Review of the Reviews

     The Help is one of my favorite and one of the best movies that I have seen in the past few years. Getting the choice to pick any movie that I have ever seen to do for this project, I decided on The Help. I found one positive review and one negative review for this movie. Now it is my turn to be the critic on two reviews. 

     The positive review is from the New Orleans Times. The author, Mike Scott, is very organized in what he has to say about the The Help. He starts off the review with an overview of the film and what it is about. Then, he goes into talking about the main and supporting characters and their role in the film. The tone of this review seems to be very positive because he does not have many bad things to say. The author mainly focuses on the plot and stars of the movie. He also brought up the fact that this is a movie based off a book and a historical time period. He thinks that the history part of the movie is "soft" compared to what really happened. 

     The negative review is from Slant Magazine. This author, Andrew Schenker, I believe jumps around a little in his review. He starts off talking about something that happens during the middle of the movie, then starts talking about the historical part of the movie. Since this is a negative review, the tone feels heavy and more serious. He uses some different words that I have never heard I believe so he can get his point across that he didn't like the movie. This author focuses mainly on the historical information in the movie, but says that the movie was not all bad because it had good acting. 

  

   One point that I agreed with from the New Orleans Times is that in the film it, "open their own eyes and think a little bit more in-depth about what they've heretofore dismissed as "the color situation"  (New Orleans). In this case, the author is talking about the characters in the film but I think that this movie opened my eyes to what happen in the past. It showed how people were treated in the 1960's.  One thing I agreed with from the negative review is that, "The Help is almost always more successful relating black experience than either white brutality or magnanimity" (Slant). I think this is saying that the movie did a better job displaying what happened to the African Americans during this time, rather than what was going on with the whites. 

   If I had never seen this film and I had to choose which review was more convincing, I would believe the positive review from the New Orleans Times. I really liked how Mike Scott gave a summary of the movie without giving too much away. I also really liked how he talked about the historical references that this movie showed. This movie was not just a movie for enjoyment, but a movie that was able to demonstrate to us what the world was like at one time. 

   If I was to write a review on The Help, I would definitely make it a positive review. One thing that I would include about the movie would be the great actresses who played the characters. I think the director, Tate Taylor, did a really great job picking which actresses played which part. I thought they were chosen very well. Another thing I would include in my review would be that I enjoyed how it had a historical side to the film. Seeing how our world was not too long ago is very interesting and this is what I would write my review about.