Spellbound

Harry, Speller; Photo - Spellbound

Yay! Spellbound finally opens at Film Forum today! Gothamist has been following this spelling bee documentary for a while, and will try to make it to West Houston today to see it. A.O. Scott loves the film, and mentions, one contestant, "Harry, a voluble boy from New Jersey, who struggles with an Anglo-Saxon plural noun (to write it would be to spoil one of the film's most excruciating and hilarious moments) referring to a religious practice he's never heard of." Harry is from Glen Rock, where I spent my 0-12 years.

The official site for Spellbound is cool, but also a pain in the ass because each time you go back "Home," the Flash heavy homepage has to load.

Spellbound is also the title of an Alfred Hitchcock film, the 1945 Ingrid Bergman-Gregory Peck mystery with dream sequences courtesy Dali. Criterion does its usual crackerjack job in the Criterion Collection DVD of Spellbound.

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By Jen Chung in Arts & Entertainment on April 30, 2003 1:21 AM

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jake

i always thought the pixies song "debaser" was referencing spellbound, but it appears not:

"Origin of Debaser: Based on French surrealistic film "Un Chien Andalou", by Spanish director Luis Bunuel (1928). The film has a scene in which an eyeball is being cut open.

"I am un chien andalusia" actually mixes English ("I am"), Spanish ("un", which exists in French, but is actually pronounced as in Spanish), French ("chien"), and something undetermined ("andalusia" as such is neither French nor Spanish).

'I wish Bunuel was still alive. He made this film about nothing in particular. The title itself is a nonsense. With my stupid, pseudo-scholar, naive, enthusiast, avant-garde-ish, amateurish way to watch 'Un Chien Andalou' (twice), I thought: 'Yeah, I will make a song about it,' he sings: "un chien andalou"...It sounds too French, so I will sing "un chien andalusia", it sounds good, no?' (Black Francis, translated from a Spanish interview) "