the movieGOOMBA

2 GOOMBAS

My office building is basically in the middle of a canyon. Every week there's a new department memo reminding us to be "aware of the rattlesnakes that like to hide in the shade," "wary of the coyotes who wander the parking lot early in the morning," or "mindful of the ducklings who could get run over by our cars." What's bizarre is I don't work in the middle of nowhere. This particular building was built by the freeway in a prominent business district, but it just happened to be nestled into a canyon. And with the summer quickly approaching, the latest nature warning memo was about a bee hive in a tree next to the building entrance. Bees freak me out.

Now, this particular bee hive doesn't have anything to do with Bee Movie, which is fine by me. However, I did like to see how creative Dreamworks could be with bees for its subject.

Barry B. Benson, a honey bee, has just finished school (all 3 days of it) and is off to the workforce to pick his life long job. Unsatisfied with the choices he is offered, Barry decides that he wants to be adventurous - even though he wasn't built to leave the hive. After venturing out on his own, he meets a human, Vanessa Bloome, and basically falls in love with her. But durng his time outside the hive, he finds that humans are stealing bees' honey. With the help of Vanessa, a florist, he progresses to sue the human race and wins, but when all the honey is returned to bees, the bees, without reason to work (now with more honey than they can imagine) grow lazy.

Completely outrageous, Bee Movie is over the top and sometimes very strange. I thought Barry's crush on Vanessa was out of line. It actually made me feel very uncomfortable. Not to be prejudice or anything, but he's a bee and she's a person. That's weird. It was even more bizarre when Barry was competing with Ken (Vanessa's ex-boyfriend) for her attention. That was just wrong. Plus Jerry Seinfeld's voice on a bee doesn't fit. I couldn't get past that middle-aged, matter-of-fact, tone. It didn't belong to Barry, a young, college graduate bee; it belonged to Seinfeld. The moral was pretty basic and uninspiring, which is a huge ding for a family flick. It had some good gags and some creative imagination. Dreamworks did a pretty good job imagining up a world of bees with humanistic qualities, but suing the human race? Come on. Will kids really buy that? Mutant Turtles or Transformers are so much more feasible. Maybe my 80's childhood puts me at a disadvantage, but I don't care. Bee Movie wasn't good.

I don't like bees. They sting and buzz and fly around so you can't tell where they'll land. Yes, they make honey, but rightly, I don't like honey either. I had a traumatic childhood experience involving chicken nuggets and dripping honey hands. So I guess the universe is aligned. I don't like bees. I don't like Bee Movie either.