While it’s not exactly groundbreaking and a little repetitive, what’s refreshing about Spellbound is how positive it is about its subject. Maybe there’s just something about the kids who participate in spelling bees and their parents that make them all very nice people, graceful losers, etc, but I kind of doubt it; there are always parents (and I guess sometimes kids) who get overcompetitive in these things. But this documentary makes this world seem very appealing. The kids are often sad at misspelling a word (and the camera perfectly picks up that rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look when the “wrong!” bell rings more than a few times), but they get over it quickly, often even expressing relief at being out of the stress zone (reminds me of last week’s “South Park” episode, in fact, in which the kids just wanted to lose their baseball game so they could have the holidays to themselves). There’s one family that seems to be driving their kids just maybe a little too hard, but you never feel particularly worried for the kids: something I’ve sort of come to expect from this kind of thing. Overall if I had kids of my own, I’d way sooner put them into something like this over any kind of physical competitive sport (not that I’d necessarily even put them into this: it is a little insane, lol). I do find it funny, incidentally, that ESPN covers this thing. I never knew that.

Random ‘me’ observation: nearly all the young girls in this documentary reminded me of Violet in The Incredibles. Gawky tweenagers are the coolest thing on earth, lol.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 11:25 pm 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.