Thighs Wide Shut

The Help
Maid In America
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 137 min

We’re not super big on southern styled movies revolving around sassy women doing sassy things in sassypants (never have seen Steel Magnolias, Driving Miss Daisy, or Green Fried Tomatoes), but we do like us some sappy movies that make us cry and semi-revolve around pie and fried chicken.  The Help is just such a movie, but this one’s got a message, about dicey race relations or something, but with a hope for a better tomorrow, or something!!!  And guess what, WE LOVED IT TO TEARS!!!!!!!!!  NOW FEED US SOME FRIED CHICKEN, NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Based on the runaway bestseller of the same name by Kathryn Stockett (that we haven’t read a word of, snatchurally), no-name writer/director Tate Taylor takes the story about the stories of two black maids (stoically solid, and Oscar-worthy Viola Davis, and an outrageously enraged Octavia Spencer) and the one white woman (not even fugly wigs can make Emma Stone un-hot/awesome) ‘brave’ enuff to tell their stories, and makes all these stories about stories of stories well worth telling and watching… even if they never happened, and even if some have accused the movie of candy-coloring & white-washing elements of the Civil Rights era.  So what if Skeeter (Emma Stone’s stoopid character’s name) is the white vehicle for these oppressed black women to be courageous and let them have their say?  It’s a freakin movie, and one, FOR ONCE, that’s appealing to both white AND black audiences!!!  Name another movie that is… that isn’t a crummy Eddie Murphy movie!!!????

Maybe The Help is lame, and we’re juss over-loving it cause it’s a summer Hollywood movie without any superheroes, and we’re beyond sick of summer superheroes.  Or maybe it’s not lame cause The Help has super heroes, but the only special powers they use are kindness, caring and compassion!!!!  (this review is starting to sound as sappy as the movie is, but WHO CARES!????).  Maybe The Help works cause Julia Roberts isn’t in it?  Maybe cause it juss looks great and feels right?  Maybe cause peeps like Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney, Cicely Tyson and Sissy Spacek are supporting acting the sh#t outta it?????  Maybe the movie is juss a great fracking movie, with tenderness, laughter and has pie AND fried chicken in every 5th scene????? MAYBE!!!

Maybe we need help, but maybe you need to see The Help

Help Wanted:  here’s someone we’d like to see in a French maid outfit – former James Franco flame…

Ahna O’Reilly

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Help helps itself to a theater near jews tomorrow

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Get Low
Six Feet Underdone
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Robert Duvall is an old man.  In Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low, with script by Chris Provenzano & C. Gaby Mitchell, he gets older, and crankier, and beardier and hermitierer and talks to animals at his cabin compound deep in the woods.  One day, after visiting the town, and realising that everyone thinks he’s a nutter and a million other things, from stories passed down and along, he decides it may be time to set the record straight before he perishes.  So he decides to have a funeral… WHILE HE’S ALIVE!!!!  SNAPPPPPages!!!!  Interesting idea!!!  So he hires local funeral parlorists Bill Murray (providing much needed, albeit mild comic relief) and Lucas Black (who always looks like a bewildered kid in any movie he’s been in) to take care of all the details.  And there are lots of details cause Duvall wants a big party and a raffle, with the winner taking all of his lands!  Damns!!  Sounds like we got ourselves a rootin-tootin hootenanny on our hands!  We do!  But we don’t!!

Duvall’s hiding something and we wait and wait for him to reveal this hidden secret, and although all of this hullabaloo is upsetting to old flame Sissy Spacek and old pal Bill Cobbs (not Bill Cosby), it’s most upsetting to us, the dear viewer, when we finally find out what it be and it be something not really worth the waiting around for.  Damns!  Oh well.  The picture is still a pretty one, dripping with sepia tones of home, and Duvall is grand as the licking his lips, mumblin bumpkin, and Bill Murray is Bill Murray, so we guess you could get down wit Get Low, but we just wished they aimed and got a lil higher

Tennesseein’ Is Tennebelievin’: this flick was actually based on the true story of Felix ‘Bush’ Breazeale, who threw himself a funeral party before he dieds!! here’s a pic of his gravestone and here’s a pic of him at the party!!!  Sometimes the truth is stranger and mo interesting than fiction!!!

[pic via TSLA]

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Low stays purty low in NY & LA only this Friday, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…