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Friday, May 12th, 2006
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2:54a - Akeelah and the Bee
Akeelah and the Bee is a thoroughly enjoyable movie, with a brilliant script and an amazing performance by Keke Palmer as Akeelah. The film belongs to the same genre as The Karate Kid and The Bad News Bears (spelling is close enough to a “sport”, I suppose), but it also brings to mind Searching for Bobby Fisher, not only because Laurence Fishburne is in both movies.
Watching the film I became concerned that the ending would be too obvious, but ultimately I was satisfied. The script is structured cleverly so that short scenes which seem insignificant at the time pay off at the end (albeit with three-second flashbacks that aren’t necessary).
It was nice seeing a super-intelligent 11-year-old girl in a movie who still seemed real.
One of the film’s production companies was Starbucks Entertainment, and Starbucks has been running in-store promotions for the last month or so. The promotion does not seem that well conceived, however; it isn’t always clear that they are trying to advertise a movie. In the film itself I don’t remember any product placements of Starbucks coffee. The only product placement I recall was for Scrabble.
Also I am wondering whether the casting of Curtis Armstrong as the benevolent principal of Akeelah’s school was an intentional allusion to Revenge of the Nerds.
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3:33a - Wicker Park
I quite liked this film when it was originally released and I recently watched it again on DVD. Wicker Park has a complex non-linear story; for the first third of the film the audience is supposed to be confused about what’s going on, knowing less than any of the characters; then in the second third the mystery is gradually revealed to the audience while the main characters are left in the dark.
Josh Hartnett plays a young man about to leave on a business trip to China, when through a vent in a restaurant washroom he hears a voice that he is certain belongs to his ex-girlfriend, Lisa (played by the magnificent Diane Kruger), who left him abruptly and mysteriously two years ago. But she exits the restaurant before he can talk to her. He blows off his trip to China so he can track her down in Chicago, meanwhile letting his current girlfriend (to whom he is about to propose) believe he is in China. Then he gets involved with a third woman, also called Lisa (played by Rose Byrne), who is strangely similar to his ex-girlfriend.
The film references King Lear and Twelfth Night although ultimately the story has more in common with Othello. It also has a nice allusion to Cinderella.
Wicker Park is a remake of the 1996 European film L’Appartement, which won awards in Britain and France but for some reason never played in North America, and is not even available here on DVD. I am very curious to see it.
(Edited 2006-06-28 to correct the link to IMDb entry for L’Appartement.)
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