The Help

Director: Tate Taylor
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 2.0

Ladies and gentlemen, get those black-eyed peas and sweet potato pie ready, because it's Righteous Indignation Time! Journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) starts a project to interview the black maids in Jackson, Mississippi - including Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer - to write a tell-all about what it's like to work for obnoxious, racist white people (embodied by Bryce Dallas Howard's shrew) who refuse to allow their help to use their own toilets (!?) and who treat them like, well, slaves. Nice as a celebration of the written word as a game-changer - Stone's book's power ripples through the deeply conservative community - though essentially pandering and obvious to its intended liberal audience.