Already a Screen Actor's Guild Award nominee a couple of years ago for the TV movie The Wool Cap, she has a bright career ahead of her if she continues this way.Fishburne projects a quiet and firm authority, but we suspect his not-so-deep secrets long before the script doles them out. What makes Akeelah much better than it really deserves to be are the natural performances of the cast lead by Palmer who avoids the child actor clichés and ably portrays the divide between being a homegirl in the 'hood and using words like "supercilious" and "truculent" in a diss - which is a legal dictionary word, we learn - of Larabee's officious tone. Considering its youthful target audience and modest ambitions, the disgraceful urban phenomenon where proper-speaking minorities are attacked by their peers for "talking white" that Bill Cosby has been railing against lately is not tackled head-on, but the vague outlines of deeper societal pathologies lurk in the shadows. While many interesting concepts are touched upon - the abuse good students have to take from their less-accomplished classmates the challenges of being a good student in a poor school the need to use proper grammar and not "ghetto talk" - the family-friendly PG-rating prohibits a grittier examination of these themes. Dylan (Sean Michael) is a snooty boy who has finished second in the National Bee for the past two years and is favored to win this year, driven by his domineering father.While watching kids spell words may sound slightly less riveting than synchronized paint-drying observation (on ESPN8 - "The Ocho"!) as a spectator sport, writer-director Doug Atchison manages to keep things interesting even though his script is oh-so-safe-and-predictably plotted that when the "surprising" revelations and plot twists occur, we've already anticipated their arrival a couple of reels back. Villarreal) is a cheerful boy who invites her to visit his spelling team at his school and attend his birthday party. Her classmates rough her up and call her names because they see her ace her spelling tests without studying, unaware that she spends hours at home playing computer Scrabble and learning words, inspired by her father who was killed when she was six.Īfter a tempestuous initial encounter, they quickly fall into a productive routine and she manages to advance through the qualifying bees, making some new acquaintances along the way from upscale Woodland Hills. Now, following the spelling bee documentary Spellbound and the mystical spelling bee-related Bee Season comes Akeelah and the Bee which rises above the after school special level on the strength of its performances.Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer) is an exceptionally bright 11-year-old seventh grader living in South Los Angeles and attending the poor - financially and qualitatively - Crenshaw Junior High School. Whether it is Dogtown and the Z-Boys spawning Lords of Dogtown or the real life Rock School being documented after Jack Black's School of Rock hit, there's been a lot of back and forth between the genres. It's been hard lately to not get a sense of d¿j¿ vu when documentaries are inspiring fictionalized feature films and vice versa with regularity.
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