not horrible nor great

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

This film, about a disconnected family and members pursuing spirituality each in their own way, introduces the viewer to many interesting ideas, plot twists, and spiritual potentials but fails each idea it promises to unveil.Unfortunately, the characters themselves have been written as one dimensional, unsympathetic, disenchanted, even frustrating. Their nearly total non-communication with each other is only exacerbated by the poor dialog they do share in very few moments.The pacing is ponderous. These are visual vignettes, but no actual relationships or personal progress develops.We really don't know at the end of the film who these people are, and most importantly, we are happy to leave them to their own imprisonment and disinterest.If the Mother is excited about her pursuits, we see nearly none of it. If the son is excited about his conversion, we see none of it at all. If the daughter is excited about the spelling Bee, we see none of it.Even the pain of the family's tragedy is buried so completely that we can easily mistake it for extremely bad acting. But an actor must have a script, and here there is none.As for the spirituality, no responsible father would ever dabble in Kabbalah or prana without proper guidance, and to do so with one's own daughter is nothing short of reckless endangerment.But again, we don't really know who the father actually is, and in most scenes he seems pleasant enough.The film winds up as a "poser" of spiritual notions, presenting things that reflect a very superficial understanding, and no actual experience with its subject matter - neither in family dynamics, character development or spirituality.Yet, the source material is an interesting juxtaposition of ideas that could have been legitimately explored by real characters. Fortunately, that film has already been made a few times by writers and directors who actually knew something of legitimate spiritual experience and succeeded entirely in bringing it to the screen: The Razor's Edge(original version) with George Marshall, Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power; or Frank Kapra's Lost Horizon, or Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm.

Bee Season is flatly based on the premise that words are ultimately incomprehensible and therefore magic. The movie makes a direct link from kabbala-sorcery to spelling bees in a way that is absolutely hilarious, but it seems the filmmakers will be the last to get the joke.According to the dark and mysterious mythos of the movie, one can become god and so achieve telepathic and prophetic powers -- by meditating on the mysterious spelling of words. The more difficult a word's spelling, the more incomprehensible, and therefore the more magical. Rearrange words and magic numbers appear. Study the kabbala and you will have supernatural visions and become an expert speller. Oh boy.Misinterpret the secret kabbala hidden in the spelling of English words and you will go insane and become a serial thief, as happened to one main character.Although the movie was made in dead earnest, it is an unintentional commentary on how primitive human beings trapped in the Stone Age can walk among us in this age of high technology. Indeed technology and the complexities of spelling in English can stump any or most of us, but the primitive human sees in the inscrutability secret magic.The movie's dead earnest handling of superstition can have you falling out of your chair in laughter, as it did me.Or the movie's failure to show how spelling is magic and the movie's slow, very slow, move to an embarrassingly predictable end will have you falling out of your chair asleep.

This may be a movie about the various ways people search for meaning (and in a very heavy handed way search for God of all things - yuck), but the way in which it is done here is yawn inducing to say the least. Sentiments and poignant sentences are repeatedly hammered into the viewers like a Hare Krishna mantra - literally... and the pace is so pedestrian that we could see the same movie in half the time without losing anything. Im guessing the movie wants us to be put in a trance somehow and with all the long winded "Bee's", kaleidoscopic imagery etc, it might succeed - but that is not why I choose to see a movie. I would rather prefer a view of a beautiful scenery, a fantastic concert or another awe inspiring experience. Very few movies can be trance inducing and good (2001 and Once Upon A time In The West come to mind) - this just doesn't work.Yes there are some clever CGI to illustrate the "magical" powers of the child prodigy (obviously inspired by the similar scenes in "A Beautiful Mind, where Russel Crowe has visions from wherever), but what are we supposed to believe - That the child can talk to God ??? Seriously...If this is what passes for a dysfunctional family, then intellectual families such as this really don't have as many problems as they think. The mother should obviously have been to a therapist way back when her parents were killed, but other than that, they really seem like a pretty good family.

I can't understand why so many people have given this film such a bad wrap. Well, I guess it's no action flick or thriller, but it is one of the most complex, layered, beautiful, thought-provoking films I have seen in a long time. I am an aspiring writer, and if I ever write something that comes even close to representing an interesting analysis of life as this film does then I will consider myself a success. It was also visually absolutely stunning and whilst there were, for me, no single outstanding performances I thought all the actors did a wonderful job.If you like head films that challenge, question and rip back the layers, then ignore the lowish rating and give this film a go.