The Help — MomStart

The Help 2-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pack Review

December 17, 2011 By Momstart 5 Comments

I read The Help over a rainy Seattle weekend back in November of 2010. I had a hard time putting the book down as it was so well written and filled me with a wide range of emotion. When I heard that that the movie would be out in the summer of 2011, I was eager for its release. Unfortunately, I never did get the opportunity to see it in the theater. Since becoming a mom, the only movies I tend to see in the theater are rated G and in 3D. So when I was given the opportunity to review the 2-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pack of the The Help, I was thrilled! And my anticipation was not in vain as this was a great movie, true to the book and performed by some amazing actors.

If you’re not familiar with The Help here’s a synopsis:

The #1 New York Times bestseller by Kathryn Stockett comes to vivid life through the powerful
performances of a phenomenal ensemble cast. The Help is an inspirational, courageous and empowering
story about very different, extraordinary women in the 1960s South who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project — one that breaks society’s rules and puts them all at risk. Filled with poignancy, humor and hope — and complete with compelling, never-before-seen bonus features — The Help is a timeless, universal and triumphant story about the ability to create change.

The Help stars Emma Stone as the courageous Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, who goes against the beliefs of
her family and friends to find her own voice. The critically praised, emotional performance of Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark, a woman who secretly dreams of one day having more than she has been given, offers a deep emotional storyline. The breakthrough performance of Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, whose sass and tough exterior disguise the pain and fear she faces every day, brings both drama and humor to the film. Bryce Dallas Howard breathes life into the catty Jackson socialite Hilly Holbrook and Jessica Chastain brings charm and humor as Celia Foote, a kind housewife living outside of town who longs to fit in. Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney and Ahna O‟Reilly also provide vivacious performances that round out this all-star female ensemble.

On December 6th, 2011 The Help was released on Blu-ray™ Combo Pack, DVD, Digital Download and On-Demand. I love owning a Blu-ray DVD player, not just for the superior sound and image quality, but also since most Blu-ray movies come with tons of extras. I received The Help 2-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pak which includes the Blu-ray disc and a regular DVD disc that I can put in my car, portable DVD player or just lend to my Blu-ray deprived friends. There is also a 3-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pak available that has a downloadable copy of the movie.

Both the 3-Disc and 2-Disc Blu-ray Combo Packs include a number of bonus features that are well worth checking out. They include:

The Making of “The Help:” From Friendship To Film Find out more about the friendship between director and screenplay writer Tate Taylor and author Kathryn Stockett and the process it took to bring this story to the big screen. Commentary from the crew and actors on the making of the film is also included which is always an entertaining way to learn more about their time on set.

In Their Own Words: A Tribute To The Maids Of Mississippi An informative look at the women who worked as maids and provides a deeper understanding of the relationships that form between maids and their employers as well as the children they care for.

Also included are deleted scenes (my favorite!) and a music video, “The Living Proof” from nine-time Grammy Award®-winning and multi-platinum selling singer/songwriter, Mary J. Blige.

The Help can be found just in time for the holidays in these formats:
3-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pack (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy) = $44.99 U.S./$51.99 Canada
2-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pack (Blu-ray + DVD) = $39.99 U.S./$46.99 Canada
1-Disc DVD = $29.99 U.S./$35.99 Canada
For Fans of The Help movie:
“Like” the Help Facebook page
Follow The Help Movie on Twitter
Visit the website and mobile site:

Disclosure – This product was provided to me free of charge by the manufacturer or representing PR agency for the writing of this review; however, opinions expressed are my own and are NOT influenced by monetary compensation.

About Emily:

Emily is also very active in the local MOMS CLUB. She raises chickens and has 2 shih tzus. Her daughter Caitlyn attends Montessori school and she hates housecleaning, loves wine and enjoys dining out. She would love to find a cure for the depression and anxiety she has dealt with on and off over the past 10 years, just like me. She is an amazing mom and friend.

Filed Under: Movie review Tagged With: dreamworks, Movie review, The Help

Inside The Help: A Conversation with Octavia Spencer

August 21, 2011 By Momstart 25 Comments

On Friday, I had the opportunity to interview Octavia Spencer who played Minny Jackson one of the main characters in The Help. Many of Minny’s characteristics were taken from Octavia and her personality. Octavia described herself as defiantly being feisty and someone that speaks up for herself and that Kathryn Stockett the author of The Help used her as character inspiration.

“Kathryn Stockett very loosely based well, the character of Minny on me and it’s basically my physicalities (being short and round) she met me on a day I would say I was not really feisty, but I was completely irritable.”

After watching The Help myself, I found Minny to be the spunk and humor the movie needed to lighten the subject matter. The Help made me cry my eyes out. I cried and cried as I watched the sets of women the movie portrayed and all of their different struggles. I cried in the beginning as they illustrated that Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) had lost her own son. I cried when Celia lost her baby. I cried when I found out Minny was an abused wife and the cruelty she suffered at the hands of Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). But it was Minny’s feistiness and that very special chocolate pie that brought some sunshine of revenge into laughter.

Most everyone I know that has seen The Help in theaters cried, so when it was my turn to ask a question I had to know if Octavia cried.

“I did cry when I watched the film…there’s so many scenes that made me cry but I have different reactions because they were evocative of other things. So just the last thing without giving anything away…definitely the scene were Minny finds Celia in the bathroom…um..yeah there were just other moments that nobody else knows would be emotionally moved by…I think it’s where ever you are emotionally that you’re response…that would honor a certain response.”

She’s exactly right, being a mother of very young children myself, any scene children were involved in made me get emotional in some way. As the subject matter was very serious Octavia was asked what she hopes people would take away from the film.

“I hope people will take away the sense of humanity and the strength of the bond that these women from culturally different backgrounds were able to come together and basically change their community..I find it remarkable…the triumphs of the young”

When people ask me about The Help, I tell them they will cry, they will get emotional. Almost everyone says, then I’m going to wait to go see it. No, don’t wait to go see it, you need to see this movie in the theater and take all your friends with you. Take your support group with you and you can all cry and laugh together. It’s a movie about hard times, but it’s also about how these women band together and build strength and stand up to the injustices that they live with. There is triumph at the end of the movie.

Photos and interview courtesy of DreamWorks Pictures The Help.

Filed Under: interview, Movie review Tagged With: interview, Octavia Spencer, The Help, The Help Movie

When You Go See The Help In Theaters Wednesday August 10th

August 8, 2011 By Momstart 4 Comments

When you go see the Help in Theaters Wednesday August 10th bring all your friends with you. I watched The Help back in June with a group of my mommy blogger friends and needed them dearly after the movie. The movie The Help is based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett and directed by Tate Taylor. Tate grew up knowing that life was like this movie.He used his experiences to keep the movie true to the book and the era. And for me, knowing these things happened and that women were so nasty ripped me apart. I needed my friends to give me a hug, and I needed to know that I wasn’t the only one that was mentally exhausted with red eyes from sobbing.

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When you go see The Help in Theaters Wednesday August 10th bring a box of tissues. I still haven’t had a chance to read the novel yet, but I can tell you that I started crying from the opening scene of The Help. “The Help” stars Emma Stone (“Easy A”) as Skeeter, Academy Award®–nominated Viola Davis (“Doubt”) as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny—three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. In that opening scene, Skeeter is interviewing Aibileen about her experience working as a Nanny and maid. Aibileen cares very deeply for the children she watches, having lost her own son. The Help had me crying from then until the very end of the movie. I was crying so hard and so disturbed, and so angry, and so miserable that I wanted to get up and leave the theaters. I had a great deal of trouble holding myself together. Am I saying that the Help is a bad movie, no! I often cry at movies, I’m a sap. I cry. In The Help, I bawled. I Sobbed. My entire body was shaking with tears and it took everything in me to keep semi-quiet. The Help emotionally moved me to a place I’ve never gone while watching a movie.

THE HELP

When you go see The Help in Theaters Wednesday August 10th be prepared to be shocked. Perhaps if you’ve read the novel you won’t be that shocked. In one scene, Skeeter, who happens to be the newsletter editor for the women’s group (a group of women who only accept Skeeter because she comes from a family with money, because Skeeter is an outcast in a way just as The Help is). She gets angry at one of her so called friends and puts a purposeful “typo” in the newsletter asking everyone to bring their old used toilets to the President of their chapter’s house. Everyone in the town rushes over to see the toilets in her yard. In this moment watching the movie you’re laughing at how Skeeter got even. In what happens next, I was ripped up emotionally as one of the children at a potty training age gets on the potty and goes. The child’s mother is mortified, and spanks her daughter for going potty. She yells and makes Aibileen deal with the crying child. The child gets no love from her mother. It even seems like her mother doesn’t love her child. I just couldn’t believe that any of these women deserved to be mothers.

When you go to see the Help in Theaters Wednesday August 10th you’re going to see a masterpiece.

Filed Under: Movie review, review Tagged With: Movie review, The Help

The Help With Stacey Snider Dreamworks CEO: It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.

August 7, 2011 By Momstart 18 Comments

“It takes a village to raise a child” says Stacey Snider CEO of Dreamworks movie studio. There is nothing wrong with having help while raising a child. Parents need time to recharge and should take a break. It’s ok to have a nanny care for your children. It’s ok to have a career. Stacey Snider wouldn’t be CEO of Dreamworks without the help she has had in raising her own children. Stacey talked a bit about the help she had with her children.

“Well, you know, I have two daughters. I have a 12 year old and a 14 year old. I first went to Universal after Katie had been born. She had just been born and then I had Natalie two and a half years later…….So I relied on women to help me raise the kids and I’m a pretty good hands on get home, get your butt home mom. But I’ve always felt like more love is good. More people that know them, that love them, you know, I know women who feel threatened by that. That feel that they don’t want — that’s a person that works for me. I feel like Jody, who’s the woman who’s been with us for 12 years, that Jody and my husband and I have raised the girls together.”

“She’s the boss when I’m not there and our values are comparable and she’s leaving us this year. So, you know, it’s funny my big girl graduated from eight grade yesterday and they had that, you know, as only teenagers get. I’m never gonna see my friends again and, all the crying and then she got home and she saw Jody and she said, you’re leaving me too. How can you leave me?”

“You just want your kids to have that love and that wisdom and you’re grateful to the women the help. It takes a village. My mom passed away when I was 17 so I used to get in bed with the night nurse that helped me when the kids were young and I would sleep with her all night. My husband was in the other room. it would be me and her and the baby and, you know, she got me through such a scary time that I just was attached like a little, you know, a little kangaroo. I didn’t want to let her leave.”

For me, hearing Stacey Snider speak about having help was refreshing. Being a blogger sometimes feels like a full time job. Plus the kids are there in my lap and any mother knows that kids are a full time job two, so I have have two full time jobs. I’m terrified of asking for help and constantly worried about the guild I would feel for leaving them with someone else. I never once considered the love they would get from one other person in their life.

In the movie The Help, it was quite obvious how the help really cared for the children. It was so sad to see how the mother’s instead of being grateful for all the help they received were vicious and cruel just because the color of their skin was different. These women were even raised by the help they hired to take care of their own children. Yet, once they were a young adult they suddenly decided that their toilet paper was too good for their help.

Stacy said, “Tate Taylor, who wrote the adaptation The Help and directed it grew up with Kathryn (the author) in Jackson, Mississippi and it’s a kind of great story because they were best friends growing up both raised by single moms, both raised by African American women who were like their moms and both trying to make it in their respective careers” Together they brought a realism to the movie, and Tate wouldn’t let any studio tell him how the movie should be done. We all need help in our lives and I feel that even though The Help is more about how terrible these women were, and how Aibileen and Skeeter were able to rise above their issues, I still walked away from my experience knowing that it’s ok to have help. We should remember to love our help the same way they love and care for our children.

Thank you to Disney and Dreamworks for the hotel stay and transportation to Hollywood to watch The Help.

Filed Under: interview, review Tagged With: Dreamworks CEO, interview, review, Stacey Snider, Takes a villiage, The Help

Fun Facts Why You Have to See The Help Movie

July 28, 2011 By Momstart 50 Comments

I saw a very early screening of the help and I highly recommend that you get your mom groups/girlfriends together to see this movie. It’s spectacularly heart wrenching and the must see movie of August. I even have a list of fun facts about The Help that will get you into the mood to see the movie when it opens August 10th.

The film is based on the phenomenal New York Times best-selling book by Kathryn Stockett. With 3 million copies in print, “The Help” remained on the NYT best-seller list for 103 weeks, six of which were at No. 1.

Produced by Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, and directed and written for the screen by Tate Taylor, “The Help” is a deeply moving, poignant film about the ability to create change.

Tate Taylor directed and wrote the screenplay for “The Help.” Both he and the author of the novel, Kathryn Stockett, were childhood friends and grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, where the book is based.

“The Help” boasts an illustrious cast, including Academy Award® nominee Viola Davis, Allison Janney, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Oscar® winner Sissy Spacek and Academy Award® nominee Cicely Tyson.

Growing up in Jackson, Miss., in the 1970s, both director Tate Taylor and author Kathryn Stockett had maids (whom both refer to as their “co-mothers”) who cared for them while their mothers worked. Taylor’s “co-mother,” Carol Lee, has a small part in the film.

The film was shot on location in and around Greenwood, Miss., and the citizens of Greenwood willingly pitched in to find period props for the film by digging around in their attics and basements, and many played extras in “The Help” as well. Even producer Brunson Green’s grandmother’s dress wound up in wardrobe.

Octavia Spencer, who plays Minny in the film, is a longtime friend of director Tate Taylor, having met him when they both worked on a film. The two eventually became roommates in LA for four years. In addition, producer Brunson Green (also from Jackson, Miss.) is also a longtime friend of both Taylor and Spencer and the three used to hang out together, occasionally with Kathryn Stockett, author of “The Help.”

While growing up in Jackson, Miss., Tate Taylor, Kathryn Stockett and Brunson Green would regularly be treated to milkshakes and grilled cheese sandwiches at Brent’s Pharmacy soda fountain. The production was able to recreate the real Brent’s Pharmacy as it was back when they were children.

Local chefs were brought in to make sure foods used in the scenes, from fried chicken to congealed salads, were regionally correct and also correct for the times, and a conscious effort was made to make it all look homemade—not fancy or store-bought—to add to the authenticity of the film.

Cast members spent a whole day in a ballroom learning how to do period dances, including the bunny hop—taught by Sissy Spacek.

A dialect coach, hired to make sure everyone’s southern accent was perfect, flew into Jackson, Miss., to record accents for the actors. Even the real southerners in the cast were coached in the proper way of speaking specifically for the Mississippi Delta. Allison Janney picked Producer Brunson Green’s mother’s accent to emulate for her character, Charlotte. In 1963, Mrs. Green was the same age as the character Skeeter, played by Emma Stone.

The mothers of Tate Taylor, Kathryn Stockett and Brunson Green all have appearances in “The Help.”

Due to the intense summer heat in Mississippi, the filmmakers adjusted the schedule to shoot only indoors in the middle of the day. Exteriors were shot in the early morning and late afternoon.

Director Tate Taylor grew up visiting Greenwood, Miss., as a child and would later spend nights in the home used for the interior of Skeeter Phelan’s house. Taylor was college buddies with the homeowner’s son.

The Mayflower Café, a Jackson, Miss. landmark, where Stuart and Skeeter eat oysters in the movie, is one of Director Tate Taylor’s favorite restaurants. It is the place where Taylor ate his first raw oyster as a child.

The movie theater that Skeeter observes in the beginning of THE HELP while getting gas was the theater Director Tate Taylor went to as a child. It closed down in the 1980s and was brought back to life by the production crew. The gas station is a yoga studio today, but was transformed back into a gas station for the shoot.

This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to the winner, Sand.

All rules can be found under giveaway rules.

Filed Under: giveaway Tagged With: Disney, dreamworks, giveaway, movie announcement, The Help

From Book To Movie: Interested in The Help?

June 23, 2011 By Momstart 8 Comments

I went to a very early screening of The Help and all I’m allowed to say at this point is that you need as many tissues as you can find. A whole box per person that attends this movie. No, not everyone at the screening cried, in fact the person sitting right next to me didn’t cry at all, but me, I was a fountain of waterworks. The movie The Help is based on the book The Help, and I haven’t read the book yet, my friends say I should read it, but if I’m going to cry that much I’m not sure about reading the book.

Based on one of the most talked about books in years and a #1 New York Times best-selling phenomenon, “The Help” stars Emma Stone (“Easy A”) as Skeeter, Academy Award®–nominated Viola Davis (“Doubt”) as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny—three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. From their improbable alliance a remarkable sisterhood emerges, instilling all of them with the courage to transcend the lines that define them, and the realization that sometimes those lines are made to be crossed—even if it means bringing everyone in town face-to-face with the changing times.
Deeply moving, filled with poignancy, humor and hope, “The Help” is a timeless and universal story about the ability to create change.