Akeelah and the Bee

Akeelah and the Bee (2006)
Director: Doug Atchison

This was the first movie ever produced by Starbucks. For those of you who aren't familiar with filmmaking lingo this means that starbucks footed the bill (or at least part of it). That was a good move. This is an excellent film to begin your producing portfolio.

This movie is very similar to "Searching for Bobby Fischer" it just has spelling instead of chess. Lawrence Fishburne even plays the coach character again. Basic plot: A young black girl from Los Angeles tries to make it to the National Spelling Bee. That's it. Seems simple enough, and it is. The plot plays out pretty much how you would expect. It contains all the characters you would expect to see in a film like this. You have the mysterious but effective coach (who is usually played by Lawrence Fishburne anyway in movies like this), you have the reluctant mother, you have the arch rival and his overbearing father, and a collection of bullies from family and school. In spite of all this the film is quite good.

You might think that a movie about spelling would be boring, but it isn't. It is a new twist on a theme we have seen many times before. The characters are great. Akeelahs friend Javier is one of the greatest characters I have seen in a while. He absolutely stole a scene where he is stalls for time at a spelling bee. I especially liked Eddie Steeples (Crabman from "My name is Earl") turn as the shady drug dealer(?) character. I thought it was very clever to have a character who is bad by societies standards but still has some good intentions for other people. Why wouldn't a drug dealer root for a little girl to win a spelling bee? Even drug dealers have feelings, but most movies don't portray them that way.

I feel like the thing that set this film apart from others is that Akeelah really has compassion for other people. In "Searching for Bobby Fischer", Joshua Waitzkin offers his rival a draw, but you get the feeling he is just doing it because he feels it is the right thing for a chess player to do under the circumstances, and not because he feels any sense of compassion for the other boy. This is not at all the case with Akeelah. Akeelah is very empathetic towards the people she comes in contact with, and it makes for a different dynamic than most normal films.

I do think that this film is riding the wave of the spelling bee craze in the USA right now, but it is a good film so I don't mind.

My rating: 4 out of 5