Akeelah and the Bee review

Posted on the November 30th, 2009 under Uncategorized by ryanmoormansblog

A warm positive message and a strong lead performance helps save 'Akeelah' from its own cliches

Audiences craving a big manipulative embrace this weekend after seeing "United 93" could do worse than seeking out "Akeelah and the Bee." Throughout just about two hours, Doug Atchison's mistiness relentlessly rams cordial fuzzies down your throat and you know what? For all of the cliches and all of the cringe-worthy talk and for every weight where the score forced me to an emotional reply I wasn't really feeling, I bring about it nearly unsuitable to stay out of one’s head at "Akeelah." When a movie's empathy is so certainly in the hand place, it deserves some respect.

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Akeelah (Keke Palmer) has grown up in South Central Los Angeles, where her intellectual gifts are something to suppress, choose than a thing to celebrate. When Crenshaw Middle School holds its in the beginning spelling bee, Akeelah is a reluctant participant until she wins. Suddenly, the Scripps National Spelling Bee seems like a corporeal plausibility, but only if she can learn to work with Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishbourne), a stern and proud linguist who refuses to let her sin herself or to buying her training as an excuse not to succeed. She also has to sway her stark-working mother (Angela Bassett) that hers is a vision worth having. Competing against kids who are richer and more on the ball, can Akeelah embrace her own possibility?

Although on the surface "Akeelah" weight seem like "Spellbound" meets "Boyz n the Hood," Atchison prefers to approach the means as a ritual underdog sports movie. It's "The Karate Kid" with more cognates and Latin roots. There are stern villains — the robotic Asian kid whose create is willing to push him to the breaking point up because of a win — and innocuous love interests — J.R. Villarreal as Javier, a mate speller from the right side of the tracks — and, of positively, there's Fishbourne in the Mr. Miyagi, playing the kind of stern-but-loving mentor figure he does so hearty.

Atchison refuses to let any of the darkness of the ghetto founder into the temporal. The bullies who mock Akeelah for her brains are cartoonish and the neighborhood gangster is played by Eddie Steeples, Crab Hamper on "My Name Is Earl." How on earth, he doesn't dumb the mundane down. With the reassuring participation of the Scripps people, as Akeelah advances, Atchison takes pleasure in whipping out the exact kind of esoteric words that Non-Standard real do settle most bees. Heaven forbid, people may learn something.

Palmer, unreserved to many viewers from her recent turn in "Madea's Genealogy Reunion," provides a enchanting central behaviour. Both her youthful petulance and intelligence are unstudied, a insouciant naturalism that's almost at odds with the film's over-calculated storytelling. She's also masterful to hold her own with both Fishbourne and Bassett, veterans who contain been known to overpower their co-stars.

"Akeelah" repeatedly quotes the Marianne Williamson jingle that begins, "Our deepest distress is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us." I'm a big enough softie that I can forgive a lot of formulaic tripe in the interest of a bulletin that solid.

More photos added from the Vancouver stay of the "Twilight" sequel.

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