The Secret Life of Bees (8:38 PM, Oct. 25, 2008)

1. As a document of Southern race relations in the early '60s, The Secret Life of Bees is about as useful as The Fairy Chronicles. [Slate]

2. Because it is set in the South against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Act, it would be easy to assume "The Secret Life of Bees" is about race relations, but Kidd and Prince-Bythewood are casting their net further than that. [ComingSoon.net]

3. "The Secret Life of Bees" is about finding healing and hope among friends who don't judge you, at a time when people were being judged for their sentiments as well as the color of their skin. [Tulsa World]

4. That's not what "The Secret Life of Bees" is about. [ScrippsNews]

5. Set in the 1960s American south, The Secret Life of Bees is about teen Lily Owens (the role undoubtedly going to Fanning) and her pal Rosaleen (Hudson). [FilmCrunch]

6. The Secret Life of Bees is about a 14 year old girl named Lily living in Sylvan, South Carolina with her father Terrance Ray, whom she refers to as T. Ray. [ChristopherParfitt, Note: this, as well as numbers 7,8, and 10, are about the novel on which the film was based]

7. The Secret Life of Bees is about a young adolescent girl named Lily Owens. [The Open Critic]

8. The Secret Life of Bees is about a girl named Lily Owens who lost her mother at the young age of four. [Wikispaces]

9. "The Secret Life of Bees" is about 14-year old Lily Owen who tries to cope with her mother's death during the summer of 1964. [MediaTakeOut.com]

10. A quirkly, bittersweet story, The Secret Lives of Bees is "about" a lot of things: a daughter's desperate attempt to understand her mother, her search for her own identity, race relations during the Civil Rights era, and how family can sometimes be found in the most unexpected places. [Paw Prints]

For one, The Movie is About Project has run into its first challenge: what about movies that are based on books of the same name?

To skip those results invalidates the directive that the site should list only the ten results comprising the first page of Google listings.

Also, it would skew the information, and would restrict a reader from examining the potential causes of such results. Why do reviews of the book, some from obscure blogs or the school reports of 8th graders, appear in the top ten results? Is it because reviews of the film are less likely to attempt to sum it up? Or are there just thousands of reviews of the book lying around on the internet, clogging up the results? It seems that the totals are largely similar. For "The Secret Life of Bees" novel review, there are 220,000 results. For "The Secret Life of Bees" movie review, there are 229,000. For what that's worth.

I think in the future I am only going to include the first ten results that directly reference the movie. In fact, I'm already starting to consider abandoning the "Top Ten Only" rule and replacing it with a "Whichever Results I Find Most Interesting/Entertaining" version, but we'll see what happens.

Regarding what the results tell us about the film itself, I would say that it appears to suggest that the movie focuses on broader issues than the characters themselves, or at least appears to film reviewers to focus on such.

Examining the results for "The Secret Life of Bees is" give us completely different, much more judgmental results. Some say things like "The Secret Life of Bees is a story about self discovery and the complicated nature of love," but a lot of them use the opportunity to make bee-related puns such as "The Secret Life of Bees is all honey, no sting" or "The Secret Life of Bees is not too sweet."