Even though I had read negative things about THE HELP and only all of a sudden decided to watch it this evening, I came away from the movie liking it much more than I expected because of the chemistry, both friendly and hostile, between the characters.

When I first heard the title “THE HELP” months ago, I was fascinated by it because I thought “help” was referring to the action of help itself.  I thought, what could be this help and what might it be needed for and where is it coming from?  It sounded supernatural.  Once I learned “help” was a noun referring to people who work in homes as maids, etc., I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a more common usage of the term.  Never dawned on me at first though.

What the movie actually is about is a young white woman returning from college with aspirations to be a writer and a deep love for her  black maid/nanny that raised her.  The surprising dismissal of her nanny by her mother sparks her journalistic ambitions into what do maids really think about their work, how they are treated and their position in society.

To me the movie was about what is real and what is fake.  The lives the white mothers were living seemed extraordinarily empty, fake.  Like, how could they wake up and do absolutely nothing each and every day?  It just does not seem real to outsource motherly love and care of their children to their maids, especially when the thought of their maids using the same toilets as them utterly disgusts them, yet they are ok with those same maids hugging and holding their children all day!  How this absurdity never became crystal clear to these white mothers is beyond me.

THE HELP reminded me of my time abroad where I realized that obasans, azumas, middle aged moms were the backbone of society.  Men may be running the government (somehow), but take away these women, and everything would fall apart.

Seeing the work the maids did in THE HELP, I really respected the real world skills they have.  I can setup a wireless printer, but what is that compared to being able to run a household?

Another example of the real and the fake in THE HELP is the contrast between the relationships of the young white wives and the maids.  The white wives just have shallow lunches together and hold totally for show charity events.  The maids are literally leaning on each other, sharing real emotion, real life.  I liked seeing Minny and Aibileen look out for each other.

The criticism I had heard of THE HELP is that it is just another movie with white people helping black people.  That why could the maids have not just written the book on their own?  Seeing the movie and knowing the publishing industry, it would have been impossible for Aibileen to get the book published on her own without Skeeter.  Skeeter had the contact in New York (key to getting anything done, knowing someone).  Skeeter got the women to be willing to talk in the first place.  So that criticism is not valid I think.

My reservations about movies on this topic is that it is easy to elicit emotion from audiences by showing racism.  I also do not watch medical TV dramas since all you have to do it put a sick kid in jeopardy, instant drama, which is too easy I feel.  However, I feel THE HELP does not rely on showing acts of racism alone to make the audience feel.  The aforementioned relationships between the maids and also the few white people who have real emotions give the movie its heart.  Thus, I ended up being pleasantly surprised by THE HELP.

It is a rare pleasure to view of movie that appears to be what I call, “handmade.”  THE ARTIST is such a movie, and not just because it is the first silent film I have ever seen in my life nor because it is in black and white, but because every frame on screen is on purpose, crafted, and punctuated by a score that provides emotion so differently than endless dialogue does.

I have no idea where they found Jean Dujardin to play the lead character, George Valentin, but it looked like he was from a different era himself, and that he was a veteran of silent movies.  I found his performance to be mesmerizing.

It did take quite some time to get used to there being no spoken dialogue.  My ears kept straining to hear words that were not there, then my eyes took over trying to read lips, and finally I just watched.  Once the viewer is able to do this, the immersion into the world of the late 1920s and early 1930s provided by THE ARTIST is complete.

Valentin is the biggest actor in Hollywood(land) filling that role to the delight of his fans.  Movies are silent, acting is exaggerated, and the cast appears on stage after movie premieres.  By chance he meets an energetic young woman, appropriately named Peppy, and gives her some key pieces of advice that ultimately lead to her replacing him as the toast of the town as the movie industry abruptly shifts from silent films, to talkies.

Valentin is not interested in speaking on film.  From that point on I truly had no idea what to expect from the movie, it was just so different.  There is no dialogue, just watching Valentin become more and more anonymous, though ever by his side is his faithful dog and man servant.  Valentin’s pride stops him from evolving even though Peppy still holds a fondness for him.

THE ARTIST is not a tragedy though.  It is a marvel, a comedy, an intimate look into what happens to an artist when his craft is no longer wanted, and ultimately about accepting change.

THE ARTIST is one of the ten best movies of 2011.

If you do not enjoy watching movies with characters that are hard to physically tell apart from each other for much of the beginning of the movie, lack any and all narrative drive, seem to have absolutely no point, then end as ambiguously as possible with no explanation, then you will definitely not like BULLHEAD (Belgian title RUNDSKOP).  I know I could not really follow the movie at all, then I realized there was nothing to follow.

The only reason BULLHEAD came to my attention was because of its Oscar nomination for best Foreign Picture, which it has absolutely no chance of winning in comparison to the fascinating Iranian movie, A SEPARATION.  BULLHEAD starts out appearing to be a gangster movie with a cattle meat front.  That part in the beginning is nearly impossible to follow with all the characters poorly introduced and then left undeveloped or even mentioned.

A BMW getting a new pair of wheels factors into some police officer getting murdered, which appears off screen and seems random.  The main character is some hulking dude I thought was a gangster too, but according to IMDB seemed to be just a cattle farmer who got caught up with the “hormone mafia.”

Then there is a confusing flashback to 20 years ago where we are again left mostly guessing who is who for much of the flashback.  Turns out the hulking cattle farmer got his nads caved in by some crazy punk kid and in present day has to take huge amounts of testosterone.

The deal going on between gangsters remains confusing and almost forgotten as the hulking dude just wonders around running into and/or stalking people from twenty years ago, all of a sudden.

I knew by the clock the movie had to end soon, but I could see absolutely no way it could end with any satisfactory story coming to light, and I was right, it did not.  I was like, “uh, that’s the end?  That made absolutely no sense.”

I learned about MARGIN CALL because of its nomination for a best writing Oscar (J.C. Chandor also directed).  The movie is described as a thriller about the start of the financial crisis on Wall Street, but it would be better classified as a drama with political overtones.

What I learned from MARGIN CALL is that many people in financial firms, especially the ones in charge, do not even understand how to analyze the financial market themselves!  The movie opens with a majority of positions being slashed at an international financial house.  In the risk assessment department, there remains only one person who actually knows how to do risk assessment.  Given a clue by his just fired boss, Peter Sullivan finishes his boss’ work to discover the entire company is about to go down.  The movie is about what to do to avoid that and along the way the viewer gets clued in to how the trouble on Wall Street started.  After all, the CEO states that one must either be first, smarter or cheat.

I found the inner workings of the firm to be interesting as I know little about how markets actually work and how money usage gets decided.  It turns out money gets used based on a firm’s model, and if that model is wrong, and you bet it all on that model, well, that is what the movie shows very well.

MARGIN CALL is well acted and smartly paced as for a movie basically about meetings in conference rooms, it seems exciting.