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From The Rumpus.


The Help is billed as inspirational, charming and heart warming. That's true if your heart is warmed by narrow, condescending, mostly racist depictions of black people in 1960s Mississippi, overly sympathetic depictions of the white women who employed the help, the excessive, inaccurate use of dialect, and the glaring omissions with regards to the stirring Civil Rights Movement in which, as Martha Southgate points out, in Entertainment Weekly, "…white people were the help," and where "the architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American." The Help, I have decided, is science fiction, creating an alternate universe to the one we live in.


Probably won't see that one.


Update: It gets worse:


If you do bring your brain to The Help, the movie is worse than you might imagine. Seeing The Help through a critical lens was excruciating.  At one point, while teaching Celia Foote to make fried chicken, Minny says, "Frying chicken tend to make me feel better about life." That a line about the solace found in the preparation of fried foods made it into a book and movie produced this decade says a great deal about where we are in acting right about race.

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Published on August 18, 2011 11:15
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