Movie Reviews

Who would've thought a movie about a spelling bee could be exciting? Well, most people (myself included) wouldn't have. Yet nearly all the reviews I'd read about this documentary praised it as being exciting and dramatic.

To an extent, Spellbound was fairly exciting. There's real tension in scenes where young spelling bee-ers are wracking their brains trying work out the correct spelling of some exotic foreign medical term (or other such word) and then spelling it aloud letter by letter, slowly, dreading the ring of the bell that sounds to indicate they've made a mistake and are out of the competition. I admit that having seen Spellbound, I would probably stop and watch a little bit of a spelling bee on television, if I happened to come across one while channel surfing. I don't, however, think it would be quite as interesting as the movie, because the movie provides a sort of 'behind the scenes' look into the lives of a number of contestants, and makes their efforts that much more dramatic.

By focusing on no less than eight contestants as they prepare for and compete in the 1999 U.S. National Spelling Bee finals in Washington D.C., the movie suffers a bit by not really giving enough screen time to some of the kids. I wish the filmmakers had maybe focused only on three or four kids, though that would've increased the likelihood of the film turning out to be a bust had all of them been knocked out in the first couple of rounds. As it stands, a few of the initial eight kids that Spellbound follows end up doing very well in the finals.