S-u-r-p-r-i-s-e: No Spelling Required

Richard Gere and Flora Cross

The film BEE SEASON, based on Myla Goldberg's novel of the same name, is a joy... an excellent diversion into the life of a spiraling family dynamic. Knowing nothing about it, thanks to the studio's non-publicity for this film, I went expecting a story about a spelling bee, akin to 2002's SPELLBOUND. I was never more wrong (well, except for thinking THE ICE HARVEST would be a good time [and no, I'm not even going to give you a link to this one]). Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche are spell-binding, pun intended. See it.

Some themes/lines/thoughts:

"What happens when you close your eyes? Do you see what I see?"
"Let God flow through you."
"God has left us out."
"We can fix what was broken--we're none of us alone."
"Nobody's mother needs her to win anything."
"...To reach beyond myself, to know the world as whole again, and like the ancient mystics, God would fly through me and we would be together."

A father obsessed... a family obsessed. Yikes, a strange twist. What is going on? All of them are alone, separate and not involved with each other, but running parallel story lines. The strain of relationships and life is too much for all of them

All the four characters deal with the same things in separate, distinct and parallel ways: the strain of life, relationships, family, religion, God, and gods. And, no matter one's beliefs or personal ideas, one FEELS for these characters. We, as audience, are drawn into the story, into their home and their lives. It is a REAL FILM--wow, it makes us think, feel, move, breathe. It was excellent.

The biggest problem I had is the ending--yes, it was the perfect move, the right decision, but come on! We have realized this is a thinking movie, we're not going to get by sucking down a cola and popcorn--oh no!--we'll have to think. OK, so we figured that out about a third of the way through the film. So why at the end are we beaten over the head with this idea? We would have figured it out and made sense of it, beautiful sense of it, without all the fanfare. Oh well.

Sage wisdom for the day: playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote that "ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

That's serious. Coming up, how I learned to stop worrying and get a date with a model from PROJECT RUNWAY.

And, lastly, you've got to love Catherine Zeta-Jones on a Letterman repeat tonight: "I have never played golf in high heels with my bosoms hanging out, but here we go."