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Techtite's DVD Reviews! |
"Physics or no physics; this bee's weight doesn't fly near the end, though the majority of the film is simply hilarious." --from the review ------------- Sidebar :: ------------- No Sidebar comments for this review. Yet...
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The Bee Movie
Click pictures to order either edition! A Review by TechtiteSome prologues are brilliant in their own simplicity. A narrator tells us that the bee is an aerodynamic mystery: a little bug with wings seemingly too small to make his fat little body fly. Yet bees fly, for no other reason than they could care less what human's think. In other words: it's just a movie. After all: if bees can fly with small wings, who's to say they don't have little cities, or for that matter, can even talk? It's this silly premise which is perfect fodder for what will possibly be one of the cult hits in computer animated movies. By now you've probably heard the tale (the publicity for this movie has been crazy, hasn't it?) about comedian Jerry Seinfeld approaching Steven Spielberg about a movie about bees, called, quite Simply, The Bee Movie. As Seinfeld's old sitcom cliché goes; "yadda yadda yadda," we have a CGI movie by Spielberg's Dreamworks, about a bee voiced by Jerry Seinfeld. Okay... It is said that upon first approaching Spielberg with the idea, Seinfeld had no idea about the story. So what story did they come up with? Well, there's a little bee named Barry (Seinfeld) who doesn't want to fit into any cookie-cutter mold the bees force him in. He winds up flying outside the hive and see what's out there, leading to him meeting a human girl named Vanessa (Renée Zellweger). Vanessa saves Barry's life and along the way, Barry breaks protocol and decides to talk to Vanessa, and become her friend. Along the way he discovers that humans are stealing his fellow bees' honey for their own use. He does what any bee (or human) would do when stolen from: he decides to sue us. The result is not unlike a CGI Seinfeld episode, which is this film's charm. Forget sitcoms "about nothing"; this is a story about nothing, as told by a bee. The story is irrelevant; the laughs are plenty. Among my favorite moments is the windshield scene, which pokes hilarious fun at the typical bug against the windshield...only in this case, the bugs talk. While most of them are shouting "Aaaauuuughhh!" (which is actually funny enough), Barry also meets one of the film's funniest characters in this scene: a mosquito, voiced by Chris Rock. Another fun visual gag includes the moment a bee friend stings someone and needs a stinger replacement or else he'll die. What they use to replace his stinger is a visual gag not to be missed. If this movie has a singular failure, it's that it cannot fall back on the Seinfeld sitcom's best feature. With the sole exception of the (ironically disappointing) series finale, Seinfeld episodes never needed an ending. See you next week, for the next day in Seinfeld's life. That was half of the sitcom's charm. Films, unfortunately, are different, in that they (most often) demand a beginning, middle, and end. This is a problem, because as funny as he is, Jerry Seinfeld clearly has some trouble ending his stories. This is especially evident in this film's final reel, which is a bit too preachy about ecology and how we all have roles in nature and, at the risk of overusing the cliché: yadda yadda yadda. Yet as is often the case; the trip there is the reward. With all the publicity buzz it's actually surprising that this movie meets expectations, though for this critic, it certainly did. For anyone who longs for a new episode of Seinfeld; this is as good as it gets. In some ways: it could not be better.
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