It's just a test, stupid
What's wrong with America is what's right with America. In the words of one of the most driven spelling dads "you can't fail if you work hard enough". But work hard enough at what? Only in the US culture could have been translated into a competition and baseball-like statistics. True, Anglo-Saxons have been forever handicapped by a language that only loosely correlates the way a word is written with its pronunciation.But the flaws of this concept run deeper than that.This wonderfully scary documentary narrates the uplifting story of sometimes underprivileged kids rising to success through hard work. But the story just goes far enough to demonstrates the cultural vacuum of the whole experience. None of the kids is shown to have any interest for the printed word besides memorizing the dictionary and contest-related materials.
Yes, they are truly wonderful kids working at accomplishing amazing feats. Yet, they are never portrayed but as one-trick wonders, and that greatly increases the feeling of futility, of competition for competition's sake. They might as well be auditioning for American Idol or practicing freestyle skateboard shenanigans. It would not make any difference.
I might be wrong of course: this documentary, impeccably filmed and produced PBS-style could actually be a mockumentary of our national shallowness, a "Best in Spell". And maybe that's how it should be watched.
score /10
PAolo-10 14 March 2004
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0895841/35631
Pages:
[1]