The Spellbound Thread

it's good to know that enrique has discovered that there is more to the us than rush limbaugh, maybe one day i'll learn that england isn't all chimney sweeps and oasis

Actually, the documentary was very good as well, though I'm not quite certain what made it so damn successful. I mean, I didn't find it THAT compelling. I thought it was shot on DV, but it's been a while so I can't really say. Part of my feelings about it, however, were very much colored by my own memories of similar things (Academic Bowl), of which I generally look back with anger upon. So my feelings on this one may not be so reliable.

and it really bugged me the way they treated that one kid (the one with the slight lisp and the jesus freak parents)

I won my school and went on to the greater Hartford, Conn., regionals, which was taped and put on public access tv. I came in third. The remaining two went though the entire word list and quite a lot of the extra word list, which they don't give out to the students. It went on for a loooooong time after I got knocked out. And yet it was on public access tv all the time! Maybe it was a good way for them to fill an hour and a half, I don't know, I just remember that I'd be flipping the dial and there I'd be again.

what does it mean to make a farce, with its necessary apportioning of ridicule and honor, with real people? kids no less...

it actually reminded me of the 7 up series a little.

!!

Akshay (and his brother, the first place winner from 2003) looked really pissed and horrified about coming in second.

But still! I watched the last few rounds (from when it was down to 13 kids to the end) and guessed maybe three or four words correctly! And I was a champion speller myself (though admittedly I only got to the county level before going down on "nasturtium").

I enjoyed seeing all of the pubescent 'staches on the 12-year-old boys.

Obviously if you haven't seen the film, go and do so. Reading ILX is a guarantee that you will get a lot out of this film :)

I was suprised, on watching it again, at how much of the second half was blatant manipulation, and how great it was at it. I really liked how they introduced the villian right at the end, and he was a fake-out as well.

The fun game for all the family is guessing how much the kids will spend on therapy during the rest of their lives. Neil is obviously a complete write-off. My friend reckoned that Emily with her curly headed father and her half-joking talk of spelling bees as child abuse was in for some trouble down the road, but I reckoned April and her "Bee Happy" parents were more screwed, though I may have been projecting based on the fact that she is basically Lisa Simpson.

The other kids seemed grand, though I did have kneejerk horror at the idea of Angela spending the rest of her days in that Texas town. Even more so than Ashley going back to triumph over obstacles in DC.

(Let there be no mistake here: I loved the film, and cried at the end both times. These are very much my people, even George Thampy. In fact, given what I was like at that age, more George than the rest)

I wasn't wondering if they went back to record backgrouond material, but rather if there were other kids that they filmed but didn't make it to the final. Some of it, EG Angela's monster qualification round looked like it was filmed as professionally as the rest of them, though I'm no technical judge of these things.

-- DV (dirtyvica...), February 27th, 2004.

Good point. They filmed them winning the local bees though: I think they got people who'd done well the previous year and taken the risk. But seeing as it must all have gone off pretty much simultaneously, did they have eight crews?

-- ENRQ (miltonpinsk...), February 27th, 2004.

Actually, no, they were two guys and did not have eight crews -- so I assume the bees must have been at a few different times. The whole thing was shot on credit card debt (at least as the filmmakers tell it. They also, if I remember correctly, shot more students than they ended up using, and also they sort of were able to narrow things down by getting some kind of information on who the favorites were, though I'm forgetting how they did this now -- I heard it all on NPR, honest.

http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/archive/2009/06/02/rich-or-rehab-whatever-happened-to-the-spellbound-kids.aspx

Damn you – I thought this was about the Paula Abdul album.

Haha!