Obsessive religious father, pressured daughter, estranged wife, neglected son … ooooooooooooh can we smell a cliché????? Much as I love the visual stuff in this movie, in the end it’s all way too corny. I mean, there’s actually a scene in this movie where the family sit down to eat alphabet soup, lol.

We don’t have spelling bees in this country; at least, if we do, they ain’t so high profile as they are in the US – the closest we ever had was Countdown until Eamonn Holmes tried to take advantage of the fact that all things American sell well over here on a Saturday night. (Incidentally, isn’t it funny that the majority of the world population’s spelling remains appalling despite this discrepancy? I guess you’d never find things like “they’re”, “there” and “their” in the Finals :-P)

Anyway, while I understand that this “sport” (I hear it’s broadcast on ESPN now) is pretty popular in America, I’m still a little bewildered that we’ve had 3 movies on the subject over almost as many years. I mean, isn’t it on some list somewhere, some list titled something like, “The Least Cinematic Things In The Cosmos”? And with the documentary Spellbound (which I’ve seen, and found pretty cute) and Akeelah and the Bee (which I haven’t seen, though I wanna, and I hear is incredible) breathing down its neck, this one never had a chance.

Richard Gere is so unsuited to the part he plays. In fact, I could sit for days coming up with countless better casts than the one they wound up with here. Considering how badly cast she is, Juliette Binoche comes out smelling of roses in the same way Christina Ricci did from the diabolical Cursed, but still, I think the casting may be this movie’s prime fault. I imagine this might have worked great at the screenplay stage.

I have to say, the ending almost completely turned me around, it was not what I was expecting and flies completely in the face of the cheesiness of the rest of the movie. I actually can’t believe I found reviews of this movie that praised it but criticised the ending; I think it’s the best thing it has going, for me it added back the ratings star it lost when the little girl appears to have a seizure trying to spell something, lol.

I would personally recommend that you ditch this one, for now, in favour of Spellbound and any Dakota Fanning movie. And though I haven’t seen either, I’m guessing a better, more up-to-date, less personally gratifying double bill recommendation would be Akeelah and the Bee and The Squid and the Whale.

I just noticed the movie is adapted from a novel. I’m guessing this novel is like 3,000 pages long. It just might be good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 2:06 am in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.