The Help

For our trip to Chicago I bought the book The Help on cd. It was fifteen cd’s, and made our drive much easier. It was a very entertaining book, even if the author got a few historical facts wrong.

This past week the movie came out, and Mark and I thought we’d like to go see it. So I looked up the theaters here in Chicago, and found one called the Davis, very close to the house. It sits in a nice little neighborhood that is almost like an old suburban town, with cute shops, and restaurants, and families strolling along Lincoln Avenue. So I thought the quaint little movie theater would be a fun place to see a film about the early sixties.

When you walk into the lobby it is as if you stepped back in time. It is old, very old and very decrepit. I figured it just added to the ambience, that is if you like the ambience of a porno theater. Actually, I take that back. Porno theaters aren’t as bad. This was an old place that had been clumsily chopped up into four small theaters. The old slope of the floor towards the single screen theater was still there, but the seats were turned to face the new movie screen tacked up twenty feet above the floor. I sat down in a seat, and was immediately greeted with a spring poking me in the ass. I moved around to try a few more, but they were all broken in one way or another, so I gave up and sat in the least broken seat I could find. Sitting there in my seat that still leaned towards the original movie screen, I became aware of the odor. Damp, dank, and with the slight hint of body odor. Once again I was reminded of being in a porno theater...    not that I’ve ever been in one.

So, after two and a half hours of getting my butt poked by broken springs, while craning my neck to see the tiny screen halfway up the wall, I have to say that The Help is an okay movie. Not great, just okay. If you didn’t read the book you might be stumped about what was going on, and even if you did read the book some of the scenes were confusing. So my advice is, read the book, wait and see the movie when it is released on video, and if you do go to a theater, don’t go to the Davis. Unless you like that sort of dirty old man in a trench coat feel.