The best way, then, to avoid practicalities of frog-pig sex, Scooter's species (and whether or not Skeeter is canon in this universe) and Electric Mayhem's drug consumption is with laughter.

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She plays Rita Skeeter, a nitwit journalist who gets everything wrong. (That's the only false note.) Daniel Radcliffe has grown in the title role, not just chronologically, while Rupert Grint, as Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as Hermione, are spunkier and funnier than ever.

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In 1962, in Jackson, Mississippi, as the civil-rights movement is boiling over, a privileged young white woman, Skeeter (Emma Stone), in rebellion against her social set, begins to interview the African-American maids who have raised her and her friends, among them Minny (Octavia Spencer) and Aibileen (Viola Davis), who are now treated by their former charges as lowly hired help, not allowed even to use the toilet in the houses where they work.

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