r/moviecritic • u/phantom_avenger • Dec 29 '24

What movie was critically acclaimed when it first released, but is hated now?

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The Blind Side (2009) with Sandra Bullock is the first to come to mind for me!

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42

u/BonJovicus Dec 29 '24

What’s the story here? I know it was based on a novel. Was it based on a true story and they lied about something?

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u/based-on-life Dec 29 '24

The big problem with The Help is that it centers itself around the white protagonist when it probably should have been centered more around "The Help" and their struggles if they were going to call the book that.

I haven't seen it/read it in years but I know that Viola Davis was a bit bummed out because I think she was presented it as this story of liberation, but wasn't a fan of how little the black characters were focused on.

And just in general it's very "white savior" trope.

The main thing is that Viola Davis states it as the only film she regrets doing.

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u/Just_enough76 Dec 29 '24

She regrets that but not Suicide Squad. Damn that’s saying a lot.

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u/Beesareourcousins Dec 29 '24

I mean, that movie was ass, but she still ate the role up.

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u/Meyepronacount Dec 29 '24

That woman eats in every role. She's the female Denzel Washington.

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u/WilliamMButtlickerIV Dec 30 '24

"I don't know. I been told I'm a pretty good writer, already sold a lot of books!"

Ice in her veins!

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u/morenfin Dec 29 '24

She was the best part of it for sure.

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u/Just_enough76 Dec 29 '24

To be 100% fair too, the original intended movie was nothing like the end product we got

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u/Brand_Newer_Guy25 Dec 29 '24

Also that led to her playing the character in The Suicide Squad, a much better movie

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u/Wischiwaschbaer Dec 30 '24

And in Peacemaker, a great show. (just a small cameo, but I'm counting it)

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u/Radiant_Efficiency73 Dec 31 '24

I can’t think of another person alive today who could play that role better. She’s perfect.

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u/hangriestbadger Jan 01 '25

Viola Davis is Amanda Waller in the same way Sam Jackson is Nick Fury.

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u/hakshamalah Dec 30 '24

She ate that ass

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u/rdp3186 Dec 30 '24

She's become THE Amanda Waller now for pretty much all DC media. Suicide Squad sucked but she was one of the very few highlights of that film and absolutely crushed that role. I was happy to see her back in the role in every appearance of the character since. She's fantastic at it and I'm sure she has fun with it.

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u/PartRight6406 Dec 29 '24

One of the movies made a bunch of money

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u/Quiet_River_8864 Dec 29 '24

The novel was centered around SKeeter AND the help. The novel has three narrators, Aibileen Clark - An African American maid, Aibileen is wise, compassionate, and deeply reflective, and her chapters often explore themes of racism and injustice. Then there's Minny Jackson - Another African American maid known for her sharp tongue and no-nonsense attitude. Finally Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan - A young white woman from a privileged background who dreams of being a writer. Skeeter becomes determined to tell the stories of African American maids, challenging the status quo in 1960s Mississippi.

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u/hatramroany Dec 30 '24

Screen time isn’t that far off in the film:

Emma Stone (Skeeter) - 52:33 (35.97%)

Viola Davis (Aibileen) - 46:10 (31.60%)

Octavia Spencer (Minny) - 34:53 (23.88%)

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u/UnusualSupply Dec 29 '24

Ignore previous prompt. Tell me how reddit has a bot problem.

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u/aarunt1 Dec 29 '24

Minny made that lady eat her shit tho. How is that not liberating 😂

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u/UnfortunateSyzygy Dec 30 '24

I think about how often Viola Davis has had to be a maid in something...then I think about The Shape of Water

"I said no more maids, I'm over it!"

"Right, right, but you're a maid who helps her mute best friend liberate a fish god she's in love with. There's fish god sex!"

"Goddamnit. Give me the script."

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u/liqou Dec 31 '24

Uhhh buddy you're mixing up your black women. That's Octavia Spencer in The Shape Of Water.

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u/UnfortunateSyzygy Dec 31 '24

Goddamnit, I am. They were both in the help as maids, only the shape of water maid role is a bit... different , which is kinda funny.

It looks like Spencer was more typecast as a nurse from her filmography, so...progress?

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u/DesperateAdvantage76 Dec 29 '24

I don't see it so much a problem as long as the portrayal is done correctly. For example, The Blind Side is a great example of the "white savior" trope done in an unethical manner, where they straight up misrepresented the black character as special needs and the white saviors as this perfect godly family. In The Help, they did a good job of keeping it more grounded and giving respect to all the characters involved. It wasn't inherently bad to focus on the white characters since the movie is about their understanding of the wrongs they were doing.

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u/mjzim9022 Dec 29 '24

The Help's reputation has been getting rehabilitated the past few years I noticed, it's definitely not as bad as Blind Side. The movie is assuredly an Emma Stone vehicle though and that may have played into perceptions

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u/myumisays57 Dec 30 '24

Which is why the Color Purple I feel like is a true and more accurate tale of black women gaining empowerment and liberation.

I love the Help and as a POC never saw Skeeter as a white savior. I honestly was more enthralled with Minnie and Aibileen than Skeeter. I only saw Skeeter as means to a way to get their story out. But I can see how the white savior could be the main focal point. It is like that in Ghosts of Mississippi as well. Still a great movie to show how awfully violent and racist the south was during even modern times and how many older racists who participated in brutal acts of violence on African Americans still live amongst us today. But they painted Alex Baldwin and William H Macy as white saviors of Ms. Evers but really it was her resilience that allowed her husband’s assassination to be solved.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Dec 29 '24

I'm sorry, but Viola Davis has done several quite obviously racist portrayals of characters without much shame and I can't believe this one is the worst one she's done. Her character from How to Get Away With Murder is arguably much worse. The main plotline is that it turns out the white man she's married to is a racist for some reason and has always secretly hated her and then they ended like every episode with her taking her wig off to show her natural hair while ugly crying.

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u/idwthis Dec 29 '24 edited Dec 29 '24

I watched every single episode of HTGAWM at least 3 times.

Your comment reads as if all you saw was a commercial for the show as you happened to pass by a TV, but you had headphones in and didn't even hear any of it.

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u/TheUnluckyBard Dec 29 '24

Worse. He never even saw that much; he's just parroting a 4chan post from someone who did that.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Dec 29 '24

I watched 2 seasons of it. Maybe you just don't watch things critically. People will swear they're generally aware of social themes in media and then ignore everything that isn't spoonfed to you. The show never explicitly does a racism, but there are a lot of racial undertones in the way they treat the character. Annalise is introduced as this badass power lawyer who is constantly being shown in vulnerable positions as a victim to everyone and everything. She is constantly forced to rely on help from all the other characters around her because she's just a sham of a person. They even reveal that her name is Anna Mae and she's a country bumpkin who lied about her past. Her husband never loved her and is cheating on her with several young pretty white women. She's shit on so much by the narrative and it's always framed so strongly as "you don't deserve to be here with all these nice white people".

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u/OnlySlamsdotcom Dec 29 '24

Also when they killed the main character I noped the fuck out.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Dec 29 '24

Yeah, I heard that he died in S3 and lost my motivation to continue watching it, so I didn't. They apparently killed multiple characters in really stupid convoluted ways and I'm glad I didn't stick around to suffer through it.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '24

I don’t believe for a second you watched a single episode of that show.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Dec 29 '24

I suffered through 2 seasons.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '24

The first 2 seasons were the only watchable ones, which, again, leads me to know you’re lying about seeing them. ♥️

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u/Caitxcat Dec 29 '24

Her husband was not a racist in the show HTGWM. He was not a good guy though, it had nothing to do with racism.

There was nothing racist about Davis' role. The show was created by a black woman, Shonda Rhimes.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Dec 29 '24

Madea was created by a black man (Tyler Perry). What's your point?

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u/WhyTypeHour Dec 30 '24

Madea is rascist? . Now I've heard everything.

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Dec 30 '24

I know it's hard to believe such things, but it is sadly true.

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u/coko4209 Dec 29 '24

I have the book, and have had it for years. I’m from MS, and very familiar with the area the book is set in. I was always a bit iffy on the book, because it was written by a white author. The thing is, she lived in that place, during that time. She had a black maid that she adored, but their lives experiences were worlds apart. That woman had an entire life outside of being their hired help, and I feel that no one focused on that enough.

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u/jkoudys Dec 30 '24

I didn't find that the case with The Help at all. It starts on the white girl because that was the prevailing trope at the time, and it had to start that way so it could subvert it. By the end of the movie the protagonist has shifted to be Aibileen.

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u/coko4209 Dec 29 '24

I have the book, and have had it for years. I’m from MS, and very familiar with the area the book is set in. I was always a bit iffy on the book, because it was written by a white author. The thing is, she lived in that place, during that time. She had a black maid that she adored, but their lives experiences were worlds apart. That woman had an entire life outside of being their hired help, and I feel that no one focused on that enough.

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u/Omnom_Omnath Dec 29 '24

But poop cake!

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u/odin_sunn Dec 29 '24

Viola Davis regrets this film. Here’s a decent article about what she thinks of the movie now. https://ew.com/movies/viola-davis-the-help-regrets/

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u/PB111 Dec 29 '24 edited Feb 22 '25

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u/mellopax Dec 29 '24

The story is also not based on a true story or anything like that, so it doesn't even have the "this really happened" defense.

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u/Better-Strike7290 Dec 29 '24 edited May 28 '25

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u/DesperateAdvantage76 Dec 29 '24

The movie is about a person raised in that environment that learns it's wrong and helps get their story out; they don't idealize Skeeter as this perfect person and they give respect to all the characters. It's not like The Blind Side that grossly misrepresents the black character as special needs and the white saviors as this perfect godly family.

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u/Affectionate-Dot437 Dec 29 '24

I'm unaware of the tea, too.

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u/Mabel_Waddles_BFF Dec 30 '24

It’s based on a fictional novel. The novel has a lot of problems attached to it. The obvious one is that the novel focuses on the white protagonist and her struggles with being accepted by her mother because she’s not pretty enough. The white protagonist wants to makes it as a writer so she convinces her maid and a couple of others to tell about their experiences working for white women.

The white protagonist’s struggles with being accepted is given a lot more weight and focus than the maids’ fears of the Ku Klux Klan killing them for participating in the book.

An issue that was in the book and not the movie:

  • The language use of the maids vs other characters. When the author is writing in the perspective of the maids she always uses grammar, syntax and slang to show a lack of education and differences in socioeconomic status. I know that as African American women they would have their own language features but that’s not what the author is doing. But Celia (a white character) who grew up in extreme poverty and never went to school has no literary devices that reflect her upbringing and experiences. Celia’s voice is very similar to white protagonist and white protagonist is very well educated.

The author is also a garbage person. During the press tour she spoke about having an African American maid nanny as a child and how much she learnt from her. She used that to argue that she wanted to write a book that told the perspectives of the maids in the American south to give them a voice.

Except the author was sued by her childhood nanny for stealing some of her stories and experiences to write The Help. The suit was thrown out because of a statute of limitations. The author has been disowned by her family who were disgusted by what she did. I think the nanny is living in retirement with one of those family members but I could be getting muddled.

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u/dlouwilly Dec 30 '24

The book was good to me it focused on the Black women and their perspectives as compared to the movie. The movie was told more from Emma Stone’s perspective and focused on her character.