Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You can play along by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and saying a little something about them.
Ah, school competitions. Whether it's music, recitations, or science projects, they are a hotbed of young talent. Sometimes. Other times, you just have to sit back and wonder at the state of the education system that these untalented, awkward youths before you are the very best the modern world has to offer. Usually while laughing and shaking your head.
HOWEVER! There is only one school competition I really care about: The National Spelling Bee. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to win the Spelling Bee SO. BAD. I actually got pretty close, considering I wasn't one of those kids who spent all their free time studying a dictionary (I made it to the final ten of my regional competition one year). I still watch the bee every year, and usually cover the area of the screen where the word it so I can "compete" alongside our nation's youngest and brightest spellers. It's fun. And these movies are pretty fun, too.
Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002) The movie that basically made the National Spelling Bee a must-watch for millions of people, this documentary is pretty basic but very well done. Like my beloved Mad Hot Ballroom (which came later), it looks at America through the prism of the students competing, showing how cultural differences not just across socioeconomic lines but across cultural heritage determine How We Live in the US. And it shows just how much of a pressure cooker it really is up on the national stage, in the ridiculously suspenseful competition sequences.
Akeelah and the Bee (Dough Atchison, 2006) Ladies and gentlemen, witness the birth of a STAR. Keke Palmer is the heart and soul of this movie, carrying it all on her tiny little shoulders with the confidence and poise of actors decades older than she. Sure, it helps that she has Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett as scene partners, but most of it is just her. As a smart girl from a poor community who falls into her talent as a speller, Palmer is impossibly assured and incredibly winning, somehow avoiding nearly all the usual child actor traps. The movie is one of the few that embraces its status as a "feel-good movie", but always leavens those qualities with a tough, lived-in sense of grit.
Bad Words (Jason Bateman, 2014) ...and now, for something completely different! This movie is incredibly, possibly irredeemably stupid, but I'm not gonna lie: I laughed my ass off. Jason Bateman plays an irascible middle-aged man on a mission: To win the National Spelling Bee for reasons unknown. Along the way, he meets a young Indian boy who worms his way into his stone cold heart, and takes the kid under his wing, teaching him the value of breaking a rule or two every once in a while. Look. I'm not saying this is great cinema, and the ending is a total flub, but if profanity used by or around children makes you laugh for almost no good reason (GUILTY), then you'll enjoy this.
BONUS:
Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (Bill Duke, 1993) How do you improve on the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Sister Act? Add some talented singing kids, that's how. especially if one of those kids is the prodigiously talented Lauryn Hill. Sister Mary Clarence has gone back to the life of a headliner, but the nuns she bailed out last time now need her help to save their school. So she does the EXACT SAME THING SHE DID LAST TIME (create a choir to win a competition), except now with kids. The supporting cast of nuns remains a riot (Mary Wickes! Kathy Najimy! Dame Maggie Smith!), and the kids are game, if perhaps a little too stereotypically "urban". If you're not impressed by their singing in this, then I just don't know how to help you.
