Spellbound

is a film about the peculiar American phenomenon of the “spelling bee”, which rewards young kids on how well they can memorise arbitrary rules and exceptions about how English words are constructed, and parrot them back on demand. D-E-M-A-N-D. Demand. This glimpse of eight different American kids and their families is fascinating on a social level. Eight diverse backgrounds, eight different (and yet uniformly geeky) personalities, eight different slices of bizarre American life. That was the interesting bit. The actual spelling bee footage, although it was dressed up with dramatic music and intercut interviews, was stunningly boring.

reminds me in some ways of Hoop Dreams , the fantastic 1994 film about young basketball players in the US. One of the best things about Hoop Dreams is that is had very little actual basketball footage in it. It was a film about two kids, not about basketball. The director of ought to have remembered that about his film as well.

The kids themselves just seemed to be going along with whatever happens – they were excited to go and all that, but they didn’t really have very much to say. The parents, on the other hand, were fascinating. Their general attitudes about life, the world and their children were so different, and in some cases, simply bizarre. One father threw words at his son rapid-fire, and bragged of covering hundreds of words in a day. In contrast, another father owned a small bar, and just seemed proud no matter what happened (his wife, on the other hand, was a basket case).

Also interesting were the (unfortunately brief) interviews with past spelling bee winners. We see that for all the excitement, all the glitz and television, these eight kids (indeed, the rest of the participants in the bee) will turn into “normal” people, who simply have an interesting story to tell. As one relates, winning the bee had “a negative impact on [his] nascent love life”.

Furthermore (he says, ascending the soapbox), this film is another proof of my theory that people are inherently interesting. Everyone is interesting, to a greater or lesser degree. Errol Morris’s 1997 doco Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is another good example: it follows the lives of a wild animal trainer, a robot specialist, a topiary gardener, and a biologist specialising in naked mole rats. It was brilliant.

Okay, soapbox segment over. is at the Nova on Lygon Street. L-Y-G-O-N.