The Help

Had planned on seeing Rise of the Apes but turned left instead of right and thought I was going to something... educational maybe, or at the very least an important story by an important writer, yada yada yada.
Impossible for me to believe that the book of this was and still is a bestseller. Who buys crap like this?
Years ago when Alice Walker's book The Color Purple was made into a movie with Whoopi Goldberg I remember Walker having to suffer the slings and arrows of black male writers who criticized the story for its portrayal of black men. Little did we all know that at least TCP was told from wonderful Miss Celie's point of view instead of some privileged white chick's viewpoint, which is what we get here. I mean seriously? What year is this that this story appears as entertainment? That we somehow need to see the story, the disgrace, of the working lives of a group black women in the pre-civil rights south, but not from their own mouths, but somehow us, the movie going public, the novel buying public, needs to be ushered into this "unfamiliar" territory, this dangerous territory by a college educated chick who has put her education before dating and who, saint that she is, puts the stories of this group of women before her own. Except when the book is published and she moves off to New York City to work at Harper Row and leave the dusty environs of Jackson, Mississippi behind.
It's actually 2011 and this is what it's come to? Wow, america. Congratulations on being able to really look the issue of racism straight in the eye, using of course, the uber rose-colored glasses of some white chick who must be still making money off the book.
This one more than turned my stomach. It saddened me. I thought we had come so much further. I'm off to read some Toni Morrison.
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more thoughts....

It made me long for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, something written by and from the point of view of the women it was seeming to depict. The film went out of its way to pull at heart strings (but whose heartstrings I would ask): mother with cancer, elderly black woman humiliated, etc etc. 

The lead character (Emma Stone) was sketched in only the broadest way and seemed to clearly be a vehicle to take the audience into the world of the maids, as if the assumed audience were white and needed a field guide into that world. 

I am more than sure that there was real violence and real beatings going on at that time in history. I don't see how it does anyone any good to minimize those horrible years by presenting them in the context of a college girl's first book project. 

Everything that was horrible and violent in Mississippi of the early 1960s is swept under the rug here in favor of buffount hairdos and cinched in waists. The white chick who keeps having miscarriages' story is somehow put on the same level as the black women who lived under threat of lynching. 

The grotesque practice of forcing an entire group of people to live as sub-standard human beings every day of their lives and their parent's lives and their children's lives is miraculously watered down to be represented by a toilet built in the garage. Maybe the horrors of this era could never be accurately reproduced in a fiction film. Three minutes of any news footage of these years with firehoses turned onto crowds of blacks, or even the still photos of lynched men with a crowd of white standing victorious below them tells us more about this time in our history than this film ever could. For someone who knows little about this history, even worse, this film is a disservice to what so many people suffered through and masks that history by minimizing it.