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Entries in Reviews (1249)

Thursday
Aug112011

Review: "The Help"

The first storyteller is Aibilene (Viola Davis), a black maid raising her 17th white baby in the Jim Crow south. She can't answer the question of what it feels like to raise another woman's baby when you've left yours behind at home. It's an overwhelming opening inquiry to be sure. Though it's immediately clear Aibilene is being interviewed, we don't know why and for what purpose as The Help begins. This type of prologue is common in movies as you get a peek at what's to come before stepping back to the beginning, but the introduction is important: Abilene is the first person we meet and the narrative voice of the movie. 

Viola Davis even listens with dramatic depth!

Though mainstream Hollywood has proven time and again that they're constitutionally incapable of telling black stories without a white frame --  in this case Emma Stone's frizzy haired provocateur "Skeeter" who is secretly writing a book about the experience of maids in Jackson, Mississippi -- The Help, however subtlely (and perhaps accidentally), suggests with its Davis-centric opening and closing passages that Abilene is capable of creating frames of her own, thank you very much. In fact, she'd rather write her own story than tell it to another writer.

So she does.

Mm-hmm. It's Octavia Spencer as Minny, a surefire Oscar nominee.If Tate Taylor's adaptation or Kathryn Stockett's bestseller were confident enough in Aibilene's voice to downplay Skeeter's this would be a much more revelatory movie, and surely a more painful one, but we're dealing with the movie we've got which is essentially both of theirs.

The story, or, more accurately, stories of The Help are passed like batons throughout the movie. Deep breath now: Skeeter who wants to be writer has a starter job as a cleaning advice columnist which leads her to conversations with (baton pass); Aibilene who is dealing with personal grief and a weak-willed bad-mommy employer; Elizabeth (Ahna O'Reilly) who is continually pushed towards racist actions by local queen bee; Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) who loves lording her power over her mother, local girls, maids and the town outcast; Celia (Jessica Chastain) who is loud and 'trashy' but really loves her maid; Minny (Octavia Spencer), the best cook in town and Aibilene's BFF, who has a sharp tongue and is at war with Hilly.

Though it's easy to take potshots at The Help  -- we might discuss those soon -- it's also somewhat ungenerous since The Help is well meaning and entertaining and best of all affords us the rare opportunity of seeing several watchable actresses chewing on a meaty multi-course feast together. Sometimes they mistake the scenery for another course (Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain may both provoke heated arguments about the line betweena "type" and a caricature) but this was bound to happen. Chief among the delights in the acting arena is watching the dependable Viola Davis (Doubt, Far From Heaven) take the reins of a movie for once instead of stealing the whole thing in one scene or two.

The interplay between the characters makes up the bulk of the entertainment value, since with its sometimes candy color glossiness and very brief detached asides to actual history (usually on television sets), it's obviously not going for a deep historical rendering of the violent racist south. The movie would have done well to jettison much of Skeeter's story, both for pacing (it's far too long) and thematic strength, but Stone is such an engaging actress that it feels strange to object to having more of her around. Her storyline does eventually return, movingly, to the subject at the heart of The Help.

In the end where The Help wins over its audience, provided that they're okay with a surface take on a deep troubling subject, is with its trio of central performances. The intertwining still relevant topics of civil rights struggles, labor and racism are so large and overwhelming that it can be hard to breathe in their vicinity. What potency The Help does achieve it gets from its entertaining actresses sharing the thick pressure cooker air: Davis inhales, Stone fumes, Spencer erupts.

One final exasperated exhale from Aibilene is just the right cathartic move to end with. The audience breathes with her. And isn't this her story after all?

Related:
Oscar Discussion With Katey 
Review Index 

Thursday
Aug112011

Slave 4 Glee

Maybe it was the air conditioning. Maybe it's that there's nothing on TV lately and I miss Glee (which makes me crazy but is also appointment television). But fact: I had a good time at GLEE: THE 3D CONCERT MOVIE even though it was kind of like skipping chapters on the DVDs for the most famous performances.

Brittany S Pierce!

READ THE REVIEW @ TOWLEROAD
Are you a Gleek?

Tuesday
Aug092011

Thoughts I Had... While Watching "Kaboom"

This past week I finally caught up with Gregg Araki's Kaboom which is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray. I still vividly remember seeing The Living End when it came out and the memory is vivid because it was so raw, like a gay garage band demo. The latest is a typical Araki as its obsessed with beautiful young men, polysexual love triangles and the apocalypse. 

Here are a few thoughts on the movie ... let's say five of them to be precise.

01 While Araki has been known to reuse the same actors, his obsession with youth means that he has to keep moving on from muses past. It must suck for 38 year old James Duval, for example, to be demoted to third tier stoner "The Messiah" after headlining in the past. For Kaboom Thomas Dekker gets the beloved son position front and center and I do mean front and I do mean center. That seems to be the only compositional choice Araki makes in the movie. Nearly every scene ignores the sides of frames entirely -- the art direction often consists of a black screen - and places one actor cropped close up dead center, usually Dekker with his blue peepers and vaguely frosted lips. Dekker is nice to look at, and I'll admit straightaway that betwen this and Cinema Verite, he's a more interesting and game actor than I initially thought when he whined through The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But I'm not sure he's ready for his close-up. Or at least not this many of them in one movie. You'd have to be a full fledged movie star to nail that many of them in short succession.

02 See what I mean about the composition...

Do you wanna f*** me?"

...asks Juno Temple's "London" while Smith begins to hallucinate from the party drugs in an early scene. This is about as forward as the movie gets about sex despite a narrative which includes the following [NSFW]:

Click to read more ...

Tuesday
Aug092011

True Blood 4.7 "Cold Grey Light of Dawn"

She hurts him to save him. Unless they're silvered all the vampires will walk into the sun.With Sunday night's episode, fang-bangers are now past the hump. This season's witchy storyline is now on its way to resolving itself. The halfway mark also suggests that from here on out we might have droppings that set things up for Season Five. 

Cold Grey Light of Dawn
We begin where we left off with Marnie (Fiona Shaw) wreaking havoc. Controlling vamps, as it turns out, seems to be getting easier and easier for her. With a whisper of "Resurrection" her former rapist Luis (Peter Macdissi) stakes himself with Bill's silver weapon after a scuffle. One vampire down, all the rest of them to go. Marnie wants them all to meet the true death. After the burst of action that opens the show (Tara also narrowly avoids death at Pam's rotting hands), things slow down considerably. We stop in on unhappy couples (Alcides and Debbie) still shaky couples (Sam &) and new ones (Sookie & Eric). Meanwhile, Tara dumps her lover and signs up with Marnie's vampire slaughter plans, Jason tries to avoid Hoyt "I'd rather be cooking then talking anyhow" and realizes (again) that he's hot for Jessica. Most oddly, Bill tells Jessica the Antonia story which seems like a really strange storytelling move. We've heard and seen this storyline via Marnie and Luis so many times now it felt like a "previously on..." in the middle of the show.

But any scene with Deborah Ann Woll's Jessica gives us great visuals. Such a screen face [spoiler image after the jump]

Click to read more ...

Monday
Aug082011

Judy Fest: "The Harvey Girls"

Silly me. I had the greatest time at the Judy Garland festival at Lincoln Center this week and the movie I didn't write about Presenting Lily Mars was probably my favorite viewing experience. Rent it! Judy was just so funny in it, it was really charming and I liked her chemistry with Van Heflin (I confess I had to look him up since Shane had slipped my mind and I'd never seen his Best Supporting Actor Oscar performance for Johnny Eager (1941). Have any of you seen that one? Is it worth checking out?

But enough about Lily Mars... on to Judy in another incarnation. The Lincoln Center portion of the festival ends tomorrow though the celebration continues at the Paley Center for Television (since Judy did a lot of variety work on TV in the 50s). The last two films I caught were period musicals and here's the first of them.

 

The Harvey Girls (1946)
I always forget that Judy Garland and Angela Lansbury were contemporaries. They were just three years apart in age (Angela is younger) though in this western musical, Lansbury is clearly meant to be the older woman. Or at least the more experienced one, if you know what I'm saying. Angela is a hardened showgirl (i.e. prostitute) at a rowdy saloon (i.e. casino/brothel) and she's just about the only person in the frontier town who isn't thrilled when Judy Garland arrives "On the Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe".

In fact, that first big ensemble musical number hilarious stops halfway through just so everyone can gawk at Judy as she steps off the train, like she's the most famous beloved celebrity in the world. The showstopping entrance makes no narrative sense whatsoever -- Judy's "Susan Bradley" being a nobody who is about to start work at Harvey's restaurant -- but it makes perfect movie-movie sense because Judy Garland IS famous and beloved. And if there's a musical number already in progress when Garland arrives at the scene it's basically the Red Sea to her Moses.

The town is divided too, right down the middle, between the wild saloon and the proper restaurant. It's basically a battle for both the soul of the town and the town's most powerful man (John Hodiak) with Lansbury and Garland representing for either side. Guess who wins: The good girl or the bad one? The headliner or the newbie (this was only Lansbury's fourth picture)? I'll give you one guess.

The Harvey Girls hasn't aged as well as some of Garland's output. It's pretty creaky and I don't think it's only due to the print we saw that badly needed some restoration and color correction. Part of the problem is that the film grinds to a halt whenever the typically able Garland isn't front and center. Plus, the songs aren't as memorable as those from her other films. Though the young Cyd Charisse is all porcelain loveliness and Angela Lansbury's perma-scowl is amusing the plot points connecting their numbers and several other characters feel insufficiently developed to hold interest in The Harvey Girls as an ensemble piece. It's always "Can we please get back to Garland?" Still, you can't beat that rare opportunity to see Dorothy dance with her Scarecrow again (Ray Bolger). I think she had missed him most of all. B-