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Akeelah And The Bee

Year: 2006

Grade: D-

Country: USA

Director: Atchison

Review

T-R-I-T-E, trite. C-L-I-C-H-E, cliché. seriously though, at pretty much every turn this film, which follows a somewhat underprivileged spelling bee contestant, is cliché and cheesy. it’s basically a cross between finding forrester and spellbound, only much worse. it’s not that the film wasn’t well-intentioned or without potential, it’s just that the execution, at nearly every turn, was awful. the music swelled at cliché moments, some of the acting was transparent and forced, the writing was anything but realistic…

akeelah is supposed to be an underprivileged inner city girl who doesn’t fit in, but her family seems to have plenty of money. they have a car, plenty of clothes and food, a nice tv and a computer and the home looks like something out of a design show on hgtv; it just doesn’t fit. all the relationships are cut from the same cliché cloth that mars so many ambitious films. for example, her father is dead and she happens to find a spelling bee coach (fishburne) who lost his young daughter when she was about akeelah’s age. the end panders to the audience by allowing everyone to be a winner (how fucking cheesy and easy is that?). i feel bad because the film had a good heart, but the filmmaking is awful so…

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