It's a dry sweet

Similarly to the last piece I wrote about a film, it took some time for the words to come about Honeyland, an interesting documentary about a beekeeper living in the hills of Macedonia with her elderly mother. It was apparently the most lauded film at this year's Sundance Film Festival and has the unusually high critical rating of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Even for great films, that's exceptional. Having seen it, I think it deserves most, if not all, of those plaudits. Unlike Cold Case Hammarskjöld, this film carried a narrative from the opening moment and didn't need any special construction to establish or maintain it. That said, the overriding feeling I have after seeing the film and thinking about it for the past few days is: "Okay." The only reason I have been thinking about it is because I've been trying to write this. Beyond that, there's nothing particularly compelling about it, except to say that it's a very well done look into both the average day and some extraordinary circumstances in the life of Hatidze Muratova.

What I will say is that watching the daily activity of rural beekeeping, with hives nestled in between rocks or the crevices of ruined buildings, is interesting in itself. Likewise, her trip to the market in Skopje and changing relationship with a new family, who bring their cattle to the otherwise deserted village where Hatidze has always lived, are likewise interesting; largely because they're experiences that most people and especially most Americans would never have, otherwise. But that's the same as watching a National Geographic piece. What makes the film is the level of intimacy that Hatidze allows to the filmmakers, as we sit and watch her concern over her mother's ailing health come forth as reproving bickering; her relationship with the new neighbors shift from concealed joy at having someone to teach and converse with to frustration with the disruption of her livelihood; and her concern about never finding regular companionship expressed in casual comments to her mother and deep consideration of what kind of hair dye to purchase at the market.

One wonders sometimes how it is that documentary subjects are able to tune out the fact that cameras are following them everywhere and watching every reaction and personal moment. It would seem that someone as isolated as Hatidze would be even more conscious of that situation, but she remains as open about discussing the reality of her work as she is displaying her reactions to the world around her. It's a simple story, but simple stories can have depth without requiring elaborate plot twists. Sometimes, it just depends on how relatable your characters are, no matter that the story is taking place in some fantasy realm like Westeros or some place so far from one's daily reality that it might as well be a fantasy realm, like the hills of Macedonia.

I think, perhaps, that my reticence toward gushing about a really well-made film might be that we've been seeing so many documentaries recently that I've become mildly jaded toward the format. Perhaps it will take something as invigorating as Maiden to get me back to the point where I can appreciate a narrative grounded simply in the facts of someone's everyday life. Don't let that dissuade you from seeing Honeyland, if you get the chance, though.

Carnivals are usually fun

Give me a line that doesn't sound stupid. I dare you!

Jeff Bezos apparently told his creative types that he wanted to have the "next Game of Thrones" as an Amazon original. Carnival Row is supposedly one of the first entries in that attempt to recreate the (ahem) magic of the HBO series. I can tell you right now that, if by some miracle they actually succeed in that effort with this show, I will lose what little faith I have left in humanity. It's been a while since I've seen something this bad. Yes, I know the last episode of Game of Thrones was just a few months ago, but even that had some redeeming value (Solid actors with actual roles, a decent line or two, etc.) I didn't see any whatsoever in Carnival Row.

First off, let's just assert one thing: No show is going to capture the zeitgeist the way GoT did for two reasons: 1. The multiplicity of networks means no one is watching any one thing at any given time. There's too much choice out there to capture the same size audience so that that one thing will be the only thing talked about at the office the next day. 2. Almost all of these new services are offering up entire seasons in one go. There is no designated watching time, such that you know that you and several million other people are all planted in front of your TVs at the same time (and tweeting about it at the same time...) That kind of communal activity just isn't possible when some people binge things inside 24 hours and others can only watch them over a few weeks. At the moment, Hulu is the only one attempting weekly releases to try to maintain that community tension (and, of course, show commercials.)

Wait... You want us to say what?

That asserted, there's no way that Carnival Row should become the next big hit because no one except Jeff "more money than any deity you can think of" Bezos would have been willing to pay for it. It's awful, top to bottom, from every technical perspective you can think of: acting, direction, writing (save me, Jeebus; ESPECIALLY the writing), as well as the more nuts-and-bolts stuff like lighting and basic physical functions (how dual, insect-like wings actually work, for example.)

Now, granted, you had to expect that the acting would be brutal if the lead is Orlando Bloom, whose range is essentially "pensive but wooden figure constantly trying to convince you that he actually has emotions.", but how did they trick Jared Harris and Indira Varma into this? Promise them they'd only have scenes with each other so they could feed off one another and ad-lib their way out of the awful script? Apparently not, since it was still awful when Harris was explaining- to his wife -how his job works and the status of the current legislature. Because she wouldn't know these basic things, would she? And, overall, the acting doesn't rise above the level of Bloom's emoting in front of his boss (complete with requisite fist slamming to the desk) at how much he feels for the Fae people and their plight. Could they have made this any more obvious? How about if he did the classical "baring a breast with a ready dagger" bit?

Dreary. Like pretty much everything.

But the direction was poor, too. Chase scenes are supposed to build tension, not stutter for five minutes while the two participants keep pacing each other, but that's exactly what happened as Rycroft Philostrate (Bloom) and Unseelie Jack (Matthew Gravelle) race across the rooftops. It was like trying to turn over an engine when the starter is failing. You keep feeling that something's about to happen as the car does that shudder... but then nothing. So, you try again. That's not tension. That's anticipation and despair, because the motion that you get means nothing and the motion you expect never happens. You want tension? Go watch The Bourne Identity again to see how to set up and conduct a chase scene. Oh, and the names... Rycroft Philostrate. Vignette Stonemoss. Imogen Spurnrose. Seriously? I mean, you're serious with this? It isn't fantastical enough that you have people with wings and demons living in the sewers and you think Orlando Bloom can actually act, but you have to give people names that would make each and every one of these people despise their parents?

But that's part and parcel of the worst part: the writing. It's brutal. Half of it is exposition, but even where it isn't, they have the True Detective, season 2 pattern down cold (i.e. People don't fucking talk like that!) My favorite bit was where Bloom confronts the sergeant he suspects and the latter responds: "Just what are you insinuating?" Wut? Not "What's all this about?" or "Tryin' to make a point?" or even "What are you tryin' to say here, inspector?", all delivered in standard Cockney. No, no, no. Let's reach into Webster's for the elevated term because that's the first thing that would come to mind for Average Joe Desk Sergeant. All that tells me is that, in addition to your world not being real (suspension of disbelief!), your characters aren't real, either, because they speak like someone just handed them a script, rather than how they would if they actually lived in your unreal world. JFC, Tamzin Merchant's entire role (Imogen) is exposition! Every time she opens her mouth, she's dropping facts like an almanac to people that should already be familiar with them. She even describes what we've already seen, as if we need that explained to us like her entire family history and marital status. "Carriage!" Yes, we saw that. This is the same response I'd expect from a four-year-old pointing out the window to say: "Fire truck!", because it's exciting for him and he thinks no one else saw it. But we're watching the screen (presumably), so we don't need it announced.

"I'm about to tell him what style of hat he's wearing!"

The crowner is, appropriately, the last scene, where you'd expect some more detail and, instead, are given none, presumably because the writer (René Echevarria) thought it would be "mysterious". Unseelie Jack is about to unburden himself of, y'know, everything and decides that that's the moment to drop some hints about the horrible things that he's seen and why Rycroft Philostrate(!) has no clue about the real world. It's at this point that you'd normally drop in a couple names or words that the audience won't recognize or understand so that they have something to entice them into watching the next episode (although, with this series, perhaps this is a blessing.) Think Melisandre talking about the Lord of Light/Red God/R'hllor. You don't know who that is or what its role is in Westeros, but she name-drops because it's natural to her (she lives there and, really, with the Red God) and it gives the audience something to think about, in addition to providing a little detail on the world. We get none of that from Unseelie Jack's monologue. None! It's all horrible darkness this and you won't believe what I've seen that, but we don't get one single detail about this obviously overarching plot element. So, his entire speech becomes ephemeral, as we later watch a Fae woman get devoured by something in the sewers down by the docks which, for all we know, might be a common thing in these parts... and tells us the same thing his useless speech did!

Me, too. It's called "This screenplay."

I'm not even getting into more technical detail, like how showing everything with a blue lens to make it seem "dark" also begins to make everything blend together. Or how you don't soar, as Vignette(!) does in the opening scene, with dual, halteres-type wings (think common housefly.) Or how working girls don't sleep with their johns! That's because they're working and need to move on to the next guy. If you're going to use sex as a major plot element, you might as well know how it works, yo.

I honestly can't fathom how even Amazon greenlit this thing and I've seen Britannia. Echevarria was showrunner on Terra Nova (once described as "Stargate Universe by Dr. Seuss"), if that gives you any indication at which level things are operating. But if one is trying to field the "next Game of Thrones", one certainly wouldn't start here. Aim higher.

Cold Case, cold film

It's not often that I get stuck with the "blank page" writer's phenomenon. You know, that point where you're just staring at the page/screen and not knowing how to actually apply words to it? But in trying to keep up with my pseudo-promise to review all of the films we see at the Michigan/State, I kind of struggled with Cold Case Hammarskjöld. It's not because it was great and I didn't know how to encompass it. It's certainly not because it was bad and I didn't know how to get started ranting (see: any of my coverage of Game of Thrones' final season or True Detective's second season if you want to see loquaciousness in the service of bad productions.) It's because it wasn't much of... anything. It's not as if there isn't substance to the film. There certainly is. It's loaded with facts that reflect the colonial exploitation of Africa, the dirty wars that accompanied and followed that exploitation, the influence of massive corporations in those wars, racism, disease, and the turbulent political period following World War II and the introduction of the Cold War. It is all of those things. But it's also somewhere between a newsreel and a Twitter thread in its presentation of them.

The film examines the death of former United Nations secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, in a plane crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia.) As Hammarskjöld was a fervent reformer and champion for the rights of those who had been (or still were) under the colonial boot, he had a lot of enemies. As the plane crash was very swiftly examined and buried by the Rhodesian authorities, it's never been far from the thoughts of many people that the crash was actually a calculated assassination. This is the premise of the film, as Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish journalist Göran Björkdahl interview people both involved in the clean-up and those who claim to be part of the mercenary outfit that actually carried out the crime, the South African Institute for Maritime Research. The film continues down that rabbit hole, exploring the possible paymasters behind SAIMR and the various other projects that the Institute was involved in, ranging from pedestrian white supremacy to attempted genocide.

Sounds fascinating, right? And it probably would have been for someone who hadn't already spent many years reading about that activity. There were several moments in the film where I would have been more interested by an exploration of the larger picture beyond what was hinted at, but they quite properly avoided that and tried to stay focused on Hammarskjöld's death, for the most part. But that also set the film up to be something like a first draft of a screenplay for a police procedural, without any real narrative or character, except the interjection of the two filmmakers in something of a Mr. Bean role, as they fumble around trying to dig up the wreckage of the infamous crash. I think they tried to compensate for the fact that they were laying things out in pretty straightforward fashion by showing Brügger dictating the story to two different transcribers and showing their reactions to both the story and his elaborations upon it. The fact that both transcribers were Black does kind of dovetail with one of the more explosive elements of the conspiracy story, but I'm not sure if that was intentional or coincidental.

Of course, the conspiracy is kind of the central conceit of the film and, in that respect, it's just like watching Oliver Stone's JFK. The surrounding plot and performances run secondary to the theme in that film in the same way they do with this one. But it's the manner of delivery that kind of stalls out here. If you're already aware of the mountain of evidence out there about the activities of South African mercenary groups, then it's not difficult to believe that what's being presented here is true. But it's also not that interesting because the filmmakers take pains to not dramatize the possibilities, as Stone did in his film. For documentarians, that's a laudable goal. But it also kind of saps the life from the presentation in this case. And that's strange for me because it sounded like a great idea. I'm a Cold War enthusiast. I used to live and breathe that stuff. I have board games sitting in my house based on that period, mostly because they're about the Cold War, as opposed to whether they're any good on a rainy afternoon (They are.) But this film just didn't sing to me. I walked away from it thinking more about the casual reference in one moment to Jonas Savimbi, rather than about the film itself, because there's actually more story around the former UNITA leader.

I won't say that it's not worth your time, as I think it is. It's just that I wish it were more worth it.