Life's a Bee and Then You Die

HONEYLAND (A-minus) - This thoroughly depressing documentary follows the hardscrabble life of Hatidze as she nurtures the bee population of her crude hamlet outside the capital of Macedonia. She also tends to her dying mother in the stone hut they share. When a rowdy couple with a bunch of undisciplined kids moves in next door, they decide to clumsily take up beekeeping themselves, upsetting the town's apian ecosystem and threatening Hatidze's livelihood.

Hatidze nonetheless helps look after these neighbor kids and still goes about collecting honey and selling it in Skopje. The details of her day-to-day existence in this primitive setting are fascinating. People are industrious when they need to be. (They rig up an aluminum disc on a pole -- nailing it in place using a rock -- so they can use it as an antenna for an old transistor radio that they gather 'round like the castaways of Gilligan's Island.) Somehow, the movie is bookended with snippets of the '70s cheese classic "You Are So Beautiful" (doesn't sound like the Joe Cocker version, though), a touch of irony considering Hatidze's haggish, dentally challenged physical appearance. (She looks 70 but tells someone she was born in 1964.))

Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov gain intimate access to every aspect of Hatidze's simple existence. The camera is perpetually over their subject's shoulder, even as she scales a cliff to check on a hive that is treacherously situated. Some of the visuals are breathtaking. The directors find humor in this rough existence (the neighbor kids are constantly battering and bruising each other -- when they're not getting stung by bees). Hatidze is a survivor, and her gumption is to be admired. But there are times when you wonder if this trudge to the grave is beautiful or pointless.

MONROVIA, INDIANA (C-minus) - You know all those things you do throughout the day -- get your hair cut, shop at the grocery store, do your job, maybe go to a community meeting, prattle on to your fellow senior citizens at the ol' diner? Would you ever want to watch yourself do those things? Would you want to watch a bunch of people in rural Indiana doing those things? Documentary legend Frederick Wiseman thinks you do. You don't.

File this one under Fast Forward Theater. This is as dull as watching corn grow. Which we do in this film, by the way. Sorry, this town is just not interesting. What is the point? Life is tedious and then you die? (Wiseman actually closes with about 15 minutes of a rambling sermon at a funeral for some old lady named Shirley.)

Wiseman -- known for modern successes like "Boxing Gym" and "Crazy Horse" -- has been testing our patience for quite a while now. "At Berkeley" (four hours) and "In Jackson Heights" (a mere three) were wonky process experiments that pushed the limits of fly-on-the-wall observational narration. They just could not be consumed in one sitting, if at all. But at least he had a compelling subject last year in "Ex Libris," about the New York Public Library. It gave us hope that the old boy was back on his game. No such luck.