In the mist of power outages and evacuation alerts, The Help was able to stay on top of the box office (as we predicted). But overall, this weekend hurt the studios harder than the hurricane hit the cities. This weekend was the release of big pictures like Colombiana and Guillermo Del Toro‘s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – but neither were able to known down the leader. The Help stayed on top with $14.3 million. The new Weinstein picture Our Idiot Brother came in fifth with $6.5 million.

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The Help had a busy weekend. After being overshadowed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Help came back strong and claimed the No. 1 spot in its second week, as we predicted. In that time, the $25 million budget film has managed to pull in a grand $71.8 million. But the success of one film, means the lack of to another (or, in this case, others). This weekend all debuts flopped. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World landed third and grossed $12 million. Lionsgate blockbuster Conan the Barbarian (the film has a $90 million budget) barely managed to scoop in $10 million. Also new were Fright Night and One Day – both landed in the bottom half of the top 10. Take a look at the numbers…

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It’s the dog days of summer. This weekend four movies are coming out and – realistically – only one has a shot at taking the top slot. Last weekend saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes hold well enough to fend off The Help, but this weekend it’s more than likely that The Help will take the top slot. Conan the Barbarian, Fright Night, Spy Kids 4, and One Day are all going wide with only One Day not in 3-D. With Final Destination 5 underperforming, and an audience wary of 3-D (in general), we’ve seen studios beg off 3-D for some of their event films, but with international numbers of Pirates of the Carribean 4 propelling the film to an over billion dollar gross, you can’t count out the third dimension just yet.

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Four new movies crowd this end of summer weekend. As TV and radio are bombarded with back to school ads, Final Destination 5, The Help, 30 Minutes or Less, and Glee the 3D Concert Movie hit the big screen. It’s a weekend that becomes a theater palette-cleanser, as the hangers-on’s that have still been playing on a couple of screens finally leave. This is bad news for films like Friends With Benefits, or The Change Up – even Cowboys and Aliens. If the goal was to have less competition from A-list titles, it’s hard to stem the tide of new products, and next week there’s also four wide releases. Check out our predictions…

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Racism is still a hot button issue in America, and though the civil rights movement was a previous generation’s struggle, it’s hard to address those issues cinematically and still make an entertaining film. 2011′s The Help comes at a time when issue pictures are out of fashion, and so it seems slightly fresher than it might have had it come out in any other decade. And yet, it’s the same sort of empowerment movie as we’ve seen before. The bottom line is that the film is fun and has good performances from performers like Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Bryce Dallas Howard. But as a commentary on the issues of race in America, it’s decidedly lacking. Check out our review…

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For Tate Taylor, working on a studio movie had to be a dream. That he adapted the book The Help, which was written by his high school buddy Kathryn Stockett, likely made every day seem like a dream. As we sat down to do the interview Kathryn passed around a picture of the two of them at prom together. Both had very intimate feelings for the material, and it shows. Check it out.

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It’s always a bit difficult when two stars are paired together in that you always want more out of them. And for The Help’s press Viola Davis was partnered with Emma Stone. At once you wanted to talk to the ubiquitous Stone about her upcoming work in films like The Amazing Spider-Man (which we did), but then with Davis there’s so much to talk about with the film, and her career, and what it means to be an older black actress in Hollywood (albeit one with an academy award nomination, and a Tony award). Better too much than too little. Check out our conversation…

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In The Help, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly Hollbrook is the villain, a woman who insists that the Black maids who help raise their children and feed their families should have their own toilets as to not infect the white people. This is her cause, and it’s easy to root against her, but Howard makes her character fascinating, in spite of our modern understandings of how wrong she is. In person, Howard is nothing like her character (as to be expect) and at the time of the interview she was pregnant and glowing. Check it out…

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Tate Taylor’s The Help offers a number of great roles for women, which is somewhat rare, and a number for older actress, which is rarer these days. Allison Janney and Sissy Spacek play the mothers of the two leads, and the two got on immediately, both while making the film (they don’t have any scenes together, though) and in our interview, where the two often overlapped and played off each other. It was a fun interview. Check it out…

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