Matialth
Good concept, poorly executed.
Aiden Melton
The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
Dana
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
markallankaplan
"Bee Season" is a multi-dimensional cinematic masterpiece with subtle streams of subtext swirling just below the surface, sweeping us into a deep and gentle journey of emotional and spiritual transformation. This little film is filled with deeply penetrating multi-layered representations of familial archetypal roles of spouse, father, mother, son, daughter, and sibling, mystical and metaphysical wisdom, and haunting reflections on the deep human psyche, shadow, and the powerful undercurrents of buried memory. Slowly, these subtextual streams rise and become the text in this beautiful cinematic work. This is a gentle, haunting, sacred, mystifying, and subtly profound motion picture. In the final moments, there is revelation that is beyond what can be spoken. For some this is a difficult movie to watch because of its transmodern approach to story, shifting the ground underneath what we normally experience as text and subtext, but if you can open yourself to this wondrous little film it will feed your heart and soul.
pete_olds
I can't remember when I last feel asleep watching a movie. Until Bee Season.I have the distinct feeling that I should find the book and read that, but I found this movie disappointing and unable to generate emotion in the audience partially because of the prevalence of overly simplified characters. The basic premise of the movie sounded interesting, but the execution did not bring any emotional engagement in a movie which could have offered so much more.I came away with the distinct feeling that it was an attempt by shallow people to make a deep movie.
vietboi612
It's true.. the book is always better than the movie. I thought that this movie was very disappointing to watch after having reading the book.The movie moves too fast, though I can understand because of time limit, to actually give the viewers the concepts that the book gives. A lot of details and events are cut from the book that is important to the story as a whole. The script seems undeveloped, and the actors/actresses carried out their character with mediocre performances.Saul (Richard Gere) is somewhat true to his character. The only thing he is obsessed with is to enable Eliza to communicate with God. He does this in a way that is the most true to novel.Aaron's (Max Minghella) appearance is very different from that described in the book. He is described as a pale and scrawny young man, who is incapable of getting dates and is a social outcast. His search for a new religion seems unreasonable and spontaneous in the movie, and I thought it didn't really capture his true character.Miriam's (Julliete) kleptomania is weird in both the book and the movie. Her actions in the book seems more reasonable when I knew her purposes for doing it. In the movie I thought it was a very random thing for her to do.Eliza (Flora Cross) is a young actress, and is limited to what she can do. Her acting is very mediocre at best, and does not convince me of Eliza that is in the novel.Chali, which I am surprised to see, have been transformed from a middle-aged man into a young blond girl. I can understand why they did that, but that just adds to the falseness of Aaron's character.Overall I think the movie is an average depiction of Bee Season. I can't say that they did a nice job of sticking to the plot. It's almost impossible to transform a novel into a movie with everything in the book.
Robert J. Maxwell
Well, just about every kind of quirk you might expect to find in a nice Jewish academic family in Berkeley is tucked away somewhere in this leisurely trip through misunderstandings.Richard Gere, gone white and looking great, does most of the talking and most of the moving. He teaches Hebrew Studies, he coaches his son on the cello, he always cooks dinner at home. (Pretty liberated, eh?) Now Gere isn't frenetic as he sometimes has been, as in, say, "Power". His buzzing activity mostly stands out because nobody else has much of it.His wife, Juliette Binoche, has lost her family and wanders around with all the substance of a wisp of smoke. It turns out she's covering up some quirky activities, even for a family like this. She has a garage full of broken trinkets she's collected from other people's properties. They hang from the ceiling in a multitude of sparkling threads, tinkling a little bit, as Gere discovers them and goggles at the sight.Then there's the son, Aaron. Gere is a devoutly religious man who would like to be a mystic but is reduced to merely studying Jewish mysticism. But the son? Well, he's a whiz on the cello. With a father like Gere you could hardly be other than a whiz at whatever he urged you to try. And Aaron is searching for God too. But where does he find God? In the now-defunct Hare Krishnas. Of course it could have been worse. Aaron might have dug up some suicide cult. But still, for some people it must be getting a bit tiresome to deal with people who have learned that God is communicating with them. Andy Warhol once claimed that he'd been given a dead phone but that God was supposed to be on the other end waiting for his call. Warhol never made the call because he could never think of anything to say. Doctor Fielgut's advice is this: Do find God, if you can, but then whatever he tells you keep it to yourself.Oh, yes. Then there's the little daughter, reserved, soft, vulnerable, unamazing in any way until she discovers that she has some form of synesthesia regarding words. When she hears "cotyledon" defined, she closes her eyes and is swirled about with leaves. When Gere finds this out -- WOW! TWO geniuses in the family, not including him and Juliette Binoche who is "a scientist." Aaron and his cello are put on the back burner while Gere hovers over his daughter and tells her emphatically that God is in the letters. In the end she teaches him a valuable lesson too, humility.There's something distasteful about judged performances like spelling bees though. I say this not only because Barbara Lukashinsky came in first, to my second, in a fifth-grade spelling bee, just because I misspelled a stupid word like "nickel" and she got it right. No, it's not that at all, even though she didn't deserve first prize.It's that like other judged performances, spelling bees are a zero-sum game. One can only "win" at the expense of someone else. It's competition in its purest form. You win the prize by beating everyone else. But who wins a prize for cooperation? Or self sacrifice? Roger Bannister was the first person to run a 4-minute mile. Does anyone remember who was the second runner to break four minutes? It isn't that competition is necessarily bad per se. It can boost team solidarity and even be fun. The main problem with spelling bees is that they encourage lazy, categorical thinking about either "victory" or "defeat", while "compromise" has no part in the contest.This is a pretty slow movie. It's almost European. It's stuffed with far too many themes, like the kaleidoscope (did I spell that right?) that Binoche hands down to daughter Emily. Impossible to grasp them all. But it's a nice change to see a film that challenges us.
