The Help was great.

The movie cer­tainly was not per­fect. White ladies were all made out to be demons, except for Euge­nia “Skeeter” Phe­lan and the hurt­ing char­ac­ter, Celia Foote. The African Amer­i­can ladies were painted as almost angels.

True, the sit­u­a­tion was appalling. Peo­ple like Skeeter, Aibileen Clark, Minny Jack­son — and Mar­tin Luther King — put their lives on the line to stand up for what was right, and helped cul­ture and soci­ety change. High­light­ing that courage and strength of char­ac­ter was worth the price of admis­sion alone.

The visual tex­ture was excel­lent. Pac­ing was fine. I thought not read­ing the book was an advan­tage; the expe­ri­ence of enjoy­ing the story stood on its own. My wife had read the book and still fully enjoyed the film. But she had com­par­isons of how the film was dif­fer­ent than the book, such as how the film was softer in its treat­ment of characters.

The film chal­lenged my way of think­ing about injus­tice in the world today. Sim­i­lar con­di­tions of vir­tual (and real) slav­ery still abound. What am I doing to change things?

ET mixed with Aliens mixed with Juras­sic Park. Add in a lot of intel­li­gence. Then you have Super 8.

My 15-year-old son and I saw Super 8 last night. We thor­oughly enjoyed it. J.J. Abrams, the direc­tor of the TV series Lost, added that same level of sus­pense to the film — except you don’t have to wait five years to solve the mystery.

Visu­ally, it’s stun­ning. The crashes and attacks are totally in your face. The slow-moving scenes are treated with care and respect.

There is way more char­ac­ter devel­op­ment than most action movies pro­vide... a teenage romance is almost the film’s centerpiece.

The PG-13 rat­ing is appro­pri­ate. My 10-year-old daugh­ter would have been too scared. And some of the kids swear like sailors.

Ver­dict? Go, if my descrip­tion makes the film sound appeal­ing to you. It may be the best film of the summer.

Finally, here’s another wor­thy review from my brother: on Ama­zon. (Scroll down on that page.)

Still photo cour­tesy of collider.com.

I was amused by this “Lit­tle Buddy” device that Best Buy sells. It’s a GPS unit that your child is sup­posed to carry around so that you will always know where they are.

I can see this being a good thing for chil­dren of high pro­file peo­ple, where kid­nap­ping might be a pos­si­bil­ity. But nor­mal peo­ple? My advice is to com­mu­ni­cate with your child. Ide­ally you have a trust­ing rela­tion­ship with them — they tell you where they are and when they expect to return. A pay-as-you-go mobile phone would allow them to com­mu­ni­cate with you in a sit­u­a­tion where they need to make a new plan. And that would cost less than the $15 a month that the Insignia plan requires (if your agree­ment with your kid is that you will pay for those kinds of calls or texts only).

Finally, I admit that we are of course not per­fect par­ents. And also, some kids just make bad choices. I don’t think those kind of kids would read­ily carry around a “Lit­tle Buddy” in their pocket or back­pack. Chances are, they’d leave it at their friends house before they went off wher­ever it was they wanted to go.