The Hottest Summer Hairstyle Trends for 2011

As a season marked by fashion revivals, it's no surprise that some of the hottest hair trends for the summer of 2011 happen to be updated versions of classic styles. Much of this is driven by celebrities who sometimes take inspiration from the fashion trends of yesteryear. As such, here are some of the most popular cuts and hair colors for the hottest months of the year.

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Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011)

Kevin Smith's Red State indirectly posits a future where "ripped-from-the-blogopshere" becomes the new method of stabbing at relevance. Its unfocused narrative, contradictory thematic thrusts and strawmen play like an unresearched screed against, well, everything within reach. The man whose command of Catholic teachings gave Dogma its depth here presents...I'm not even sure, to be honest. The fitful narrative spurts in and out of topics: occasionally, it goes after dumb, horny teenage boys, then to Christian Extremists In No Way Related to the Phelps Family (lawsuit-avoiding clarification included) and finally to the lethally inane bureaucracy of law enforcement.

Smith seems to want to make a hyperkinetic Coen brothers film, but he has made the same mistake of so many detractors in assuming that every character in a Coens' movie is loathsome. There's no one to latch onto with this film, which already whiplashes so much it could use an identifiable center. Smith, who has made some of the most tangible characters in modern comedy, crafts props who spit out his lines with either listlessness or overacting bathos the one time he really needs great delivery to maintain suspense with words. So thin are these characters that, amazingly, the most inherently likable one turns out to be the homphobic preacher sitting on top of a small arsenal.

That preacher is Abin Cooper, played by Michael Parks with such vicious elegance it takes time to realize he really isn't saying or doing anything at all. His Cooper comes off a great deal more human than Fred Phelps—he's seen as tender with his grandchildren compared to documentary footage of the cold WBC leader, and he even has a spry spring in his step. But then, sometimes reality is just too strange for fiction. His daughter (Melissa Leo, who has officially crossed the threshold from big, bold acting into scenery mastication) uses a fake online listing to lure three repressed boys looking for a gangbang, only to plunge them into a nightmare world of religious fervor. But first you've got to sit through talk. And talk. And more damn talk.

Obviously, this could be expected of that most talky of writer-directors, but Smith isn't simply riffing here. He needs to build and maintain suspense with his language, much the same way Quentin Tarantino drew out tension like shrieking violin glissandi in Inglourious Basterds with nothing but ingeniously structured dialogue. Well, and a formal mastery of editing, which stands nearly at a polar opposite from the haphazard guesswork of Red State's assembly. Smith's work in comedy has honed his ability at editing down whole cuts to ensure the tightest movement to the punchline. But trimming scenes and true editing are entirely different things, and as his (inexplicably) hand-held camera careens around angles and jittery coverage, the obliteration of spatial-temporal clarity creates a distraction that further robs the stiff dialogue from impact. This is a horror film mercifully without cheap scares, but its construction prevents atmosphere from condensing around its characters.

Also hurting the film are its wild tonal and narrative shifts, which if nothing else prove that the Coens' anticlimaxes are fare more clever and assuredly handled than many credit them. But where an unexpected occurrence can completely change not merely the direction of, say, A Serious Man or No Country for Old Men, thematic, even intellectual depth grows out of the voids left by early resolutions and protracted falling actions. Red State's gear shifts feel not like pullbacks to the bigger picture but "Oh, and another thing!" returns to a conversation that you just want to end. The sudden turn from fundamentalist Christianity to a bungled ATF operation reminiscent of Waco tries to expand the scope of criticism to include grim responses to such sects, but for this aspect to work one must consider the murderous cult to be misunderstood in some way. In the end, it all just feels like a senseless bloodbath to lead to incoherent, meaningless action scenes.

Smith amassed a solid collection of exceedingly gifted character actors, but their lengthy monologues feel only like extended cameos in films where they're being given more prominent roles. Parks and Leo are supplemented by Stephen Root, John Goodman and Kevin Pollak (whose blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance elevates the film almost as much as his turn in Cop Out), all of whom are clearly game for something meaty but wind up rushing to deliver their lines before the camera moves away again. The younger cast isn't bad either, from Veronica Mars' Kyle Gallner to Michael Angarano. Had the script any more focus, this may well have been the demented actor's showcase it thinks it is.

Unfortunately, it feels mainly like everyone is wasting his time. I kept waiting, and then hoping, that some element would fall into place, that the scattered plots and dry humor would anchor themselves to something, anything, and work. But by the time Red State stumbles to its ending—which for one brief moment seems as if it might redeem the entire picture with its bravery, only to opt for a Burn After Reading-wannabe non-resolution that instead feels like a cop out—it's joined church and state more messily and simplistically than any fundamentalist ever could.

The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2011)

For the first five minutes of The Arbor, I assumed that one of the two actresses appearing on-screen was the subject of the movie, Andrea Dunbar, the late UK playwright. But after they detailed the abuses and neglect they suffered in their dingy household, I was horrified to learn that the two characters (I'm not sure if that's the right word, as I'll explain shortly) were Dunbar's daughters, that the tyrannical specter of a drunken, uncaring mother, a stereotypical artistic motivator for the downtrodden yet ambitious, was the artist herself. That realization, even more so than the film's adventurous presentation, kept me riveted for the remaining 90 minutes.

Told through reenactments with actors lip-synching to taped interviews of relatives, neighbors and friends, The Arbor initially seems an arty take on the documentary, a cute gimmick to make the movie stand out among the pack. But Clio Barnard's film proves original not merely in its staging but in the structure of its drama. This is a biography, but one that explores the far-reaching consequences of Andrea's all too brief life and the social significance of her family story. Barnard reaches her death less than halfway into the film, leaving the remaining time to sift through the lives of those she left behind, in the process delving into the perpetuating cycle of the same social ills that Dunbar documented in her realist writing.

In fact, the film's central subject could easily be not Dunbar herself but her daughter, Lorraine (Manjinder Virk). Our first concept of Andrea comes not from the archival footage collected for the movie but in Lorraine's bitter recollections, memories of her mother's alcoholism and blindness to the sexual abuse the girl endured from relatives. We also hear the second daughter, Lisa (Christine Bottomley), chime in, her perspective more optimistic; where she defends Andrea, Lorraine flatly admits that there are some things her mother did she would never forgive. By starting with these conflicting takes, Barnard humanizes his kitchen-sink documentary even as he also sidesteps objective details for gruesome remembrances.

To get at Andrea's life, Barnard mixes the old footage of the real Andrea with acted-out selections of her plays, which drew heavily upon her life in run-down estates. These readings are brilliant, not merely for the staging, which draws upon Dunbar's style (constantly onlooking residents, stagey recreations like some car seats standing in for the full vehicle), but the sheer power of Dunbar's words. She wrote her first play, for which the film is named, at 15, but her gift for capturing the world around her was instantly evident. No line appears to exist between Dunbar's plays and her life, playing out the personal dramas of an alcoholic father, teen pregnancy and the aimlessness of ignored youth through the words that never managed to get Dunbar out of that life.

When the film shifts to focus chiefly on Lorraine after handling Dunbar's death from a brain hemorrhage at 29, one almost gets the sense that the film has restarted. Lorraine, who so deeply despises her mother for her alcoholism, torment and neglect (one can even view her death as the ultimate show of the latter), falls into a life that mirrors her mother's to a disturbing degree. Substance abuse, early motherhood, extreme neglect, all of these become traits for Lorraine just as they did her mother. Both mother and daughter met men who seemed so nice in company but turned into psychotics behind closed doors. But if Andrea carried around the scars from her father, Lorraine's issues are exacerbated by the isolation she felt has a mixed-race child in a racist community, prejudice endured even from her own mother. The real Lorraine speaks like a shellshocked veteran, and Virk conveys her hollow, haunted readings with facial language just animated enough to be heartbreaking in its resignation. Her story dips into unspeakable horrors, but Lorraine pushes on, so ravaged by them that she can no longer even express fear of them. But that tone also suggests an obliviousness to how much she shares with her hated mother, something Lisa subtly establishes in her own interviews.

Indeed, the role of perspective in this film is key. Youssef, the Pakistani who dates and impregnates Andrea, is so nice that even the racist community comes to somewhat accept him. Then, we hear of him trying to force her to get an abortion and considering ways to make her miscarry, and news of his physical abuse changes the view of this nice young man. But when he visits Lorraine one time and one time only, she is left with the memory of a pleasant day dancing in Middle Eastern clothes before returning to the prison of her mother's home. Lorraine speaks of her mother's scarring effects, but Lisa suggests that her sister misses their mom in some strange way, a naïve statement that nevertheless might hold some truth.

Barnard ties all this together with impeccable casting and direction. His camera glides with eerie precision over images of estate life, and at times The Arbor almost feels like a Resnais film. He links past and present with repeat shots that show the positive passage of time: littered fields of the past become cleaner, more communal areas in the present, while the scratched, hardwood stairs of the old Dunbar residence now has soft green carpet. The actors are so invested in their physical performances that I had to remind myself they weren't actually speaking the lines. The actors even insert tics, such as "Lorraine" averting her eyes slightly when she reaches her darkest confessions and "Ann," a kind neighbor who eventually becomes Lorraine's foster parent with her husband Steve, fiddling with a necklace.

A bleak movie, to be sure, The Arbor nevertheless finds hard-won determination in its accounts of personal and social abandonment. One can hear people light up in interviews when they remember acts of kindness that made everything better, even if just for a moment, and the graceful final shot shows community emerging from these areas of loner poverty. With the recent riots in England, uprisings of confused, angry teens at once directly responsible for their own actions and the products of social conditions, The Arbor is even more poignant: blame is exchanged, whether thrown at the system or amoral youths, but the film takes care to show that nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and even in its darkest moments, it always allows for hope.

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

The Help takes the obliviousness of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 hit novel and magnifies it to the level of the dangerously ignorant. The novel at least had the decency to include a modicum of ambiguity and the suggestion that Stockett could vaguely remember some of her 3rd-grade social studies lessons on the Civil Rights Era. The film, on the other hand, is erected out of pure fantasy, set in a plastic, pastel Jackson, Miss. that has all the authenticity of Lars von Trier's Dogville set. Stockett's novel dropped whiffs of the true reality of 1960s Jackson among her dialect-ridden, charmed view of social prejudice like talismans to ward off criticism, but childhood friend Tate Taylor has to condense 500 pages into two-and-a-half hours. Given the paper-thin characterization of the novel's figures, this means that the obliterated subplots and truncated, blunt dialogue serve to make the material even more farcical.

In fairness, Taylor does try to refashion Stockett's book around the African-American characters instead of a white guilt cipher. But this idea goes no farther than letting Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a maid who becomes the first to tell her stories of life serving whites, narrate the movie. Soon enough, focus is back on Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent college grad and sort-of feminist who, despite no clear identity before leaving for school and a blindness to current events (at least in the book), decides to get the black perspective of Jackson life. In the novel, Skeeter is almost jaw-droppingly entitled and never criticized for it. Here, Taylor dispenses with nearly all of her story, which would be a significant improvement if he also cut down her screen time to match. But no, regardless of who had to go in to record ADR, this is still Skeeter's story.

Completely unaware of the risks of such an enterprise despite living in one of the hotbeds of the Civil Rights Movement, Skeeter puts the lives of maids in jeopardy just to please a scabrous New York Jewish elite editor—no commas because Taylor/Stockett seem to use each of these terms as if they all mean the same thing—named Elaine Stein (Mary Steenburgen, who somehow gives the most one-note performance in a film of unambiguous heroes and villains). For some reason, Stein is never shown sitting at her desk like a professional, instead lounging on the thing dangling her legs like a naughty secretary or brashly calling from a restaurant whilst devouring adoring younger men. Mocking the ivory tower insularity of the New England elites, both Stockett and Taylor have her flippantly telling Skeeter to hurry up and get the interviews she needs for a book "before this whole civil rights thing blows over."

The rest of the archetypes are spread out among dignified, frumpy sexless (yet child-inundated) maids and shrieking housewives who put a glossed look on racism so audiences don't have to be reminded that some of their parents (or even friends) used to beat and hang people for the color of their skin. This brigade of over-hairsprayed, overacting harridans is led by Hilly Holbrook, played by a Bryce Dallas Howard with such narrowed eyes there simply must be a gag reel of her walking into furniture by mistake. One never gets any clue as to why Skeeter was ever such close friends with her or Elizabeth (Ahna O'Reilly), a lab-grown Betty Draper cloned with amphibian DNA to fill the sequence gaps. But then, Skeeter herself is such a blank slate for the author's guilt and wish fulfillment that presumably anyone could find something to project in her.

As for the maids, Aibileen is the chief representative, but she is also joined by Minny, de-sassed from her ludicrous novel form into someone who might conceivably have lived past the age of 13 in a town where lip from a black woman could equal jail time at best. Stockett wrote the character with her actor friend Octavia Spencer in mind, and Spencer plays the role here. Her bug eyes are their own punchline, always bulging in anticipation of reprisal when she can't keep her mouth shut and regarding any and all white people with disbelief, as if unable to comprehend just how ridiculous they are. Minny is the most anachronistic element in this story, modeled after a modern, no-nonsense black woman, but now that Spencer can say the lines instead of Stockett writing in loose dialect, she nearly makes the thin comic relief of the character work. She shares some organic laughs with Aibileen that work far better than the more staged comic pieces, precisely because these smaller, more intimate moments feel like conceivable gallows humor between two people suffering through the same endless torment.

Nevertheless, Minny's neutering makes her extraneous, and the already unnecessary side-plot with her airheaded but sweet new boss, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), only more distracting. I would venture to guess that Stockett intended Celia's character to comment on how much poor whites shared with blacks in their ostracizing from the realm of "classy" whites, but her depiction as a kindhearted, racially blind piece of "white trash" is antithetical to the true, vile nature of racism among poor, which is almost always more vicious for the jealousy and resentment of being in the same financial bracket as minorities. Having said that, Chastain gives as good a performance as the two black leads with her equally limited role: virtually unrecognizable from her turn earlier this year as the embodiment of human spirit in The Tree of Life, Chastain speaks with a squeaky hiss that sounds as if the air for her words came not from her lungs but wind blowing through the empty space between her ears and out her mouth and nostrils. She couldn't be any further from her other breakout role this year, and the sheer range she's shown within releases spaced apart by mere months is, one hopes, a sign of stardom to come.

Much talk has already circulated regarding the awards potential of Davis' performance, and it's true that she makes a startling presence. Confined by Stockett's conception of Aibileen as a loving maid who seemingly exists to raise and cheer up white babies, Davis nevertheless injects steel into the character. She's no more complex a character, but Davis' fearsome visage etches pain on this glorified Mammy figure. If anything, she conveys too much strength to be taken seriously as a humble, submissive domestic: there's more fire in her face than Spencer's. When one looks into those hardened eyes, however, one can also find humor and love, and if she has to play a maid who, in one way or another, always gives of herself to a white person, at least Davis makes that role almost believable on a human level.

I mention all these actresses because there are some genuinely solid performances here. While the Stepford women of Jackson shriek and scream and hiss, depicting racism as a matter of peer pressure instead of an endemic social ill, Spencer, Davis and Chastain elevate a film that doesn't deserve them. But not even they can distract from the shortcuts and stereotypes thrown at the screen for easy identification. Skeeter's mother, an imperious yet unchallenged force in the book, is here softened by Allison Janney. Taylor condenses the gradual progression of Charlotte's illness into a single line, and I must say that "My daughter's upset my cancerous ulcers!" is my favorite non-sequitur, crass exploitation of a terminal disease since "I got the results of the test back, I definitely have breast cancer." Skeeter too finds the shortest distance to her moral awakening, openly sniping Hilly from the start and eroding any plausibility of her supposedly close friendship with Jackson's resident witch. Skeeter's arc revolves around the mystery of what happened to her loving maid Constantine, who disappeared just before the young woman returned from college, and we're meant to track her moral development through this uncooked subplot that serves only to not-really drive a wedge between mother and daughter.

Constantine is the downfall of both the novel and the film. A repository for Stockett's idealized memories of her own maid, Demetrie, Constantine appears in flashbacks that reduce the woman to an utter fabrication, Aibileen without the tangibility. My mouth actually fell open in horror at seeing Cicely Tyson, an icon, simply appear to a teenage Skeeter, so rail-thin, shriveled and toothless that she resembled less a human being with her own life and story than a savior version of Baron Samedi. Constantine exists solely for beatification, despite how little say she gets in literary or cinematic form. All she does is buck up Skeeter, which Stockett interprets as true motherly love. Hilariously, she gave an interview in which she admitted that, when she spoke to white families that used to have a maid, they remembered the workers with fondness and love. But when it came to the maids, well, let's take a look: "When I spoke to black people it was surprising to see how removed they were emotionally from those they worked for. That was not always the case, but it was one of the dynamics that struck me. Sometimes it was a total disregard. It was just a job."

The interviewer, of course, didn't press this, but the question arises: did Demetrie truly love young Kathryn, who incidentally grew up in the '70s and '80s despite people passing this book off as autobiography? I would love to know if, at any moment, Stockett remotely entertained the possibility that the maid she has placed on a pedestal for raising her, for empathizing with her, really just viewed her as a job to make oppressive wages to feed her own children. I think that she did, in some dark recess of her mind, and the result is Constantine, a icon carved out of blessed wood that Stockett uses to chase such life-altering thoughts away like a broom to a raccoon. The resolution of Constantine's fate in the novel is overwrought, but it at least cast Skeeter's mother as a more accurate face of racism than the sparkle-bright young ladies of the Junior League, revealing how nearly three decades of service and invaluable contributions could not stop a white person from acting with cold impersonality. The film, however, recasts the revelation with regret on behalf of Charlotte, and she and Skeeter suffer no fallout or profound change for it. It's just there for another tearjerker in another film that makes so many intervallic leaps between cutesy comedy and shameless manipulation it feels like a bebopification of sentimentality.

And so, the film resolves itself for maximum audience pleasure: Hilly turns into a dozen crows that scatter into the winds, Muggles and wizards learn to live in harmony, and a baby named Barack raises his tiny, large-eared head in Hawaii and coos the word "Change." Stein, who exists to be a hard-ass to Skeeter (and an inconsistent one, first aware of the risks facing maids and then expecting more than a dozen interviews later), somehow lets Skeeter's book be released with the most hysterically dumb cover I've ever seen. The baby blue cover sports only a dove as its centerpiece, halfheartedly justified as being linked to the budding hippie movement. I just found it amusing that even the goddamned object on the book cover is white.

The Help, even in its semi-ambiguous novel form, cocoons open racism as a thing of the past. It doesn't say that racism is over, per se, but it clearly wants us to admire how far we've come. But when Jackson only recently found itself the subject of another high-profile case of race violence—in this case the murder of a black man by racist teens who shouted "White power!" as they beat him and ran over him in a truck—maybe we shouldn't be so aghast at how things "used" to be. But no, we are instead treated to the running joke of Minny's revenge against Hilly, a dastardly deed involving a pie and a mounting sense of dread, not in the reveal but in the dawning realization that this work really will sink so low for a laugh. Naturally, it works as a crowd-pleaser, but it is so insipidly dumb, Stockett writing herself out of the true conclusion to it (and the release of Skeeter's book itself) with the threat of mutually assured social destruction. But do you know how that story really ends? It doesn't end with Minny in prison where she can tell the world of Hilly: it ends with her being killed and her house firebombed. Those might not even be two separate actions. It ends with Aibileen not simply fired but completely stripped of what little she has and possibly the target of violence. It ends with Skeeter mostly likely being raped for being a race traitor and definitely with her family crippled economically. These are not pleasant endings, and I do not "want" to see them, at least in the sense that I would ever like to spend an evening seeing such sights. But if you're going to make a film about '60s Jackson, you should show the truth, not what will only unsettle audiences in the safest way possible.

So what, in the end, are we left with? A movie that hinges its biggest payoff on a flight of pure revisionist fantasy designed to make modern audiences feel good about themselves, complete with emotional moments that are, in almost every occurrence, tied to a black person helping a white. Whether it is Aibileen's insulting "You is kind, you is smart" speech to little Mae Mobley, the maids agreeing to speak after Hilly crosses the line (their assent delivered with a collective "mmm-hmm" that throbs through Aibileen's house like an A/C unit switching on), and finally the dénouement of the two supposedly lead black maids stopping everything to cheerlead Skeeter getting a job. This trivialization of the '60s has been defended for its nonsensical feel-good whimsy by those who feel validated for having a cry over these prop cutouts of suffering. But those looking for a genuinely inspiring story of overcoming hardships associated with the racial serfdom that persists today—a recent Pew Research Center release showed the median net worth of a white household at 20 times that of a black family—should read this account of a conversation the daughter of a maid had with the grown-up child of the family that employed her. It's heartbreaking, enraging, unexpectedly uplifting, defiantly confrontational, and it ends with a punchline that is not only earned but truly hilarious and vindicating. In other words, it's everything The Help isn't.

IPA's 2011 Best Winning Photos

The International Photography Award winners and finalists have been announced and as usual, they're downright impressive. The IPAs are sponsored by the Lucie Foundation , whose mission is to discover innovative photography, honor great photographers, and promote photography in general. This year, they received 8,000 submissions. A whopping 70 jurors judged these submissions. Here are 41 of some of the best winning photos.

"5th Ave. Fix"
Lorin Crosby


"Five Minutes in Santa Fe"
Michael Crouser


"Burning Peak"
Rafael Rojas



" Magic World"
Name: Adam Balcerek, Poland


"Noorderlicht, Spitsbergen, Norway"
Philip Harvey


"A Night in Tahrir Square"
Jacopo Quaranta


"Friends"
Joanna Borowiec


"Nouakchott opus incertum"
Philippe Bernard


"Afghan Heroin: Not for Export"
Thomas Stanworth


"Gatorade Natural"
Brian Kuhlmann


"Our Oceans Aren't The Only Ones In Danger"
Adam Taylor


"Agent Orange"
Ed Kashi


"Go, My Beauty"
Gordon Welters


"Pastoral Scene"
Nikolas Despiniadis


"Black River"
Michael Mullady


"Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out"
Edmund Clark


"Pure Blood"
Ximena Etchart


"Buddies"
Serhat Demiroglu


"Gulf Oil Spill"
Daniel Beltra


"Remote Control"
Claudio Allia


"Chicago"
Ball & Albanese


"Heinz"
Maurice Heesen


"Strange Things Are Smoking"
Karen Divine


"Cold Places"
Sue Flood


"Innocence"
Claudio Allia


"Surplus"
Michael Krebs


"Desertic City"
Joanne Pouzenc


"Tibetan Monastery Kitchens"
Marrigje De Maar


"Docklands"
Rafal Krol


"Under Water Lilies"
William Scully


"Drough and Flooding Rains"
Melissa Powell


"Let Them Eat Cake"
John Wright


"Warsaw Chopin Airport"
Kacper Kowalski


"Langstrand"
Ulrike Klumpp


"Where Ships Were Born"
Paul Alexander Knox


"ELEMENTARZ"
Karolina Karlic


"Wild Card (1)"
Russ Lamoureux


"Geezz"
Lennette Newell


"Yangtze - The Long River"
Nadav Kander


"Nazi Americana"
Julie Platner


"Our Oceans Aren't The Only Ones In Danger"
Adam Taylor

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