The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

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The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

Directed by	Martin Duffy
Produced by	Steven Haft Larry Meistrich
Written by	Jennifer Sarja(screenplay)
Starring	Elijah Wood Rachel Leigh Cook
Running time	95 min.
IMDb profile

The Bumblebee Flies Anyway is a 1999 film starring Elijah Wood, directed by Martin Duffy. It was based on a novel by the same name written by Robert Cormier

1 Tagline
2 Plot
3 Cast
4 Trivia
5 Awards
6 Links

[edit] Tagline

They Took His Past. She Gave Him His Future

[edit] Plot

Barney Snow (Wood) wakes up in a hospital with no memory of why he is there. All he has is his name and some vague recollections of a car crash. He assumes that he is in the hospital for his amnesia and settles in to try to recover. He quickly realizes that all of the other residents of the youth clinic are all suffering from terminal conditions.

Everyone except him.

Mazzo, another patient (played by Joseph Perrino), asks Barney to play host for his visiting twin sister, Cassie. Barney immediately falls for Cassie (played by Rachel Leigh Cook), and strives to get better, if only to be able to see her in a setting outside the hospital. He is determined to learn about his past so that he can make her a part of his future.

In his explorations, both inside his shattered memories and through the physical rooms of the hospital, Barney starts to realize that there was no car crash. Doctor Harriman (known as The Handyman to her patients), induced amnesia in Barney to make him forget everything in his past. Barney demands to know why and Harriman tells him he has cancer.

The experimental procedure that Barney is undergoing is attempting to test the power of the mind in fighting cancer. Barney had volunteered for the treatment, hoping for a miracle cure.

The theory was that if Barney didn’t know he had cancer, if his entire memory of it was eliminated, the body might stop creating the cancer cells. The explanation Dr. Harriman gives comes from an old urban legend that bumblebees are aerodynamically incapable of flying. Based on weight ratios to wing power and wind resistance, the bumblebee should be incapable of flight, yet, the theory says, the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it flies anyway. This statement also gives the film its name.

Torn between his hope for a cure and his desire to continue his budding relationship with Cassie, Barney is forced to choose whether to go through the amnesia procedure again or remain with the memories and knowledge he has thus far acquired.

[edit] Cast

Elijah Wood as Barney Snow
Janeane Garofalo as Dr. Harriman/Handyman
Rachael Leigh Cook as Cassie
George Gore II as Billy
Joseph Perrino as Mazzo
Roger Rees as Dr. Croft
Oni Faida Lampley as Nurse Bascam
Jeffrey Force as Allie Roon
Christopher Mark Petrizzo as Chris Ronson
Samuel Haft as Samuel Ronson
John E. Mack as Willy/Orderly
Matthew Cavallary as Young Barney Snow
David France as Richard Snow
Joan Levy as Woman in Suburbs

[edit] Trivia

Billy mentions calling a radio station to request on obscene song. The title he requests is "Lick My Love Pump". the title is a reference to a song in the 1984 mocumentary This Is Spinal Tap.

In the novel upon which the movie was based, Janeane Garofalo's character, "The Handyman", is a man.

The urban legend about the bumblebee being incapable of flight is, in fact, false. The story started in Germany in the 1930s at a dinner party[1]. A engineer was talking to a biologist at a dinner party and somehow the flight of bees came up in conversation. The engineer did a quick "back-of-the-napkin" calculation, assuming the bee had a rigid, smooth wing to keep things simple. Estimating the bee's weight, wing area, and lift generated by the wing, the engineer came to the conclusion that there would be insufficient lift to raise the bee off the ground. The detailed calculations had to wait for later, but the story continued to grow and travel, becoming the urban legend it is today.