I'm reading the book right now and I get the feeling that the authors of the statements you link to above have perhaps not read it. The 68-year-old African American woman sitting in the room with me had the same impression. She really liked the book. I can't comment on the movie.

I think they need to be in that area, too. I was born in Seattle in 1955 and we didn't really have anything like that.

I saw the movie and didn't read the book.

The first commentary makes me a little sad, because I would hope most of it didn't even need said.

Unless there is more in the book, it seems to be pretty much only about the women's part of the world. It's not about men or children so they only flit through as needed for the plot. This is also why it only portrays the awfulness of the boss ladies and not of schools, shopkeepers, klan, etc.

It definitely is showing the women as having very few options. The white women too have very few options, the options they do have certainly are more comfortable, less financially stressful, more stable, less strenuous, less demeaning. Perhaps one of the reasons they are mean to the help and each other is because in this world dominated by their husbands and with strong rules about what is acceptable behavior and interests they mostly aren't seeing other outlets to take out their own frustrations.

I would expect that if we heard all the women's stories there would be sexual harassment and rape, but the movie could get confusing and lose it's story arc if it tried to do that. Does the book do it?

We could just as well complain that only one white person who was not of this elite class was in the movie and then only because one of their men had married her after getting her pregnant.

They did show the church's function as a community center. I saw it's importance. I don't know if they didn't see the movie, or they think it needs to be specifically called out which could again disrupt the flow, it is already a very long movie.

Okay the whole 'smart, kind, important' thing got old, not because of dialect, I don't know one southern accent from another, but because it was meant as such absolutely blatant audience emotional manipulation, rather than what necessarily was real.

What struck me as the points I would most expect objection to - they only mentioned one of - that the center of this whole thing is a white woman who is basically using them for her own purposes (though she does her best to treat them fairly), and that they leave you with the impression that it will be okay for all and I fear it would have gone quite badly for at least some.

Girls our age who came from Mississippi (the ones who said I was ok until the revolution), said that they had been completely shocked to find out that the shopkeeper who had always acted nice and polite to their faces was unmasked as the grand dragon. That sort of two-facedness would also have been interesting to include somehow, but yes it was a very long movie already.

I guess there is a question of who the book/movie is for. I think that they felt that in order to get white people to see it and not write it off as a black movie it had to have that main white character. I assumed the reason they didn't show the maids as more forceful is to emphasize how much fear was in the air. Certainly they couldn't have been shown mouthing off at their bosses or they'd be fired, and the main other interaction shown was related to getting them to tell the stories for the book, again it was already long so they didn't really get into the personal lives of anyone except as necessary to push it along.

I was a little appalled at the people in theater (mostly white women at Camera 12 opening night) as they cheered along with every victory or comeuppance, it somehow didn't feel quite seemly. I guess I was flashing back to high school a lot. More appropriate to me would've been a group of black girls like I had in my history class who muttered 'amen's and the like throughout as if they were in church listening to an inspiring preacher. It was obvious at least some of them had read the book because you'd hear people say 'oh this is going to be a good part' and such.

My friend who is from the Bay Area, but has been stuck in Georgia for the last several years as a military wife, took her two elementary-aged daughters to it and reported that it was very eye-opening to them. They hadn't previously heard of the whole white vs colored signs and such before , so she figured it really was time they started to learn about it.

Yes, it is frustrating. I try to see things where I think there might actually be a character that is 'like me' somehow because it is extremely rare, and the stuff that is wrong sticks out because of that.

To a certain extent movie portrayals, except MAYBE in a biographical/historical piece are always going to either be stereotypes, or deliberate plays off of stereotypes, of whoever they are portraying.

It's sad that even now, if the movie did not have the central white woman character so many fewer people would watch it, try to relate to it.

Maybe they don't and I'm grouchy? It depends on who is writing it. If they are writing about people like the ones they actually know they can be less stereotyped, but still to not get in trouble they should be making them composites if not meant to be historical fact. When people write about people they don't know - what else are they going to go on for the most part? It's not 100% stereotypes, but often.

I shouldn't mix the words "to a certain extent" and "always" in the same sentence and expect it to make sense.

check out the review at Colorlines.com.

that was what made me be willing to let go and not see the movie, and I'll think about reading the book.

I am still searching in vain for reviews of either the book or the movie by people who were born in 1950 or before, even if they didn't live in the South. (Roger Ebert reviewed it, but he addressed mainly the quality of the film as a film.) All the links here show me women who probably were not alive at the time. No disrespect meant to them or their opinions, but I really want to know what people who actually had some experience of living during that time think.