TV - TOWIE

"Oh my God, I'm so jel!! Shuttupppppppp!" We have all heard of 'The Only Way Is Essex' (TOWIE) by now I'm sure. The show is on its fourth series of augmented reality type drama, and it's still going strong. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I have been an avid viewer of TOWIE since the first series when I heard Chris Moyles taking the mick out of one of the girls on the radio (Sam Elizabeth Faiers sounding like she said her name was "Sam Available for Affairs). I have really enjoyed this show for the last couple of years, but I have to say, I think it's going downhill (if that's even possible).

The original cast was fairly small and all seemed to know each other. They all had their dramas and tantrums within a little group, and even though we know it's set up, the plot flowed fairly naturally. Now, the cast has expanded, which isn't necessarily a good thing. The chemistry and personality that the original characters had seems to have been lost, with only two or three of the current characters being ones that started the show. Now we seem to have family members, distant friends and random women all creeping in to jump on the TOWIE bandwagon. Mark Wright's cousin? Harry's boyfriend? Strange girls Kirk met at a petrol station? They've all had their 15 minutes (and sometimes much more) of fame. As a result, the scenarios are much more forced. There are plenty of moments that you know that the characters aren't really friends and wouldn't usually spend time together, but they have been forced together for the good of a juicy story line, and sometimes it just doesn't work.

For example, the new girls Billie and Carla (or maybe it's Cara, I don't actually know as I refuse to view these two as proper characters on the show) suddenly seem to be best friends with everyone. I'm sorry, I know people are always saying "small world" but I can't believe it's that small. Kirk met Billie at a petrol station and he and Joey briefly dated the pair last season. Now they are at Lauren Goodger's girly get togethers, they are Lucy's shoulder to cry on and I believe they were present at Lydia's birthday meal. I suppose this is the problem with this kind of augmented reality; people are brought into the show and forced to become friends with other members of the cast to diversify story lines and get them more screen time.

This leads on neatly to the situations that you can tell the producers know about but just force the characters into, or even set up themselves. To be fair it does make for some brilliant TV at times, like the time that Lauren Pope caught Kirk out on a date and he called her friend Maria an extra, but we should probably remember that these are real people, and these are their lives we're watching fall apart on national television. It just seems a bit cold hearted really. The story lines used to be funny, bitching, quarrelling, yelling, more bitching, but I don't like some of the more recent ones. Lucy and Mario's problems a couple of weeks ago was almost enough to make me stop watching. This probably sounds strange as it is tame compared to most of the stuff in the soaps or even on Jeremy Kyle, but I didn't like the way it was used on the programme.

For those who don't know, Lucy is dating Mario, a ladies man. He loves her but is mad at her because she cheated on him in a drunken one night stand, but they are back together and happy-ish. In the episodes a couple of weeks back, Lucy went to some of the other girls and said to them that she was suspicious becuase Mario wouldn't let her look at his messages. The other girls (in typical TOWIE inflammatory nature) said she was right to be suspicious and that something obviously wasn't right. This is all fine, but then then Lucy was shown alone in Mario's flat (where she doesn't live) deciding whether or not to look at messages on his iPad and then eventually looking at them and bursting into tears. She then goes back to the friends to explain that she had found 50 plus messages to other girls.

My issue is this: surely the producers would have known whether or not these messages were actually there, because if they weren't there wouldn't have been a story line worth pursuing. So I'm thinking either Lucy had already discovered these messages and then had to stage this moment again so it could be filmed, or the producers encouraged Lucy to look at the messages while filming to get the reaction. I think both of these are pretty cruel things to do. From what I can gather, TOWIE have specific filming days, so it's not like they are followed around by cameras waiting to capture something exciting like in documentaries or whatever. So Lucy must have been told to go to Mario's flat and look at his messages. I know that the people in TOWIE get paid to do this and there's the argument that once people have become desperate for fame and let themselves into the public eye in such a way as the cast of the show have done, they should expect stuff like this. I can see the point of this, but I still think it is cruel to film the break up of a real reltionship like this.

To be fair, it could all be completely staged and none of this could of happened, meaning I'm just a loser who reads far too much into what they watch on TV, so in case that is true, I am going to shut up about this now and end by saying that, aside from all that I've rabbited on about, for some reason I still can't tear myself away from this programme, so rant over and I will probably write a post far less caring and intellectually questioning this show soon, and far more along the lines of how much better I think Chloe looks with lighter hair and how much of an idiot Joey Essex is.

Ps, I'm sorry I couldn't be bothered to put any photos into this post, google image searching seems to just come up with tons of pictures of Mark Wright with food in his mouth or Amy Childs getting out of cars, and I don't think we really need to see any of that!!

Film - The Help

So The Help is the latest film that I'm going to comment on. I have mixed feelings about this one. The Help is set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi and is the story of a white writer recording the experiences of the African American maids that look after white families in the town of Jackson. This film is based on a book and when I watched it, for some reason I thought that it was based on a true story, i.e. a film documenting the writing of a book that actually exists. This is actually not the case, but I think I enjoyed the film much more thinking that it was. I'll come back to this later on, but finding out that this story was a total fiction written in 2009 by a white American woman makes me re-think my enjoyment of it.

 Trailer

Putting this aside, I thought that this film was excellent. It is very long for this type of film at about two and a half hours, but it doesn't drag at all until the very end, and this is only because of the winding down of the story. The acting in this film is very good, and unsurprisingly many of the actresses were nominated or won awards for their performances. I expected the writer (played by Emma Stone) to be the main character, but she is actually more of a side character with a couple of the maids (notably the characters played by Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer) taking the main spotlight.

Some of the characters are very easy to warm to in this film, while at the same time some are very easy to hate. The white household women are all very prim, proper and bitchy, and treat the black 'help' horrendously. The film highlights the fact that the help look after these women when they are children, love them and care for them while their mothers are busy socialising, and form real bonds with them. Then, as they grow up and have their own children, the black women that took care of them just became 'the help', and in some cases aren't even allowed to use the same toilets as the rest of the house. So the white women are easy to hate in this film. The maids are brilliant. They are funny, sarcastic and full of life and there are loads of funny bits which will have you laughing (and some really shocking bits). But at the same time there are many poignant moments giving plenty of opportunities for tearing up. The maids really love the children they look after, but their mothers seem to have little time for them and scold them unnecessarily. The maids are horrified by this but are powerless to intervene and put these women right. There is also problems in the personal lives of the maids, showing all aspects of their lives, not just their work.

There are some white women that do do right by their maids, most notably the writer and one of the other women in the neighbourhood (played by Jessica Chastain). The relationship between Chastain's character and her maid (played by Spencer) casts a direct comparison to the other bitchy white women, with Chastain's character showing kindness towards her maid, as well as sharing her vulnerability with her. It makes you wonder why all of the women don't behave like this, and because of this Chastain's character is by far my favourite in the film.

My main problem with this film though is the stereotypes it adheres to. Both the black maids and the white women are basically exactly what you would expect. Even the Chastain's character who treats her maid far more kindly does so in a very typically 'story-book' manner, with Stone's writer character feeling like she is on very traditional quest to get the maids' voices heard.  This wouldn't bother me if the story were true, if it was (as I originally thought) a film documenting the true story of how the book was written. As I said, the film is in fact based on a book written in 2009. This kind of takes some of the magic away from it as the story line feels almost predictable.

I haven't read the book so I can't really comment on it, but it does seem a bit of an odd time to write about the Civil Rights movement and the relationship between black maids and their white households. She may have done her research very well, but really what does the author know about living and the maids real experiences during this time? The book has received criticism for adhering to sterotypes in the way that it does. It makes you wonder how true to life this film is and how much it just plays up to the stereotypes we are all familar with.

For me, this takes some of the power out of the film. Yes, the plot line and the acting were excellent and go together to form a brilliant, poignant and funny film but it just seems a bit hollow when I think that it was written so recently and so far away from the actual events of the 60s. 'The Help' is definitely worth a watch, as on the surface it's a great and really enjoyable film, but just don't think too much about how and why it was written!