I was browsing through the comments for this movie and was sadly disappointed - it seems no one has read the book upon which the movie was based. I was reading Bee Season and heard there was a movie that was made a few years ago, so I made a mental note to check it out when I finished the book. Then, when I saw it in a bargain bin at K-Mart for $5, I couldn't pass it up.I popped it in and immediately loved the cast - Richard Gere was an unexpected but wonderful choice for Saul, and Ms. Binoche made an achingly poignant Miriam. The casting for Aaron and Eliza was great, too, although I pictured Aaron more stereotypically nerdy (he was far too attractive and mainstream in the movie, I thought - in the book, he was constantly being made fun of and picked on). They made subtle changes in the movie, some I wasn't very thrilled with - changing Aaron and Saul's guitars to a cello and a violin, changing the time line of the story so that Eliza only goes through one bee season instead of two, etc. And I thought changing Chali's gender was a big mistake - in the book, Aaron was attracted to Chali's seemingly freeing beliefs, not because he had pretty blonde hair and big dreamy eyes. I would just say to anyone who is thinking of seeing this movie, and to those who were dissatisfied with it, READ THE BOOK! Please, go and read it - don't let your judgement of the movie cloud the beautiful and interesting story that Myla Goldberg has invented. Ms. Goldberg has a profound gift for prose, and she weaves the tale from every perspective represented. Because she writes with third-person omniscience, you as the reader get a chance to see into each character's thoughts at all times, which really helps you get a sense of the real story going on as the family unravels. You find that Eliza is incredibly sensitive and mature for a nine-year-old, that Aaron is desperate for deep and heartfelt validation as a person and as a man, and searches for it everywhere, and that Saul is the sort of person so wrapped up with big and lofty things that he misses the beautiful, seemingly insignificant but jarringly important things all around him, like the fact that his children are clamoring for his attention and love, and his wife has been stealing for 18 years. Seriously, how distracted can you be?You even begin to relate to Miriam's frantic attempts to put herself back together through taking things that don't belong to her. If this author can make stealing seem reasonable, ha ha, I'd say she is going to do great things. I, for one, am looking forward to scouring the library for other Myla Goldberg novels. A warning, though: there are some scenes in the book that, if included in the movie, would have given it an "R" or even an "X" rating. Just FYI for those who are interested. So, as a summary: Bee Season the movie - So so. Bee Season the book - Wonderful.

Another IMDb user who rated this just as low as I did called this an infomercial for Kaballah. On that, I must disagree. Infomercials generally have strong narrative voices, attempt to explain their products in easy-to-understand and easy-to-appreciate terms, and try to keep you interested, informed, and engaged. As a true independent film from the 1990 - 2010 period, Bee Season does none of these things.I know no more about Kaballah now than I did before I watched the movie. I care no more about it than I did then either. So as an infomercial, it fails miserably. The filmmakers do follow today's independent film mantra of using as few words as humanly possible. It has been decided by this generation that words are a crutch best left to Hollywood hacks. All great movies are visual only. This "Truth" alone often leaves me clueless on independent movies as to why we are seeing what we are seeing, in what order things are happening, and whether something is actually happening or imagined.Most of today's intelligentsia calls this stretching one's mind and challenging one's audience. I call it pretentious obfuscation and self-aggrandizement. Bee Season, to me, is the poster child for this independent film phenomenon.The trailers led me to believe that this would be another Akeelah and the Bee -- a film I loved. Instead, it is even worse than the only other movie I know that had Kabbalah as part of its plot - A Stranger Among Us -- and that was putrid.I try to consider a movie on its own terms. Viewed that way, Juliet Binoche was remaking Woman Under The Influence without Gena Rowlands' talent or John Cassavettes' direction. If Kate Bosworth was a real Hare Krishna, on any terms, then I'm a giraffe! The movie was so ponderously directed and withholding of information about the movie's most innocuous events. Therefore, it was difficult to know when something was important or just unbearably routine.I actually did think that the girl playing Eliza and Richard Gere gave excellent performances that made their characters somewhat interesting at times even though they both made many actions inconsistent with the characters they carefully built up. It is for these two performances that I give this film 2 out of ten instead of zero.

Bee Season is flatly based on the premise that words are ultimately incomprehensible and therefore magic. The movie makes a direct link from kabbala-sorcery to spelling bees in a way that is absolutely hilarious, but it seems the filmmakers will be the last to get the joke.According to the dark and mysterious mythos of the movie, one can become god and so achieve telepathic and prophetic powers -- by meditating on the mysterious spelling of words. The more difficult a word's spelling, the more incomprehensible, and therefore the more magical. Rearrange words and magic numbers appear. Study the kabbala and you will have supernatural visions and become an expert speller. Oh boy.Misinterpret the secret kabbala hidden in the spelling of English words and you will go insane and become a serial thief, as happened to one main character.Although the movie was made in dead earnest, it is an unintentional commentary on how primitive human beings trapped in the Stone Age can walk among us in this age of high technology. Indeed technology and the complexities of spelling in English can stump any or most of us, but the primitive human sees in the inscrutability secret magic.The movie's dead earnest handling of superstition can have you falling out of your chair in laughter, as it did me.Or the movie's failure to show how spelling is magic and the movie's slow, very slow, move to an embarrassingly predictable end will have you falling out of your chair asleep.

The first one was "Man on the Moon" which I had to stop as I couldn't take it any more. But I was really surprised how bad THIS movie was. I remember the "wonderful" reviews about Bee Season last year. Half way through the movie I thought to myself that who ever produced this movie, must have been on some good drugs or a young teenager making a movie for a class project. This movie was dragging so badly that I was able to make a cup of coffee without missing anything. The back and forth of different scenes with no explanation as to what it's about was absolutely ridiculous.The best thing that could happen to this movie is if someone remakes it - and it makes sense.