on the matter, Everett is shocked to find that on the first day on the case together, Boyle notes that it’s his day off and proceeds to take it.  To Everett there’s "not a minute to spare," to Boyle there’s nothing that could possibly happen that could not wait until the next day.  And so it goes...

At one point an exasperated Everett says to Boyle: “I just don’t know if you’re just really, really stupid, or if you’re really, really smart.” [Those who see the movie, will note that my phraseology is sanitized for the readership here ;-)]

It turns out, of course, that Boyle knows quite well how things go in western Ireland, and in a climactic scene near the end when Boyle and Everett find themselves taking on the drug-smugglers themselves, Everett asks, “Should we call for back-up?”  Boyle answers quite sadly and  knowingly, “There will be no back-up.”

Such it _also_ is in rural western Ireland (and in much of the rest of the world): All the authorities knew, more or less, where the shipment was probably going to come.  And all the authorities _also knew_ (and quite well) to stay far, far away from it ... (Honestly, that was one of the best, most gut-wrenching dialogue exchanges in a police drama that I’ve seen since similar scenes in the Kevin Costner/Sean Connery film The Untouchables or, for that matter in the closing scene in the Harrison Ford/Brad Pitt, New York/IRA drama The Devil’s Own).

And Everett’s comment “I just don't know if you're really, really stupid, or really, really smart,” resonates to the very end.

Parents should be warned that there is a good deal of bad langauage and other crudity in the movie that isn't for little kids and that Boyle is certainly not a paragon of moral virtue.  But he does take his dying mother to Confession...  And again, _so it goes_ in this movie: The humor, even when it is crude, is _gentle_ and based on what I've learned over the years of Ireland / the Irish (I am 75% Czech and the remainder Russian/Ukrainian...) it's very, very Irish ;-).


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Final Destination 5

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (2 stars) Fr Dennis (for those who like this kind of movie 3 stars, for those who don’t please don’t go).

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1622979/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv091.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110810/REVIEWS/110819993

Final Destination 5 (directed by Steven Quayle, written by Eric Heisserer and Jeffrey Reddick) is a movie that is DEFINITELY _not_ for everybody (understatement of the year (nervous ;-).  Parents: The movie _definitely_ deserves its R-rating and I can’t imagine why any parent would even want to take a pre-teen to such a “in one’s face” (and I’m not kidding, remember this is 3D) _again and again_ exquisitely filmed slash and gore fest.  I’d also add that anybody _with a heart condition_ ought to avoid the film, especially the 3D version.  And to anyone who is somewhat pressured to go see the film, honestly remember, _it’s okay_ to “close your eyes” at times (I learned this trick a number of years ago, when I was going with our parish youth group to the Six Flags / Great America amusement park.  I found that if one just closes one’s eyes, one could basically ride every roller-coaster no matter how frightening it would otherwise seem to be ;-).

That said, I’ve been around teens and young adults (and _I was_ a teen / young adult) long enough to know that movies like this are magnets to both age groups.  In fact, it was one of my parish's college-aged young adults who first told me that this movie was coming and that, yes, she was definitely going to go see it when it opened.

Now why would that be?  Why would movies like this be so attractive to young people?  Well Stephen King explained in his book, the Danse Macabre, that a good horror story is one that “touches a nerve.”  That is, it takes a value of the audience – in this case youth and vitality – and inverts it.  So one gets gore and splat.  The actors and actresses in this film are all attractive.  This adds to the shock appeal of, for example, actress Ellen Wroe playing a young gymnast going through her routine.  Everyone knows what’s coming, just doesn’t know when.  And then in an intricate, seemingly utterly random sequence of disasters she hurls off the apparatus in a seemingly utterly random fashion, lands _not_ on her feet (even on her head) but in a previously inconceivable, but truly _worst possible position_ ...  and splat (OMG how was that even possible?) the character in the story is dead, instantly.  Now repeat the same idea played out in a kitchen of a swanky high end restaurant, at a LASER EYE CARE center, at an acupuncture clinic ... and ... you get the picture.  Beautiful young people, seemingly “with their whole lives ahead of them” die _one after another_ in utterly unexpected but intricately plotted ways and ... that's the appeal.  They're so young, so beautiful, so full of life, yet instantly ... so dead.  Thus the movie plays on some of one’s greatest fears: that one could find oneself dead in an instant and in a seemingly utterly unexpected way.  And is one _really_ that surprised that young people who flock to roller-coasters and various ‘fright fests’ and ‘haunted houses’ around Halloween time would flock to a movie like this?

So what’s the story?  (Is there a story? ;-).  Well there's sort of a story: A group from an office of a nondescript “small company” set out on a chartered bus to go on a two day “company retreat.”  While on their way to the retreat center, they are to cross a long suspension bridge.  There’s road work occurring on the bridge.  The bus stops.  Then, one of the people from the group, Sam Lawton (played by Nicolas D’Agosto) has a horrific premonition of the bridge collapsing.  The bridge collapse sequence is, of course, horrific and graphic.  As he is about to fall off the bridge, he wakes up, _realizing that it was a dream_.  But as he wakes up, he realizes that things are happening _exactly_ like in the dream/vision that he just experienced.  So he freaks out and drags his girlfriend, Molly Harper (played by Emma Bell), off the stopped bus.  Six other confused passengers follow – junior exec Peter Freidkin (played by Miles Fisher), intern/college gymnast Candice Hooper (played by Ellen Wroe), hot secretary Olivia Castle (played by Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), creepy I.T. guy Isaac (played by P.J. Byrne), new-factory floor manager Nathan (played by Arlen Escarpeta) and department boss Dennis (played by David Koechner).  Because these eight got off the bus, they were able to “cheat death” and survive the Tacoma Narrows Bridge style collapse.

But Death does not like to be cheated.  So during the rest of the movie, Death moves in to take them all, one by one...

Is there any value to a movie like this?  Here I would like to note that the CNS/USCCB gave the movie an “O” or morally offensive rating because of the gore and because the reviewers there had an honest question about whether there’d be anything redeemable about a movie like this.  Well, if the movie does help to  remind young people that “death comes to all” and to pray for the dead –  for friends who died in teenage accidents (and teens do die that way) or for their loved ones who’ve died over the years -- then perhaps there would be a positive aspect to a story like this.  If it makes young people a bit _more careful_, not to take stupid chances, which young people often do, it’d have a positive value as well. 

So I don't see the movie as a total loss.  And I do know that a lot of the young people (even among the young people I know) are going to see this movie, whether they tell me or not.  Just folks remember that if you do see the movie, then do take the time to pray for the loved ones that you know who have died.  And remember to live life basically on the "straight and narrow" because _none of us knows_ when our lives will end, and when we’ll have to make an accounting for how we lived them to our God.


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The Help

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv088.htm
Roger Ebert review - http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110809/REVIEWS/110809983

The Help (directed and screenplay written by Tate Taylor based on the novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett) is a story about the women of Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 near the end of the first half of the Civil Rights Movement.  There were references to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr’s March on Washington D.C. (as something about to take place / just having taken place) as well as a scene with a whole household – white family and “its” black help watching the funeral of John F. Kennedy on a “new” (now ancient) television.

It is important to understand that neither the book nor the movie was intended to be a documentary but rather to be historical fiction, seeking to give to readers/the audience a sense of the life of a relatively minor, arguably “quaint” though deeply troubled state capital in the Deep South of the time.  In this Kathryn Stocket follows a long, storied tradition of historical fiction writing coming from women of the South that would make Margaret Mitchell who wrote Gone With the Wind and Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird proud. 

As I write this, it is clear to me that who is sill missing to complete this pantheon of women writing about the South would be a work written by a black woman reaching the acclaim of these three as yet white women, who nonetheless have pushed the cause of humanizing African-Americans in the larger American culture.  Margaret Mitchell arguably began this process as she humanized the various black servants working on the plantations of the Old South (even as she did not outright condemn slavery).  Harper Lee further humanized a black victim of false accusation who ended up being lynched (though the lynching itself was not portrayed).  Kathryn Stocket chose to write a fascinating book from the perspectives of the black maids of Jackson (though the story still passed through her pen).

In each case, these were steps that on one hand could be portrayed as large.  And yet on the other hand seem painfully small.  Perhaps a black woman will one day complete this cycle of writing about the Old South.  Or perhaps, the subject itself may not prove to be altogether interesting to African American women writers of today/the future (or fraught with other dangers, such as _no matter_ how good a black writer’s book/novel may be, it may not get the kind of attention that a better connected / still more "mainstream" white writer would receive) who may prefer writing about other pressing challenges.  In this regard, please check the ADDENDUM to this Review (below) for the link to the statement and suggestions of the Association of Black Women Historians with regard to this book/film and general topic of African American domestic workers in the pre-Civil Rights era South or just click here.

It is also important to understand the book as historically based fiction rather than documentary because the characters in the story do feel more like “types” than actual people.  The characters inhabiting the universe of the novel/movie _are_ important but the viewer will have no trouble identifying who the people who’re supposed to be sympathetic are and who we’re supposed to despise.  So it’s a morality tale stocked at times with ringers.  But it is well done and perhaps pertinent to our own time.

The specific hornet’s nest that The Help may kick-up is the identification of Hilly Holbrook (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) as the movie’s “Queen Bee” chief villain.  To be sure, Hilly mistreats not only her “help,” Mimmy Jackson (played by Octavia Spenser) who she fires after Minny refused to go outside to use the “help’s bathroom” during a tornado but used the house bathroom instead, as well as the woman who replaced her ostensibly for “stealing” (but the story’s more complicated that than), Hilly _also_ makes sure to keep her white-women “friends” in their places as well.  She keeps the writer of the story, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phalan (played by Emma Stone) off balance (who was the only one of this circle of white women to have gone to college – Ole Miss’) by constantly reminding her in one way or another that, college grad though she may be, she’s the only one of their friends who still wasn’t married.  And Hilly’s particularly vicious to a sweet, but “out of her depth” woman “with a white trash background” who had married one of Hilly’s old boyfriends.  She also pressures subservient “friend” Celia Foote (played by Jessica Chastain) to build a bathroom for her maid (and the movie’s narrator) Aibileen Clark (played by Viola Davis) because _she_ does not want to use a bathroom that could have been used by a black person.

In other circumstances, the prominence of Hilly’s “Queen Bee” character as the story’s chief villain could be appalling.  Yet, we do live in a time when we have two _snarling_ former beauty queens Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann becoming powerful fixtures on our national political scene, arguably _nationalizing_ the power-dynamics played-out in Jackson, Mississippi in this story.  Indeed, the two, Palin and Bachmann, have come to have a hate-filled fixation on bringing down our nation's (first) African-American President Barack Obama. Say what one may about his politics (note that abortion aside, I tend to agree with him on _just about everything else_) like _most_ of the black “help” in the movie, notably Aibileen (Viola Davis' character), Obama is intelligent, measured and _calm_.

So while the movie is about Jackson, Mississippi of the 1960s, it is also about our time.  For “those who have eyes, see...”

ADDENDUM -

I wish to add here an Open Statement to the Fans of "The Help" by the Association of Black Women Historians.  Included at the end of the statement is a _suggested reading list_ of books, fiction and non-fiction, that address the realities of black domestic workers in the Pre-Civil Rights Era South.


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