“The Help,” an adaptation of a 2009 best seller of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, has a tricky story to tell. Make it too uplifting and it will ring historically false; make it too realistically downbeat and summer audiences might stay away. Luckily, the story of a Southern Belle’s social awakening and the women who made it possible, hits most of the right notes.
Set in the weeks and months leading up to the 1963 death of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, “The Help” is the story of Jackson, Mississippi native “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), who comes home from four years at school to discover the woman who raised her, a maid named Constantine (Cicely Tyson), is no longer employed by her family. Her mother says she quit, but Skeeter has doubts. Meanwhile Skeeter takes a job writing a domestic maintenance column for the local newspaper. When she asks a friend’s maid, Aibileen (Viola Davis) for housekeeping tips she realizes there is more to the lives of the maids who raised her and her friends than she previously thought. With the help of a courageous group of housekeepers she tells the real story of the life of the maids, writing a book called “The Help.”
“The Help” is set at a time in the South when groups like the White Citizen’s Council had an office on Main Street and those same citizens didn’t see the irony of arriving at a charity event called The African Children’s Ball in a White’s Only taxi cab. The film gets the casual racism of the time right, offering up a sense of the era, but in a sanitized Hollywood sort of way. The brutal details of the book—stories of lynchings and corporal punishment for trifling matters—have been wiped away. Even the death of Evers, a turning point in the Civil Rights movement, happens off screen and goes largely unexplored.
There are some subtle moments that really ring true however. In one scene Skeeter visits Aibileen as she does her chores to try and convince her to be interviewed for the book. She’s meeting with her person to person, but when it starts to rain Skeeter rushes to get out of the rain without offering to help Aibileen gather up the rest of the laundry she had been bringing in from the clothes line. Skeeter wants to level the playing field between them, but she hasn’t yet completely let go of the idea of what is maid’s work and what is not.
But having said all that, this isn’t a history lesson. If you want real life grit rent “Eyes on the Prize”—Harry Hampton’s 1987 documentary on the American Civil Rights Movement from 1952 to 1965—because you won’t find it here. What you will find is a portrait of the South painted in broad strokes, performed by an eager and talented cast.
Some of the performances are pitched a bit over-the-top—Jessica Chastain, so understated in “The Tree of Life” seems positively ready to burst in the first half of this movie—but in the Southern Belle category, Emma Stone (and her football-sized eyes) brings some curly-haired determination to the role. She’s obviously different, the filmmakers seem to be telling us, because she’s the only one without a pulled back Beehive hairdo. Allison Janney as Skeeter’s dramatic mother—“My daughter has upset my cancerous ulcer,” she cries at one point—really shines and Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly Holbrook, the town’s well-born racist, is a chilling reminder of the genteel face of intolerance.
The performance that sells the picture, however, belongs to Academy Award nominee Viola Davis. As Aibileen she is the soul of the film, a woman who has been hurt by life but is still capable of nurturing the very people who wounded her. Even though she doesn’t have the movie’s showiest role—that’s Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson—she’s still the film’s strongest and most memorable character.
“The Help” is a heartfelt and sincere story that could have benefited from a little less of those qualities and a little more realism.
At one point in “Easy A” Olive (Emma Stone) says “John Hughes did not direct my life.” True enough, but he could have directed this movie. The story of a girl who takes the saying “let’s not and say we did” to a whole new level has echoes of Hughes and is the best high school comedy to come along since “Mean Girls” and “Superbad.”
The movie begins with the voiceover, “The rumours of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated.” It’s the voice of Olive (Stone), a clean cut high school senior who tells a little white lie about losing her virginity. As soon as the gossip mill gets a hold of the info, however, her life takes a parallel course to the heroine of the book she is studying in English class—The Scarlet Letter. At first she embraces her newfound notoriety; after all she had been all but invisible at the beginning of the school year. “Google Earth couldn’t find me even if I was dressed as a ten story building,” she says. It isn’t until the lies and gossip start to spin out of control that she has to assert her virginity.
“Easy A” is funny. Laugh out loud until your face hurts funny. Even the product placement—Quiznos—is funny. It’s filled with great one liners—“I fake rocked your world!”—and the best non-sex, sex scene ever but as good as the script is, it is enhanced by terrific comedic performances that elevate the movie from clever teen romp to something special.
Leading the cast is Emma Stone, the typical movie not-so-plain, plain girl, as the spunky Olive. Her past work in “Superbad” and “Zombieland” hinted at her ability to be funny and hold the screen, but here she turns a corner into full on Lucille Ball mode, mixing pratfalls with wit while pulling faces and cracking jokes. Smart and funny, she’s the film’s centerpiece and this should be her breakout movie.
Supporting her, as her parents, are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson. Tucci, who recently creeped out everyone who paid twelve bucks to see “The Lovely Bones” unleashes his silly side here, proving, once again, that he is one of our most versatile actors. Clarkson, as his freewheeling wife (and Olive’s mom) brings bucket loads of charm and comic timing. When they are together sparks fly.
Uniformly strong are Amanda Bynes, in what was supposed to be her last role before her retirement from acting, and Dan Byrd (from The Hills Have Eyes) as Brandon, a gay teen who turns to Olive for help. His plaintive plea for her to help put an end to the teasing he takes at school is heartfelt and touching and real.
“Easy A” is the most fun I’ve had in the theatre in a long time.
Making a horror comedy is tricky business. Do it right and you get a classic like “Sean of the Dead,” a movie whose body count is offset by just the right amount of laughs. Do it wrong and you’ll wind up with “Repossessed,” a movie that is neither funny nor scary, just dull. “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer (whose next movie is to be called Psycho Funky Chimp) understands that horror comedies are neither fish nor fowl—they are both. For every decapitation you have to have a giggle and “Zombieland” delivers on both counts.
This post-apocalyptic zom com stars Jesse Eisenberg as a teenage curmudgeon who has survived a fast acting viral plague that turned his neighbors (and everybody else) into ferocious flesh eating zombies. Mad cow became mad person which became mad zombie disease! It should be a paradise for this videogame playing hermit—no facebook status updates!—but a life spent killing ravenous zombies has left him starving for human contact. When he meets zombie killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), and two dishonest sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), he realizes for better or worse, they must stick together to survive.
“Zombieland” has the same over-the-top silly vibe that makes movies like “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” such guilty pleasures. It’s gross-out funny with plenty of action and zombie kills for the hardcores, but underneath the absurdity is a message about humanity. At the end of the movie Eisenberg’s character realizes that his solitary life was turning him into the thing he feared most. “Without other people,” he says, “you might as well be a zombie.” The sentiment may not be as powerful as George A. Romero’s zombie metaphors but it puts a nice little bow on this coming of age story.
Also strong is the casting. Eisenberg, a young actor second only to Michael Cera in playing awkward teens on film, is an unlikely action movie hero, but here he plays to his strengths—playing the witty self-conscious teen—and expands his range to include zombie serial killer.
Equally fun is Woody Harrelson as the Twinkie loving zombie hunter Tallahassee. Harrelson brings a swagger and some unexpected twists to the character and delivers many of the film’s funniest lines.
Both are ably supported by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin who don’t have as have much to do as the boys, but do a great deal to keep the story moving forward.
The showiest role in the film, however, belongs to a Hollywood superstar who has one of the most surreal cameos in recent memory. I’m not going to tell you who it is (it’s funnier if you don’t know) but his wild scenes alone are worth the price of admission.
“Zombieland” breathes a bit of new life into the sometimes stale zombie genre.
“The Croods,” Nicolas Cage’s new kid friendly flick, is set in a time when cave drawings were considered high tech, but despite its paleontological roots, it feels very modern. It may be about a family of cavemen and women—imagine “The Flintstones” without the brontosaurus ribs—but the 3D animation is state-of-the-art and you don’t need to be an anthropologist to get the father-and-daughter story. It’s only the mother-in-law jokes that feel almost as prehistoric as the characters.
Cage voices Grug, a caveman dad with some Neanderthal ideas about how to protect his family. “No one said survival is fun,” he grunts. His teenage daughter Eep (voice of Emma Stone), however, wants something more from her life than hiding in a cave and surviving. Sneaking out of the family grotto one night she meets Guy (voice of Ryan Reynolds), a caveboy with good looks and a brain—he invents fire, belts, shoes and other necessities of life!—who warns her that a colossal change is coming.
The news does not go down well with Grug and his “Anything new is bad,” attitude until the earth begins to split, their cave is destroyed and they are forced to follow Guy to higher ground. Their journey takes them through a changing world where they’re no longer the top of the food chain and must learn to adapt or die.
OK, adapt or die sounds pretty heavy for a kid’s film, but the movie is about how facing adversity actually brings this family closer together. There are other messages wedged in there—adapting is good, acceptance is better and loyalty is best—but the movie uses run-ins with ancient animals—fanciful kid friendly creatures—to entertain the eye and get its main idea across.
It’s chock-a-block with beautiful images. Eep’s introduction to fire is gorgeous, as is the new landscape created with every eruption of the earth. There’s loads of caveman comedy and Paleolithic physical action—apparently cavemen invented Parkour—and it contains the best self-aware line Nicolas Cage has ever uttered on screen—“Hand me those acting sticks!”
The family dynamic works, although Grug’s ambivalence to his mother-in-law’s (voice of Cloris Leachman) survival seems like a relic from another era. “The Croods” does err on the side of sentimentality near the end—even cavemen have feelings!—but to quote the theme song from another stone-age family cartoon, you’ll still “have a yabbadabba-doo time, a dabba-doo time” with Grug and his clan.
Any movie brazen enough to put the word “amazing” in the title really should go the extra mile to ensure that the movie is, in act, amazing. Otherwise filmmakers run the risk of opening themselves up to reviews that begin like this: “Amazing Spider-Man,” more like “So-So Spider-Man.” There’s nothing that much wrong with the reboot of the Sam Raimi series, but it doesn’t have the oomph I would have expected from a talented director—the ironically named Marc Webb—hitting the reset button.
Like first Raimi film—which was released just ten years ago—“The Amazing Spider-Man” is an origin film. Peter Parker (“The Social Network’s” Andrew Garfield) is a misfit teen who develops superhuman powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. His spidey-senses tingle when danger is about and, as the song goes, he can “do whatever a spider can.” His new powers put him in the path of his scientist father’s old partner Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), an amputee doctor experimenting with cross genetic engineering to find a way to regrow his arm, and into the arms of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), the cute daughter of a hardboiled police captain (Denis Leary).
There are differences between Raimi’s take on the story and the new film. He no longer organically shoots webs, they now come out of a mechanical webslinger. There’s a new romantic interest—Gwen replaces Mary-Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst in the older movies) as Parker’s paramour– a new villain—Curt Connors appeared in the other movies as Peter’s professor—who morphs from human to giant lizard determined to infect everyone with lizard juice and J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle’s Editor-in-Chief is absent.
The biggest change, however, comes in the character. Spider-Man Mach 1, Tobey McGuire, played the webbed wonder’s human counter-part as a sweet, but awkward and bullied loner. Garfield takes a different approach. His Parker is rebellious, angst-ridden who taunts his enemies with wisecracks and gleefully yells, “I’m swingin’ here!” as he zigzags trough the air supported by his newfangled super webs.
It’s an interesting, fresh take on Parker, which Garfield, despite being eleven years older than his character, pulls off with aplomb. He’s made the character his own, balancing Parker’s nervous energy with Spider-Man’s cockiness.
Emma Stone’s Gwen and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Peter’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May bring some necessary heart to the story, but this is a summer blockbuster, so the emphasis is on the other stuff; nine-foot long lizards and fight scenes, but despite the large scope of the film it seems on a smaller scale than Raimi’s movies. Or at last as small a scale as a movie about a giant reptile and a radioactive superhero can be.
The visionary rethink that Christopher Nolan brought to Batman isn’t here. It does have the best Stan Lee cameo to date, beautiful photography and more humor than the previous films, but coming just five years after the last Raimi film it doesn’t feel as “amazing” as it should.
