Bees Make Honey

Poor sound quality, broken by frequent and confusing flashbacks, and spoiled by unnecessary and frivolous farts of profanity. Ten uninteresting minutes was about nine minutes more than I could endure.

The basic plot in Bees Make Honey is fairly routine - Honey (Alice Eve) is convinced that her husband was murdered at last year's Halloween party. To find the killer, she invites the exact same guests to this year's party. But she also invites a police detective to help her unmask a murderer.

It's not that I disliked Bees Make Honey, but it could have been so much better. My biggest issue was the lack of focus. I'm a sucker for a good mystery. But too often, director Jack Eve seemed to turn his attention to anything but the mystery. Give me clues, suspects, motives, etc. - that's what I want. I suppose that what it boils down to is that I wanted a different movie, one with a good old fashioned, drawing room style mystery. Instead, what a I got was a mystery buried under kitchy characters, crazy musical interludes, and bizarre scenes that seem to exist only to be bizarre (a Nazi doing line after line of coke, for example).

I will give Eve credit for ambition. Just a few minutes in and it's easy to see Eve and Bees Make Honey have style to burn. And the movie looks fantastic. Costuming, sets, and lighting are all amazing. Being set during a Halloween party helps create the fantastic imagery. And I was impressed with Eve's sister, Alice Eve, in the lead. She brought real life and energy to Honey. It's too bad her main co-star, Wilf Scolding, couldn't keep up.

5/10

Raucous and unique. It's non linear, which I like in films. My two cents is to jump into the world and enjoy. The music is rad. Alice Eve is totally hot as usual. It's like a rocky horror picture show vibe without the set piece songs. There are some really funny scenes, but the language is hard to follow sometimes. I think it's clever though and totally absurdist.

Alice Eve is underrated I feel. She is clearly such a movie star when you watch this. She was strong and sexy without falling into traditional female traps written by men. I think it was her brother who wrote this? Great if they are related. It's super fast paced. Music was seriously cool. Would watch with friends again.

This is one of those movie that's a little bit heartbreaking because, while it succeeds at some elements, it fails miserably at others. Visually the film is sumptuous, though a tad dark. The team behind it were meticulous when it came to the costumes, the make-up, the cinematography, the set decoration, lighting, and even the editing. Which begs the question of what went wrong... Basically, the movie is overacted and not well written. When it comes to the script, it seems like the writers were simply trying too hard, which carries through in the delivery. To be clear, I don't believe the actors failed to achieve the director's vision; the problem is that vision lacked anything even resembling subtlety. As the movie progresses you end up losing interest quickly because you cannot care about the characters because they aren't really characters so much as caricatures. Instead of fleshed out human beings, the story revolves around one-dimensional cartoon like people. Consequently, whether they live or die, whether or not they're guilty, whether or not they seem happy or sad affects the viewer very little. Put another way, there is simply no one in this movie you feel emotionally invested in. In the end, this film feels like a missed opportunity. If the people behind it had invested half as much time on the story as they did on its appearance, it could have been brilliant; instead, it's tedious.