The Help (2011) - Taylor and an impeccable ensemble portray heart-thumping change in Jackson, Mississippi

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3 Time Film Excess Nominee:


Best Film (lost to The Descendants)
Best Director: Tate Taylor (lost to Agnieszka Holland for In Darkness)
Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer (lost to Agnieszka Grochowska for In Darkness)

+ Best Mississippi Movie of the Year
+ Best Ensemble Movie of the Year

The late-summer treat of 2011, Tate Taylor's The Help

Jackson, Mississippi in 1963: An aspiring young, white female writer persuades a black housekeeper ('the help') to tell her about her life, plagued by the racism that defined the South at the time. That starts a change.

Splendid, handsomely produced, shot in Mississippi, (the biggest production there since O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)), The Help is an empowering, uplifting, marvelous film about a multitude of women.
In it plays an ensemble to be reckoned with: Emma Stone (Magic in the Moonlight (2014)), Viola Davis (Doubt (2008)), Bryce Dallas Howard (Manderlay (2005)), Octavia Spencer (Fruitvale Station (2013)), Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty (2012)), Allison Janney (Mom (2013-15)), Cicely Tyson (Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)) and Sissy Spacek (The Straight Story (1999)) are all inspiring and stand out individually. - Bravo!
Social and political change for the better is a powerful thing, which we witness in The Help. Tate Taylor (Pretty Ugly People (2008)) adapted the same-titled, bestselling 2009 novel by his childhood friend Kathryn Stockett and directed the film, making a precise and edifying heartbreaker and certainly one of the year's best films.

Related posts:

2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2011 in films - according to Film Excess 

Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in Tate Taylor's The Help

Watch the fantastic trailer for the film here

Cost: 25 mil. $
Box office: 216.6 mil. $
= Huge hit
[The Help took America by storm: Opening #2, behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the film took 26 mil. $ in its first weekend, but then rose to first place, which it held for impressive 25 days, the longest #1 streak for a movie in the US since The Sixth Sense (1999, 35 days #1), also an August premiere. The film ended up making a spectacular 169.7 mil. $ in the US (78 % of the total gross). At the Oscars, Spencer won her first Oscar so far as Minnie Jackson, and the film was nominated for three more statuettes.]

What do you think of The Help?
Other good films about racism and fighting it?