only those who have not seen it can ever bash it so

shame!

http://aliciabanks.xanga.com/757685411/a-rebel-tale-about-domestic-revolutionaries-help-yourself-to-%E2%80%9Cthe-help%E2%80%9D/

One.

Second, while Hollywood can and should be thoroughly critiqued and criticized for the lack of fully-developed African-American roles that it offers, nothing in the (full) movie trailer for ‘The Help’ would even remotely suggest that Viola Davis’s or Octavia Spencer’s characters would be one-dimensional. I just don’t get it.

And, people please don’t forget that until 1960s, the majority of black women in the United States were domestic laborers. And, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is dignity in all work. Jim Crow and racism severely and savagely circumscribed the lives of black folks, limiting them primarily to agricultural and domestic labor and initially excluding them from the benefits of Social Security, by the way. That is a historical fact. Nonetheless, those women who labored in that field and suffered all kinds of indignities and abuses gave rise to the black professional classes, donating their “maid” money to send their children to college, build churches, start scholarship funds, etc. Perhaps, we should all revisit Langston Hughes’s “A Song to a Negro Wash-Woman,” to remember a time when we were not ashamed of the black women domestic workers in our communities.

Evidently, one CAN fault actors for taking roles, as you’ve just done, and then casually impart (baseless) financial motivations. Your argument would be more compelling without foreknowledge that Hollywood executives have already seen fit to cast Mrs Davis as a psychiatrist, CIA director, top scientist, and (gasp!) even an astronaut (Solaris 2002). Perhaps instead of wagering that last dollar, you should put it towards a paperback copy of “The Help”? You might even find that its staggering success (5 million+ copies sold) is partly due to the fact that the characters portrayed are neither “stereotypical” nor “one-dimensional” as you seem to presume.

Would you be more inclined to see this movie if the theater showing it was owned by African Americans? Sure you would, you say as much; because “financing and ownership of black cinema is an important step in [your] cultural evolution,” right?

What if the author of the source material was, herself, African American? Would you be more inclined to see it then? And, if so, wouldn’t you be guilty of engaging in the same elitism that cripples our society at large?