According to Colwell

The Help, based on the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett, takes place in the epoch I was born into, in Jackson Mississippi where racial hatred and segregation was a fact of life. Emma Stone plays Eugenia (who goes by “Skeeter”), a freshly minted graduate of Ole Miss returned to her hometown to work on a career as a writer. She does not easily settle back into life in the circle of her childhood friends, most of whom have married and started families. Those families have black maids working six days a week for less than minimum wage, frequently acting as the primary caregiver for children and generally being treated like dirt. Skeeter, who fondly remembers her family maid Constantine as the person who lovingly raised her under the nose of her distant mother and absent father, is struck by how her friends take advantage of and abuse the help. Looking for a project to write about, she contacts an editor with a pitch to tell the story of the maids from their point of view.

Tate Taylor who directed from his screenplay, does an excellent job of adapting the book to the screen, maintaining the essence of the story while necessarily simplifying and compressing to the shorter format of a movie. We get to see the lives of several maids, but primarily Aibilene (Viola Davis) and Minnie (Octavia Spencer) both directly and as they reveal some of their stories to Skeeter for her book. One thing that is heartening is that now, some 50 years later, the treatment of the maids is immediately appalling. Progress has been made. To drive home just how abominable things were not so long ago, Taylor has Skeeter read aloud some of the laws of the State of Mississippi which included a prohibition against saying that minorities should be treated equally. That was actually a law.

The performances are uniformly strong and convincing, including Bryce Dallas Howard as the most loathsome of Skeeter’s circle. I laughed, I cried, and I marveled at how backwards we were and took heart in the progress that has been made.

X-Men: First Class is one of many movies I’m behind on reviewing. I saw it when it came out a couple of months ago and it has largely faded from memory. With a few exceptions, mostly provided by James McAvoy as the young Charles Xavier, it lacks the humor that made the first X-Men stand out, but is an entertaining escapade. This doesn’t really qualify as a review, but it’s too far behind me for me to give a fair critique at this point.

The Trip is a repackaging, of sorts, of a BBC mini-series featuring a cross-country tour by actor Steve Coogan and his friend, impressionist and actor Rob Brydon. The two portray themselves, with Coogan on assignment to review some fine restaurants scattered across the island. He brings Brydon along for company when his girlfriend bails out on him. It is not a story so much as time spent with two interesting characters. They are alternately harsh and affectionate with each other. Coogan, as the better-known actor, is careful to make sure he gets the nicer room at each hotel and to remind Brydon that he is only a “chat show” participant with little skills beyond some impersonations. Brydon is a remarkably good sport in the face of this snobbery, and frequently responds with impersonations that Coogan tries to match. Their conversation frequently breaks down into competing versions of Michael Caine (”She was only 15 years old”), Sean Connery (”Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred”), Woody Allen (take your pick). Many of these would be funny on their own, but the competition between the two actors frequently makes them hilarious.

Brydon has his own unique character called the small man in a box that must be heard to be believed. Do a video search for “Rob Brydon Small Man”, and if you like that, you’ll like this movie.

I’ve read all the books and now have seen all the movies. The lives of the youngs stars and their characters have paralleled, at least in age, that of my own daughter (who has read all the books and seen all the movies multiple times each). I have enjoyed them, but have frustrated my daughter by quickly forgetting various details (she would call them critical elements of the story). My main criticism of both the books and the movies has been that a lot of time is spent with Harry and his pals basically dithering while forces acted off-screen (or off-page). This was most apparent in Part 1 of the Deathly Hallows where we see Harry, Ron, and Hermione hopping (magically, not literally) across the fields and mountains of England being glum and bickering while you-know-who goes about taking over the world. What I found particularly frustrating was that not one of them ever raised the point that this was not a sustainable strategy. Could one of them have said, “how long are we going to do this” or “can we talk about ideas about what to do next”?

Finally in part 8 of a 7 part series, a lot of things do happen. Harry plunges in where his earlier self sometimes dared not tread, Ron and Hermione faithfully at his side. When asked if they should develop a plan he astutely points out that their plans all go down the toilet fairly quickly anyhow, so why bother wasting time developing one. To kill Voldemort our heroes must dispatch of six (or seven - it’s one of those details I forget) horcruxes which contain bits of his soul. They’ve been hidden and protected by powerful dark magic. To give an idea of the difference in pace between this final installment and the rest of the series, in the first six and a half parts, they get rid of two of these things, leaving the final 4 or 5 (I forget) for the last half of the last book/movie. To say the pace has picked up is an understatement. (That’s admittedly unfair to some of the earlier installments which had other things going on - such as the resurrection of Voldemort and various stages of adolescence.)

So while I may not have Pottermania, I still felt more than a little wistful as we looked at the trio of young adults, triumphant in their epic struggle that defined their youth, looking back at the camera and their own unwritten futures. The details fade quickly, but the overall feeling of a childhood thoroughly lived sticks with me. While I look forward to watching all 8 movies again (over a span of a bit less than 10 years), oddly enough I think that right now it would make me a bit too sadly nostalgic for all that youthful excitement and anticipation that helped define a generation.

For whatever reason I was not in the greatest frame of mind to see this movie (back in May). I hope to catch it again on video because it had some hilarious moments. Occasionally I thought the farce went too far (Wiig’s opening sex scene with Jon Hamm, for example), and farce must maintain contact with reality to be funny. The cast of characters in Bridesmaids was both original and funny and (usually) believable, so I hope that the screenwriting pair of Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are working on their next comedy.

This guy sure is earnest. Nice, definitely, but not a lot of fun. And ultimately don’t we want our comic superheroes to be fun? After 90-pound courageous weakling Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is transformed into a buff fighting machine by some mad scientist go juice, he becomes a single-man wrecking ball in World War II Europe. However, his target is not Hitler but Johann Schmidt aka Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), a megalomaniac (of course) who has harnessed some supernatural powers (from Norse god Odin perhaps?) that enable him to build some superweapons. With that, who needs Hitler? Not Schmidt, because not only does he have some impressive ray guns, but he has his own army and an array of massive underground bases spread across Europe, including tanks, gigantic bombers, and enough scary thugs to make the wealthiest James Bond supervillain feel small time.

Generally with a comic book movie we suspend disbelief for the basic superhero setup, but otherwise the movie lives in some semblance of the real world. In Captain America, though, I had to keep reminding myself not to worry about the preposterousness of Schmidt’s operation. For his part, Captain Steve gets his way without a lot of flash. He’s pretty handy with his red, white, and blue shield, but otherwise just packs a solid right hook and is extra speedy on his feet. So he’s a very nice good guy, and that’s supposed to be the point of Captain America. He’d definitely be a great person to be friends with, but his solemnity makes his first movie outing less than exhilirating.

Ryan Reynolds plays a buff but troubled test pilot who becomes a superhuman mastering the power of “will” in this comic book adaptation. Being ignorant of the mythology of the Green Lantern series, I found the movie’s opening voiceover to be blunt but helpful. The setup is fairly complicated: immortal beings created 3600 superbeings (the Green Lanterns) who use the power of will (that happens to be green) to protect the universe. (Each is assigned to one of 3600 sectors in the universe.) Also, there is a very dangerous bad guy named Parallax who uses the power of fear (yellow) but who was captured and marooned by a Green Lantern on some lone planet. The background has a lot of unfamiliar terrain, so I thought it was probably a good idea for the movie to set that up for us at the get-go. But as it turns out, we would have learned all this in due course over the rest of the movie, as our hero Hal (Reynolds) gets it explained to him in the same gory detail. So, instead of us being plunged into something mysterious and intriguing along with Hal, we are told in advance what is going on. It’s kind of like having to sit through someone explaining in great detail to Superman what Kryptonite is.

Lantern has some good moments, mostly when it shows a sense of humor. When told by pissed-off colleagues to “watch your back”, Hal points out “that’s not really possible.” There was a lot of potential in the relationship between Hal and his buddy Tom (who is in on his superhero identity) because, let’s face it: being a flying green superhuman who can use his willpower to fly across the universe is both awesome and ridiculous. Let’s have some fun with this! But as too often happens in these movies, they get a bit too wrapped up in the fight of good (will) versus evil (fear). The latter in this movie is personified by Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), a sniveling biologist who gets infected with bad yellow mojo, grows a giant head, and plans his revenge on a cruel world with his yellow fearpower. Blake Lively plays Hal’s romantic interest who (thank goodness!) recognizes Hal in his disguise which consists of a couple square inches of skin-tight green around his eyes. Otherwise, though, she unfortunately primarily plays the usual role of the woman in these superhero movies: a target for the bad guy to hold hostage against the good guy. I wanted to like this movie more than I did. There was potential with Reynolds for this to be more in the mold of Iron Man, still the best superhero movie for the last several years.

Christopher Plummer may be in line for another Oscar nomination for his portrayal in Beginners of a 75-year-old widower who comes out of the closet after his wife’s death determined to live his final years merely as “theoretically gay”. Hal (Plummer) learns to live the life he suppressed for three-quarters of a century. Coming out frees him to establish for the first time a relationship with his only child, Oliver, played by Ewan McGregor with a convincing sadness. The movie centers around Oliver as he deals with the Hal’s death four years after the death of his mother. It is through flashbacks that we see Hal’s journey of self-discovery, while Oliver, in the present, is left alone after having spent his childhood with parents who lived a lonely existence with each other.

Oliver, who works as a graphic artist, starts a series of drawings on the “The History of Sadness”. He doesn’t get many takers. But he does encounter a cheerful French actress, Anna (played by Mélanie Laurent who starred as Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds). The movie follows Oliver’s attempts to learn how to have a committed relationship when the model his parents gave him his entire life was dysfunctional. Flashbacks to Hal’s late-in-life romantic liberation show Oliver’s only true lesson in love. He and his father are both beginners.

Hanna is definitely one of the better movies of 2011. I can say this with more confidence now than when I saw it 3 months ago (I’m looking for the bright side to catching up on my backlog of reviews). In the thriller-adventure genre of movies, nothing else I’ve seen comes close. Saoirse Ronan is perfect as an ethereal but deadly teenage girl (Hanna), raised and educated in the arctic by her father Erik (Eric Bana). There’s a certain fun novelty in seeing the kick-ass action hero be a slender young woman, and thanks to a clever script by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, it is completely believable.

Hanna convinces her father that she has learned all his lessons and he puts in motion the plan that he and Hanna have worked on her whole life. Hanna is quickly taken in by the CIA while Erik flees, but she makes an impressive and exciting escape and a chase ensues across Europe for Hanna who looks to reunite with Erik. Leading the chase is Cate Blanchett as CIA agent Marissa, whose ties to both Erik and Hanna unfold gradually over the course of the movie. Director Joe Wright paces things expertly (and also provides one of his trademark long, uncut takes (see also Atonement) through a crowded city and subway system). The feel of the movie is decidedly not that of a Hollywood action flick, leaving the outcome in doubt to the end.