Bee Season

Bee Season: A Novel In Myla Goldberg's outstanding first novel, a family is shaken apart by a small but unexpected shift in the prospects of one of its members. When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann, an otherwise indifferent student, takes first prize in her school spelling bee, it is as if rays of ligh...	Little Manhattan In a city known for excitment two young friends are about to embark on the greatest adventure of all. Gabe & rosemary have known each other nearly all of their lives but when they come face-to-face in a karate class they see each other in a new light. Studio: Tcfhe Release Date...	Akeelah and the Bee (Widescreen Edition) There aren't enough superlatives in the dictionary to describe the excellence of Akeelah and the Bee. Superbly written and directed by Doug Atchison, this PG-rated family drama covers the same dramatic territory as the acclaimed 2002 documentary Spellbound and the 2005 drama Bee ...	Shall We Dance? (Widescreen Edition) Something got lost in translation from 1996's critically acclaimed Japanese comedy, but the American remake of Shall We Dance? is not without charms of its own. In being transplanted from Tokyo to Chicago, the original version's subtle humor is shaken out of its cultural context,...	Mr. Jones Richard Gere is pretty convincing as a severe manic-depressive whose episodes of euphoria sometimes find him dancing on a two-by-four far above the street or climbing onstage during a symphony performance to "conduct" the orchestra. When the pendulum swings the other way, he is p...
Breaking and Entering The atmospheric and erotically charged Breaking and Entering reunites director Anthony Minghella with Jude Law (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain) and the haunting Juliette Binoche (The English Patient, for which she and Minghella won Academy Awards). Law fully invests himse...	Music and Lyrics (Widescreen Edition) A washed up singer is given a couple days to compose a chart-topping hit for an aspiring teen sensation. Though hes never written lyrics in his life he sparks with an offbeat younger woman with a flair for words. Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 11/11/2008 Starring: Hug...	Atonement (Widescreen Edition) Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 08/26/2008 Run time: 123 minutes Rating: R	August Rush Music has long been considered a universal language with the power to bring people together, but can the simple act of playing music possibly unite a child with a mother and father who live in two different cities and don't even know of the child's existence? Having shared one e...	Babel Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the moroccan desert touching off an interlocking story involving six different families. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 01/27/2009 Starring: Brad Pitt Cate Blanchett Run time: 143 minutes Rating: R

The California Formula
Hey! Another dysfunctional california family...what a surprise! They just wrapped in a thin veil of religion. This was not a good or inventive movie. It's another dis-jointed, multi-line movie with unlikeable characters. I can go with likeable characters and a sad ending, or likeable charaters and a happy ending. But to sit through 2 hours of annoying people with a happy ending...who cares? I'm not sure if the girl's character was a case of bad casting or bad direction. The story with the mother was also frustrating, since we couldn't tell what was happening. Was she having memory flashbacks or psychic visions? Did she know the people who owned the houses or were they random? Was Saul cheating on her or was this related to her parents death? Sure we figured it out, but the actual story turned out to not be as interesting as what we were speculating. The oldie Grand Canyon was a better movie of the same type. At least there weren't any toads falling from the sky at the end.

Bee Season review
Richard Gere plays the father of an 11 year old girl who makes it to the national level spelling bee. Originally I had expected that this is what the movie would be about, but that seemed to be a minor part of the story. This movie got very strange in not a good way. There were flashes of story that never did come together and make sense. The end left you wondering still what those flashes were, you kept expecting them to develop the story of them, but never did. When the movie ended, you didn't know for sure if the story was over or not. The 11 year old purposely loses the national spelling bee at the last moment, even tho it was a word she knew. My whole family watched this movie together and it was one we all booed at the end and felt to be a complete waste of time.

Depressing
This is a depressing and confusing movie. Nothing like what I thought it would be from the DVD cover! It was painful to watch such morose children. The dad was villified although it seemed to me that he was guilty of nothing more than being annoying. What kept me watching was wondering what the mom was up to, but that turned out to be so weird it was beyond my understanding. And what was the deal with Eliza on the floor in the hotel room? A spiritual experience? Not a movie to recommend at all.

What is God?
Sometimes, it's good to read the book that the movie is based on or that we watch the movie as it is. The title of "Bee Season" can be rather misleading because I thought it's about spelling bee competition which a documentainment was made the year before. Anyhow, it's about a family that looks perfect from the outset but as we dig deeper, we start noticing the cracks. I'm not even sure if "dysfunctional" is the right word for it. Suffice to say that everyone in the family is like a half filled jug and that something is missing in their lives. For them, to be whole again, or in a metaphorical term is to be near God, they explore their own options. The patriarch of the family (played by Richard Gere) would use intellectual pursuit; the son would be to explore alternative religion, Hare Krishna; the daughter is to partake in the bee spelling competition, whilst the matriarch (played by Juliette Binoche) is to partake in a vice. Ultimately, I believe the movie questions of the definition of God. What is it to us? Would we forsake everything just to be near God or that God is a term used to describe inner peace that we find by learning to let go? A rather thought-provoking movie...

The Ineffable in an Hour Forty-Five
I knew nothing about this movie when I sat down to watch it. I like Richard Gere, I like Juliette Binoche, and I was once a spelling bee contestant, so when this came on cable I TiVoed it, then let it sit for about three months. But once I started watching, in short order I found myself completely fascinated. What the filmmakers are after here is just about impossible to film--a fully-realized spiritual experience. It starts by relating the mechanics of spelling to the kabbalists' search for meaning in the letters and words of the Hebrew language. Sound, as shaped and distilled into language, is our first and primary means of expression, and as our culture moves further into its visual obsession, language has been devalued--but anyone who has watched a political debate, or tried to get through to a teenager, understands the power of a right word, and the disastrous effects of a wrong word. Language, then, is most certainly one avenue toward a true spiritual experience, and it's the avenue that the young girl in this movie finds herself on. Her mother is on a spiritual journey as well, but the dangers of that path are slowly revealed as her search fragments both herself and her family. The son is also a seeker, first through music and then through different religions. At the center of all this is a father, played by Richard Gere, a professor who, tragically, understands what the search is about but can never experience it himself--he can only help others find their own way. Which is why he ends up so self-involved and destructive--everyone in his family surpasses him spiritually in one way or another, and the further they go on their own journey, the less he is able to follow and the more desperately he tries to hold onto them. Binoche is heart-breaking in a performance that is 100% subtextual, and Flora Cross as the daughter is eerily good at capturing something you'd think she was too young to possibly understand. This is a movie with layers and layers of meaning, and it gives you just barely enough clues to piece together on your own, if you're willing to put forth the effort. But the results are more than worth it. I came to this movie with no expectations and left it astounded, and moved. One of those experiences I had to just let sit and work on me for awhile; I couldn't just flip to the next channel and catch whatever else was on, this one had to be absorbed, slowly. Wonderful.