The Help Some movies lend themselves to being watched in specific theaters. The Sound of Music watched at the Salzburger Landestheater or Good Will Hunting at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square come to mind. So when I learned of The Help's release, I knew I would need to watch it at The Prytania. It's not Jackson, MS, but the neighborhood in which The Prytania sits might as well be 1950s Jackson. Even this day, early in the mornings and around four in the afternoon, you will find black workers dressed in maid outfits going to and from work, although, now, many have been replaced by Hispanic workers, who are willing to work for much less.

It's interesting to see how a cinematic jeremiad is received by the crowd the film intends to condemn. And so I trudged off to that old theater. By the roar of laughter during scenes that mocked the ruling class, an objective observer concludes that few at The Prytania are willing to see their faults in movies. How quick people are to condemn those they see without recognizing their own hypocrisy and sin.

What is this movie about? I think it's that people a corrupt society categorizes as good and upstanding are usually neither. Corrupt societies, therefore, need to be rebuked, and the rebuke can only come from heroes, or in this case, heroines who are courageous. Their courage is founded in truth, and in their courageous pursuit of this truth, freedom from the shackles of corruption and brokenness is found. It is a modern retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave or Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me [Jesus the Truth] and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." To step outside the mob's friendship is a dangerous, painful, and sacrificial move, almost always. It's a damn shame that this movie did not make more of the cost of discipleship, or cost of doing what is right. It's a bit fairy-tale-ish in its portrayal of justice fighters as triumphant. The reality is almost always that the children of these people receive the fruits of their labor while the fighters themselves are murdered or rejected. Those who have power never give up their power without violence.

Viola Davis and Emma Stone give the performances of their careers. Their characters are the only ones that break from pack-mob mentality, although the broken, blonde bimbo, Celia Leefolt, whose character I found pitiable but superfluous to the story, could, in a way, fit in this category (but remember, her exclusion is not by choice; if it were her choice, she would join the mob). The rest of the characters are rather pedestrian and used as comic relief or foils of evil.

Most viewers, like the ones with whom I watched this movie, will look at the film as an historical fiction. And they will judge the bad guys. In judging, people feel better about themselves and gain a sense of moral superiority. But as with any jeremiad, the author wants the listener or viewer to look at himself and his own situation. How are we today acting as the bad guys? How are we today treating others in a horrific, cruel, inhuman, yet culturally accepted way? 8/10

Horrible Bosses When your audience laughs hardest because one of its characters is named MFer, you know you've successfully filled the stomachs of the poo-poo-pee-pee-penis-vagina-drugs crowd. Sometimes I wonder if what passes as comedy today isn't written by 14 year old boys the studios recruit off message boards like the OT.

Jennifer Anniston is a pitiable, aging beauty whose acting career is dying, oh wait, was it ever alive? Jason Bateman is a talented actor, but until he realizes his potential, he'll be stuck scraping the bottom of the cheap seats for cheap minds. 3/10

This post was edited on 11/16/11 at 7:28 am

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Posted by TulaneLSU

Member since Aug 2003

Member since Dec 2007

13298 posts

Posted on 11/16/11 at 7:21 am to TulaneLSU

How Do You Know according to reports, this movie cost $120 million to make. Did the actors wipe their butts with gold toilet paper? This movie is awkward and heads in no discernible or interesting direction. Although it's labeled a romantic movie, there is no romance and I left the theater caring not for any of the characters, knowing it was just a paycheck for all of them. Worst romance in years. 2/10

Hugo The 19th century was perhaps the worst century for Christian theology in the Church's history. Where Kierkegaard was one of a few very bright lights, his light was not appreciated until Europe emerged from the ashes of a fallen civilization after the Great War. What led Europe to its own destruction? Natural theology. More precisely, the theology of both William Paley and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Paley believed that all we need to prove God's existence is order in the world. He therefore starts with his observation, his reason, and works his way backward, an Enlightenment's God of the gaps, if you will. In his monumentally poor Natural Theology he writes, "Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given -- that, for anything I know, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?...For this reason, and for no other when we come to inspect the watch we perceive that its several parts are famed put together for a purpose...This mechanism being observed... the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker....who comprehended its construction, and designed its use."

Hugo is a delightful tale written by a person who likely does not realize he has adopted Paley's theology, but beneath the theological undertones of this movie is a distinctly Christian message. We are broken on the inside. Someone needs to fix us. This in itself is a good and natural realization. We do not need a revelation of any supernatural means to learn how broken we are. Just look at the world around us. If we were not broken, the structures of this world would not be so hopelessly broken and corrupt. Does anyone need to look further than the media, especially at ESPN, who campaign for Alabama's inclusion in the national championship game despite only playing four teams with a winning record and hanging its entire season on a loss at home? A just world would not allow such non-sense. A just world is filled with whole and healthy people. But the world is not just. It is broken, just as its inhabitants. The film does not have the courage to delve into the Watchmaker, but Scorsese has the sense, perhaps because he has the limited theological insight, to plant the story in the land of the temporal alone. While the movie is about the one who fixes others, even at the cost of his own safety, that character, so full of mystery is left as nothing more than a flat messiah. We learn so much about the dynamic character, the old man, and it is good. But the character I wanted to learn is left as little more than a tool. What makes his clock tick? Martin, tell me.

One thing slightly perturbing I see as I get older is the feeling among American directors that characters who are not American need to have British accents. The movie is set in Paris, but every single character has a British accent. Why? Apart from that annoyance that extends not just from this movie but nearly every Disney movie ever made to the council scenes in Star Wars, I liked the visuals of this movie. Set in the Gare Montparnasse, the famous Parisian train station, known in photographs for the train that could not stop and ended up shooting through the station's main window, the cinematography is beautifully done, making the viewer appreciate the cold. It's easy for your film to be beautiful when the setting is Paris, but even so, Hugo has something magical about it. One of its magic tricks is the use of cold. Cold can be a character of death and misery, but in this movie, the cold is used to show beauty and to bring us to a wonderland of mirth. It is, in that way, a quintessentially Christmasy movie.

The acting is rather ordinary, with no magical performances given. There is, however, one shockingly foreign performance. It took me a couple of scenes until I realized who played one of the characters. So unusual and divergent from his normal roles was this one. Hugo is one of those very warm family movies that will make a chummy memory in the minds of children. But for me, I felt like so much more was left on the table that could have been developed. 7/10

The Ides of March Maybe you know J Anouilh's play Becket. If you don't, it's the story between the Archbishop of Cantebury, Becket, and the King of England, Henry II. The two, who were at one time best friends, become arch enemies because Becket is unwilling to lay down the honor of God and the Church at the altar of the monarch's power. What the play so aptly does is show the conflict between doing what's honorable and doing what friends want. The Ides of March deal with the same issues, but its message is far different, far less idealistic and memorable. In any event, I believe the naming of this movie is wrong. Something more befitting its themes would be a title like Honor and Friendship. Instead, the writers incorrectly lead viewers with a ubiquitously known title about a secretive putsch that has little to do with the movie.

The movie's focus is on two men, two ideologues, one younger, the dude in Drive and Crazy, Stupid Love, and one older, the guy in Oceans 11. The movie is at its best building both of these characters into superhumans, people who care about the concerns of the world, but who are not dragged down by the filth of the world. Act I, Eden, is a walk through Clooney's own liberal policies, which sound ever so convincing and ever so compelling.

But Eden does not stay perfect forever. As the Catholic monk, Henri Nouwen wrote about the fall of spiritual leaders, Leaders with a good message "separate themselves from their own concrete community, try to deal with their needs by ignoring them or satisfying them in distant and anonymous places, and then experience an increasing split between their own most private inner world and the good news they announce." Often the leaders who have the best ideas and the most pure motives are the ones who succumb to the cheapest of sins. And once sin enters the pictures, the dominoes comes crashing down. Sin multiplies and reverberates through the land, destroying individuals, destroying relationships, and destroying dreams. Who was once a ideologue of justice to the people becomes the power he preached he came to stop.

The game of politics pretends to be above sin, and so its adherents use what they believe is more sophisticated language, but any new terminology is only a re-released Disney movie in 3D. It might look or sound a little different, but it's really the same thing. So we enter the second act, the act of guilt and of shame. But for as much honor as these men and their camarilla exuded in their public lives, in private, they seem to lack shame. Shame is replaced with a thirst for power and self-betterment.

This post was edited on 11/29/11 at 10:18 pm

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Posted by iwyLSUiwy

I'm your huckleberry

Member since Apr 2008

34488 posts

Posted on 12/13/11 at 12:55 pm to TulaneLSU

quote:
The Help Some movies lend themselves to being watched in specific theaters. The Sound of Music watched at the Salzburger Landestheater or Good Will Hunting at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square come to mind. So when I learned of The Help's release, I knew I would need to watch it at The Prytania. It's not Jackson, MS, but the neighborhood in which The Prytania sits might as well be 1950s Jackson. Even this day, early in the mornings and around four in the afternoon, you will find black workers dressed in maid outfits going to and from work, although, now, many have been replaced by Hispanic workers, who are willing to work for much less.

It's interesting to see how a cinematic jeremiad is received by the crowd the film intends to condemn. And so I trudged off to that old theater. By the roar of laughter during scenes that mocked the ruling class, an objective observer concludes that few at The Prytania are willing to see their faults in movies. How quick people are to condemn those they see without recognizing their own hypocrisy and sin.

What is this movie about? I think it's that people a corrupt society categorizes as good and upstanding are usually neither. Corrupt societies, therefore, need to be rebuked, and the rebuke can only come from heroes, or in this case, heroines who are courageous. Their courage is founded in truth, and in their courageous pursuit of this truth, freedom from the shackles of corruption and brokenness is found. It is a modern retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave or Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me [Jesus the Truth] and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." To step outside the mob's friendship is a dangerous, painful, and sacrificial move, almost always. It's a damn shame that this movie did not make more of the cost of discipleship, or cost of doing what is right. It's a bit fairy-tale-ish in its portrayal of justice fighters as triumphant. The reality is almost always that the children of these people receive the fruits of their labor while the fighters themselves are murdered or rejected. Those who have power never give up their power without violence.

Viola Davis and Emma Stone give the performances of their careers. Their characters are the only ones that break from pack-mob mentality, although the broken, blonde bimbo, Celia Leefolt, whose character I found pitiable but superfluous to the story, could, in a way, fit in this category (but remember, her exclusion is not by choice; if it were her choice, she would join the mob). The rest of the characters are rather pedestrian and used as comic relief or foils of evil.

Most viewers, like the ones with whom I watched this movie, will look at the film as an historical fiction. And they will judge the bad guys. In judging, people feel better about themselves and gain a sense of moral superiority. But as with any jeremiad, the author wants the listener or viewer to look at himself and his own situation. How are we today acting as the bad guys? How are we today treating others in a horrific, cruel, inhuman, yet culturally accepted way? 8/10

Horrible Bosses When your audience laughs hardest because one of its characters is named MFer, you know you've successfully filled the stomachs of the poo-poo-pee-pee-penis-vagina-drugs crowd. Sometimes I wonder if what passes as comedy today isn't written by 14 year old boys the studios recruit off message boards like the OT.

Jennifer Anniston is a pitiable, aging beauty whose acting career is dying, oh wait, was it ever alive? Jason Bateman is a talented actor, but until he realizes his potential, he'll be stuck scraping the bottom of the cheap seats for cheap minds. 3/10