Honeygirl Meadery

 

Located at 105 Hood Street in downtown Durham, Honeygirl Meadery offers homemade meads by the glass as well as bottles to go. Tasting flights, outdoor seating, and curbside pickup are available. The tasting room is open from noon to six on Fridays and Saturdays and noon to five on Sundays.

 

I don’t think I’d had but a small sip of mead previously, and Honeygirl made for a fine introduction. The tasting room is small but bright and clean. Combined with a friendly and knowledgeable staff, it makes for an inviting space.

 

Honeygirl offers more than a dozen meads from basic to barrel aged and semi-sweet to dry. The ingredients are sourced locally (and, in one case, foraged by the manager) and incorporate a variety of apples and herbs. 

Hard-pressed (pun semi-intended) to make a decision, my wife and I settled on a flight consisting of spiced apple cyser, farmhouse wildflower, hibiscus lemonthyme, and tri-berry. The wildflower was all that I expected mead to be: a smooth honey wine. The cyser boasted some nice spice notes, but it also made me realize that I strongly prefer cider to its wine-based cousin. The tri-berry, on the other hand, was outstanding. A seasonal offering, it brings together mulberries, blackberries, blueberries, and black currant juice. The resulting concoction offered complex flavors and was not too sweet. We liked it so much that we ended up getting a bottle to take home.

 

Honeygirl isn’t cheap – a flight of four is $15 and most glasses are in the $8-$12 range – but it’s a great way to try something different.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

 

Dimension-hopping teenager America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) arrives in New York pursued by demonic creatures, drawing sorcerer Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) away from his colleague/former girlfriend Christine Palmer’s (Rachel McAdams) wedding. Sensing witchcraft at play, Strange calls upon his friend Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), only to find that she has been corrupted by the Darkhold, a grimoire that convinces her that she can have the family she has been dreaming about…by taking America’s power (killing her in the process) and relocating to another dimension. To stop her, Strange, America, and Wong (Benedict Wong), will seek allies in whichever dimension they can find them.

 

With directors as distinctive and diverse as James Gunn, Taika Waititi, and Chloe Zhao helming entries, one would think that criticisms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as cookie-cutter cinema would have waned by now. The addition of Sam Raimi (replacing previous Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson) suggests a further corrective to that narrative. However, like Zhao’s Eternals, Raimi’s stab at an MCU film is an awkward fit that shows a talented director not quite hitting the mark.

 

On paper, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness should have been a dream project. After all, Raimi is beloved for the first two Spider-Man films, and he cut his teeth as a horror director well before then. A project that combines both seems like a no-brainer. Moreover, writer Michael Waldron experienced more recent Marvel success with last year's Loki series. Add a Danny Elfman score and lots of returning faces, and what could go wrong?

The answer, sadly, is a lot. Pointing out the MCU’s interconnectedness and reliance on prior familiarity is beating a dead horse, but despite drawing from that shared history, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness doesn’t seem to understand it. In WandaVision (which ended with the character using the Darkhold), Wanda committed heinous and destructive acts, but Olsen delivered a complex, anguished performance. Here, the character is more powerful yet feels cheapened and one-dimensional, a dark magic-empowered Terminator with T2 Sarah Connor’s motives. This character neglect extends to Strange as well. The character is once again chided as being an arrogant risk-taker, the one who always has to be holding the knife. For most of the movie, he justifies that reputation rather than challenging it, only breaking from it in the form of a cliched late-game pep talk. Neither Olsen nor Cumberbatch are mailing it in here and embody the characters as best as they are able; they just don’t have a ton to work with. The Illuminati – a well-intentioned but secretive and ethically dubious council featuring some of Marvel’s heavy hitters – shows up in one of the film’s visited dimensions, but don’t get too attached. Their brief appearances are part fan service, part Marvel bragging about the character film rights they have reacquired, part inflating the danger an out-of-control Wanda poses, and part Raimi utilizing his penchant for shockingly violent slapstick. Undoubtedly, some of these faults can be pinned on a script that seemed to change by the day during production, but even with a more solid plan from the get-go, Raimi’s type of conspicuously comic booky superhero film would have been a better fit for audiences fifteen years ago than audiences today.

 

While the film arguably wastes its characters, one can still see where the money went. Even as MCU films become more and more visually audacious, Raimi’s work here stands out. It captures some of the exhilaration of his Spider-Man films, but its also fluid, getting weird and wacky or darkly terrifying as the occasion demands. Elfman’s score is serviceable and perhaps a good complement to Raimi’s throwback approach, but it isn’t particularly memorable.

 

To borrow the film’s central conceit, in a dimension where the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t exist, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would be a thoroughly entertaining if weird and wonky two hours. But in our reality, it doesn’t measure up to the expectations created by what came before, rendering it a frustrating – if also at times thrilling and daring – outing. At the very least, however, it leaves the door open for further adventures featuring these characters, hopefully by a creative team that will better utilize them.

Moon Knight

 

Awkward British museum gift shop worker Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) and hardnosed American former mercenary Marc Spector (Isaac again) have a dilemma: they are two personalities vying for control over one body. Spector has been working off a debt to the Egyptian moon god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham), donning his ceremonial armor and serving as his vengeful, evil-punishing avatar Moon Knight. He’s fled to England to keep his archaeologist wife Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy) out of harm’s way, but she won’t be deterred that easily. Meanwhile, it is Steven who seems to have gotten the pair in the most trouble, stumbling across a plot by charismatic cult leader Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) to release the goddess Ammit and exact terrible judgment upon humanity.

 

Though he has graced comic books pages for decades, insofar as Moon Knight is known at all, it is as an Internet meme or Marvel’s Batman equivalent with multiple personalities and a mystical flair. The character’s obscurity actually played to writer Jeremy Slater and director Mohamed Diab’s advantage as it gave them considerable latitude in developing a short-run Disney Plus adaptation. Their vision is an eclectic one, and though the resulting show’s tonal whiplash may disorient some viewers, it makes for a refreshingly fun ride.

 

A broad-strokes distillation, Moon Knight makes a number of changes to the source material that are ultimately for the best. Comic book Steven was a suave, rich Bruce Wayne/Lamont Cranston type, but show Steven is a working-class blunderer. This quality, in the face of pending doom, gives the show a good bit of humor, especially when contrasted with Mark’s cool competence. It’s to Isaac’s credit that he handles both personas – and accents – with conviction. Layla is also a stronger and better-developed character than her comic equivalent, Marlene. While her status as an Egyptian heroine is obnoxiously trumpeted as Representation with a capital R (ironic given the casting of a non-Jewish actor as the definitely Jewish Marc), Calamawy nevertheless shows both toughness and heart. Hawke’s Harrow is an amalgamation of several different villains, and he exudes a creepy soft-spoken empathy despite his fanaticism.

 

From the streets of London to the streets of Cairo and from an Egyptian tomb to a mental hospital to the afterlife, the show’s settings change quickly. While these episode-to-episode shifts can be disorienting (albeit not to the extent of Legion), Diab’s direction is surefooted and energetic, and Slater, whose Fantastic Four (2015) script was largely butchered by Josh Trank, gains a measure of redemption here. Between Diab’s inclusion of modern Cairo and Hesham Nazi’s score, Moon Knight serves as an aesthetic corrective to a popular conception of Egypt rooted thousands of years in the past.

 

Moon Knight is, like previous Disney Plus Marvel series WandaVision, a show whose quirkiness masks powerful acting and an exploration of the extremes that grief and loss can push us toward. The pull of individual episodes may vary, but the series as a whole is more often than not compelling.

Tokyo Vice

 

In the late 1990s, Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort), a young American, arrives in Tokyo and begins working as a crime reporter for a major newspaper. He chafes at the paper’s conservative deference to authority and rude editor (Kosuke Toyohara) but finds cautious support among his colleagues, including his direct supervisor Maruyama (Rinko Kikuchi). When an indebted man’s very public suicide catches his attention, Jake makes it his mission to expose the yakuza scheme that led to the debtor’s demise. To do so, Jake forges alliances with police – the vice squad detective Miyamoto (Hideaki Ito) and the organized crime investigator Kitagiri (Ken Watanabe), the local yakuza – young enforcer Sato (Show Kasamatsu) and his boss Ishida (Shun Sugata), and nightclub hostesses/fellow foreigners Samantha (Rachel Keller) and Polina (Ella Rumpf). While Jake works his way to the truth, Sato is forced to step up, Sam must avoid a threat from her past, Katagiri navigates underworld tensions, and Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida) – a ruthless out-of-town yakuza – threatens them all.

 

An adaptation of Adelstein’s engaging-but-disputed memoir had been rumored for years before making its HBO Max debut last month. While its creator J.T. Rogers is better known as a playwright, his television debut has plenty of polish: it helps that Michael Mann directed the first episode. What it lacks in consistency and, in the early episodes, pacing, it makes up for in the breadth of its narrative, its deft use of setting, and its later-episode tension.

 

Despite playing the nominal lead, Elgort is the weak link among the cast. He remains a talented actor, but he’s a poor Jake, matching neither the perception created by the real Adelstein’s authorial voice nor the interest generated by the other characters. Fortunately, Tokyo Vice’s Wire-like crosscut means that Jake-san is rarely relied on to carry an episode. Watanabe delivers low-key brilliance as Katagiri, a warm and jovial father one moment and an unflappable, incorruptible, cagey cop the next. Sato, who sings American pop songs and seems to have genuine feelings for Sam (herself torn between empathy and self-interest), is increasingly unnerved by the violence he is forced to commit, hanging onto his humanity despite his unsavory business. In somewhat predictable fashion, Rogers sways our sympathies toward the Ishida-gumi by making Tozawa (based on real-life yakuza head/Adelstein nemesis Tadamasa Goto) that much worse.

 

Though the cacophony of the club scenes wears thin after a while (this following a dizzyingly impressive depiction in the Mann-helmed debut episode), Tokyo Vice otherwise makes excellent use of its setting. Just as the glitz and allure of Tokyo’s nightlife contrast with the small offices and small apartments shown in the cold light of day, so too do we get a sense of the contradictions and complexities that Jake, despite his strong linguistic fluency, often misreads or struggles to grasp.

 

Some of its narrative beats may be familiar, and its lead is more liability than lure, but all in all, Tokyo Vice’s visual panache and multilayered storytelling can pull you in if you let it. Here’s hoping that a second season follows as there are plenty of stories left to tell.