Mrs. Sic’s DVD Pick: Bees

We’ve never been big on “white guilt” movies because in all honesty, we don’t have any.

All of us here were raised to see past the color of a person’s skin, and that’s how we raise our little ones.

“Try to separate a man from his soul you only strengthen his and lose your own,” sings Brother Ali (who is whiter than white), and the fact that a lot of less-than-worthless white people tried to do precisely that for decades in the South only reinforces the stupidity that continues to hold so many of them back.

Also, we don’t distinguish white and black (or any other color) because we’re just not into limiting the universe of people we can make fun of …

Anyway, the truth is that too many “white guilt” movies like to force feed their indignity, and we briefly thought The Secret Life of Bees was going to be one of those movies.

It’s not.

The story of a young girl on a quest to find out the truth about her mother, Bees certainly starts off like it’s going to be another Mississippi Burning, but it quickly evolves into a remarkably accessible journey of self-realization (and redemption) that has little to do with race.

Pretty impressive considering that the movie is set in rural South Carolina in the early 1960’s – not exactly the coordinates a black man would enter into a time machine.

Driven by the relationship between child star Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah – the matriarch of an eclectic black family whose lives revolve around the business of making the Palmetto State’s best honey – Bees manages to mostly resist the temptation to guilt white people to death and instead truly brings us inside the lives of these extraordinary characters.

Based on the book of the same name by Sue Monk Kidd, Bees is simply a wonderful movie – in fact, it was almost as enjoyable as Bee Movie, which was Shorty’s DVD pick this weekend.

We give both “three stingers,” people.