This week's featured adptation is "The Help," a staple of book clubs everywhere, and the reviews are very good. Kathryn Stockett's book was a real tear-jerker, if my household is any measure, and I bet the movie is rated at least three hankies. Here are exceprts from some reviews:
-- Tribune: [Viola] Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material. You can talk all you want about how a movie begins and ends with the screenwriter(s), or lives and dies on a director's ability to use the camera as more than a recording device. But some film adaptations owe their success primarily to the rightness of the casting. "The Help" is one of them."
-- New York Times: If the movie's director, Tate Taylor, had his way, your tear ducts would be sucked dry by that big finish, emptied out by a pileup of calamities that include a painful romantic breakup, the devastations of cancer and the mighty wailing of an emotionally abandoned toddler.
-- Los Angeles Times: "The Help" is a delicious peppery stew of home-cooked, 1960s Southern-style racism that serves up a soulful dish of what ails us and what heals us. Laughter, which is ladled on thick as gravy, proves to be the secret ingredient — turning what should be a feel-bad movie about those troubled times into a heart-warming surprise.
