Movie Nation

Movies that use our remembered love of the cinema experience of our youth can’t help but be sentimental. From “The Last Picture Show” to “Cinema Paradiso,” “Four Hundred Blows” to “The Fabelmans,” filmmakers have found that their nostalgia for the Magic of the Movies resonates with many a film fan.

Films about the Third World version of that experience are often built around a traveling cinema that shows movies to remote villages in India — where this still happens, as “The Cinema Travelers” and other films remind us — and elsewhere, a way of bringing filmed entertainment to the off-the-grid/pre-TV-set-in-every-home masses.

“Once Upon a Star” is a Thai variation on that theme, with a Thai twist in the way this “truck cinema” was presented in villages and towns like Lopduri and Nakhem Sowen and Phitsanulok. It’s a very slow, faintly romantic drift into sentiment and nostalgia that could benefit from a little cutting for pace, just so long as you don’t edit out the “sweet.”

Manit (Sukollawat Kanarot) heads a truck troupe sponsored by Hermit Holder Playing Cards and Osotthepuayada Pharmaceuticals. Aged driver Man (Samart Payukaroon) and hunky young concession stand operator Kao (Jirayu La-ongmanee) travel the backroads and mud-paths of 1970 Thailand, taking care to avoid communist-controlled “Red Zones,” showing their movies to those without electricity, TV or cinema.

The Thai twist to all this is that the films aren’t projected with sound. It was cheaper to hire “dubbers,” actors who’d “perform” the film, and during “commercial” breaks, plug the patent medicine that they were there to sell, their real reason for being on the road.

Their corporate overlords are quite strict. Manit has to do all the dubbing, no matter how often “Hey, is that supposed to be a GIRL’S voice? (in subtitled Thai, or dubbed) is shouted from the peanut gallery. He drops the needle on records that provide the background music, and vocalizes such sound effects as he deems necessary.

But by 1970, audiences were demanding more, and competing troupes have multi-voice casts, including women, putting Manit’s crew at a terrible disadvantage. Kao might be an aspiring actor himself, but he can see the real problem is not having a woman on their dubbing team.

A newspaper ad brings lovely Rueangkae (Nuengthida Sophon) to their attention. She’s evasive about her experience, and her personal past. But she’d love to make money to go to typing school so she can become a secretary. She’ll do. She instantly ads credibility to their endless cycle of “dubbed” dramas and action films starring Thailand’s most popular actor, Mitr Chaibancha.

But as Manit and Kao both take a shine to the woman they call “Kae,” you can see where this is going. Piecing together her back story via hints and a few drunken admissions doesn’t really scare either of them off.

There’s good if not swooning chemistry between the leads, and the portrait of Vietnam War era rural Thailand is novel. A cute touch in Nonzee Nibibutr’s film is the selection of banjo and yodeling Thai “country” music on the soundtrack, which gives the movie a jaunty touch which the pacing and self-seriousness of the story doesn’t capitalize on.

Yes, the quartet has seen the black and white TVs in the larger towns they visit. Yes, some traveling cinemas are already shifting over to projecting with sound.

Manit’s “You’ve got a bright future ahead of you” speech to Kae is either blinded by love, or just a lie.

There’s enough material here — encounters with soldiers and monks and rural rednecks, the possible love triangle, dub-offs with their arch rivals and the like — that this picture could have bounced by, never pausing to get mired in the mud, which it often does.

A lighter touch — it really wants to be a sentimental, downbeat comedy — might have made this yodeling Thai melodrama sing. As it is, it only hums along here and there, carried by its sweetness and superficially developed characters.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, smoking, drinking

Cast: Nuengthida Sophon, Sukollawat Kanarot, Jirayu La-ongmanee and Samart Payukaroon

Credits: Directed by Nonzee Nimibutr, scripted by Ek Iemchuen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:!7

Pirates, so far as we know, rarely said “Yarrrrr.” The fact that we think they do, that it’s been a Law of the Sea since “The Simpsons” Sea Captain character was a squinty wee squirt, that there’s a Talk Like a Pirate Day for years now all spins out of the Great Brit Robert Newton‘s second run up the skull-and-crossbones topped mainmast — 1952’s “Blackbeard, the Pirate.”

Newton had already given a career-defining performance as Long John Silver in “Treasure Island” a couple of years before. If this planned film of the infamous Blackbeard was going to stand a chance of making it to the screen, they’d need Newton to play him. And by thunder, he did.

Separating the character from Long John, and deeper into the alcoholism that was to make him an unpleasant co-star and shorten his life, Newton makes Edward Teach of Ocracoke infamy a much more exaggerated version of an early 18th century buccaneer.

Yaaarrrr, he did. All that’s missing is a parrot.

“Blackbeard” is a mostly ahistorical — OK UTTERLY ahistorical account of the cutthroat’s late career, because in the 1950s, people didn’t sweat “based on a true story” the way Hollywood does now.

But Newton & Co. make it fun, a violently silly swashbuckler that at least could boast a Blackbeard who looked right — braided beard, which he would allegedly stick lit fuses in to create the illusion he was literally on fire, just to terrify merchant ship captains into surrendering without a fight.

It’s about a rivalry/sea hunt between the notorious Teach and the sometime pirate, sometime English patriot and privateer Henry Morgan, who retired at about the time Teach was born and died when little Eddie Teach was but 8.

Keith Andes plays a British agent posing as a ship’s surgeon to get the goods on then Lt. Governor of Jamaica Morgan (Torin Hatcher), whom the Crown assumed had returned to piracy. Maynard the “sawbones” spy gets himself “sold” into Blackbeard’s crew.

That’s how he and Lady Edwina Mansfield (Linda Darnell) find themselves aboard the pirate’s ship together, each with his or her own agenda with regards to the pirate. Mansfield has riches belonging to Capt. Morgan in her care, and thought she was coming aboard a friendly captain’s ship. Seeing him hanging from the yardarm lets her know her mistake.

“He’s aboard,” Blackbeard cracks. “I left him hangin’ around here, somewheres.”

Maynard — pronounced “MAYYY-nard” by the bug-eyed pirate — is just the sawbones to fix up our still-wounded title character when they meet. Blackbeard isn’t Maynard’s quarry. But Blackbeard wants his share of booty that Morgan stole, and Maynard’s out to trap Morgan. And with a crew that fears and hates its captain — William Bendix plays Worley, the first mate, and Skelton Knaggs is Gilly, the shifty crewman who slips Maynard a “Kill him!” note so that the sawbones will cut a vein while removing a pistol ball from Blackbeard’s neck — and a lone accomplice (future star Richard Egan), Maynard figures Blackbeard will be just the bait to lure Morgan into a trap.

Eyepatched action director Raoul Walsh (“White Heat,” “Northern Pursuit”) was a good choice to make the fights convincing and sea and land battles work. But the picture is so soundstage (and water tank) bound that all the Technicolor does is make the spectacle look even more fake. It’s just as well, given how “difficult” his star was becoming. Soundstages are controlled environments, for the filming conditions and the general captivity of the cast.

Newton would eventually settle into a “Long John Silver” TV series just to keep working through his downward spiral.

But every damned word out of Newton’s mouth here is sadistically funny. He boasts of grabbing “All the loot of Panamaarrrrrr” whilst he was with the double-crossing Morgan, marvels that his female hostage bathes a lot — “Y’mean she gets wet all over…on purpose?” And he realizes “She ain’t near so cheap to keep as she were to take.”

Darnell makes Edwina a brassy, crafty foe with an eye for the main chance and a dim view of her new sawbones accomplice’s bravery.

“You? Hang Henry Morgan? You couldn’t hang the hind leg of a pig in a smokehouse!”

The villain is as cold-blooded as they come, but the story’s silly and the one-liners fast and furious and ever-so-“yaarrrrrrrrr. Alan LeMay’s script is inventive, nonsensical and fun. Consider the sea chant the first mate barks when they’re swinging then flinging a dead shipmate over the side.

“One, and the body, the body I say. Two, shall be cast, be cast, I say. Three into the sea, the sea, into the sea goes he!”

That there’s some yaaarrr screenwriting, friends.

We know a lot more about the historical Blackbeard these days, and his last ship, The Queen Anne’s Revenge,” was discovered in recent years. In 1952 LeMay couldn’t recreate Blackbeard’ infamous beheaded demise, but he got creative enough in finding a delicious alternative.

The movie isn’t all that, in spite of Newton’s hamminess, Darnell’s tough-broad pluck and the scurvy dogs of the supporting cast. Andes is merely adequate in a co-starring role. And even beach scenes are soundstage bound.

But “Blackbeard, the Pirate” is still fun to see and hear Newton inventing many a pirate movie trope in a role that’s as yaarrrr today as it ever was.

Walsh eyepatch

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Robert Newton, Linda Darnell, William Bendix, Keith Andes, Torin Thatcher, Alan Mowbray, Skelton Naggs, Richard Egan and Irene Ryan.

Credits: Directed by Raoul Walsh, scripted by Alan LeMay. An RKO release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube et al

Running time: 1:38

“Pencils vs. Pixels” is a brisk celebration of the hand-drawn 2D animator’s art and cursory history of its “golden ages,” the last of which ended as computer-generated imagery and digitally assisted 3D animation took over with the rise of Pixar and the birth of “Shrek.”

Filmmakers Bay Dariz and Phil Earnest got permission to use clips from a lot of Disney, Dreamworks, Don Bluth and Pixar films, including pencil test footage and digital experiments. They rounded up scores of the animators who worked on those films to talk about the nature of the work, the films that inspired them and the sad way CGI displaced the classical animation that they sketched, drew, inked and animated to life.

Their art was “black magic,” one animator notes, “a marvelous illusion — acting passion and physics on the page,” the great Glen Keane says. Some enthuse how “each frame was a masterpiece” back when artists designed and drew, inkers inked and painters painted images on cells that were filmed.

Working with pencil and paper, “artisans” who became “folk heroes” learned “what a 24th of a second feels like” as they mastered their craft, making cell animation “by feel” in the celluloid (24 frames per second) motion picture era.

We hear about the first Golden Age that the art form experienced, the Disney-driven “Snow White” to Jungle Book” epoch that produced timeless classics that were re-issued to theaters, again and again, so that new generations could discover the magic of animated movies on the big screen in that pre-cable, pre-home video and streaming era.

We learn about the Disney rebellion after “The Fox and the Hound,” which led to Don Bluth starting his own studio and releasing “The Secret of NIMH,” the Roy E. Disney-led Disney revival that burst forth with “The Little Mermaid,” which heralded a ’90s “Second Golden Age” and got Dreamworks and others into the animation business.

Being Disney-centric, there’s a lot here’s that’s been covered elsewhere in documentaries such as “Waking Sleeping Beauty.” But where “Pencils vs. Pixels” breaks new ground is in the transition that all but wiped out traditional hand-drawn animation. Animators like Keane and Andreas Deja and others sound as upbeat as they can about this revolution, and some even predict a return of hand-drawn animation in the digital age.

That could happen, as tastes in animated cinema trend towards “different. Thus, the 3D animated fad and its 3D glasses have all but disappeared. Stop motion animation has experienced an off-and-on renaissance with films such as “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline,” “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “The Inventor” grabbing at least some of the audience’s attention. Hand drawn on a budget could come back via Netflix money.

“Pencils” lets us glimpse the first CG exeriments that led, years later, to Pixar and “Toy Story” and an entire industry being upended and remade, with every animation operation going CGI in a very short period of time.

As Disney-centric as this is, there’s still a warm appreciation for the work that Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg and John Pomeroy (seen here) made that woke the Mouse out of its torpor, “An American Tail,” which followed “NIMH.” “Competition” brought Disney Animation back to life.

Not being a major studio production, there are major figures in this story missing in this documentary, Spielberg among them. There’s no Jeffrey Katzenberg to talk up his “tradigital” transition strategy for Dreamworks, a way of maintaining the human creative touch in a computer-assisted, pristine and crispy animated look. Yes, that was mostly late ’90s PR spin from the “Shrek” studio, but it has a kernel of truth in it.

Although the two historians — Leonard Maltin being the most famous — and most of the animators paint a pretty complete picture, not everybody interviewed here has a lot to say on the subject that anyone needs to hear. Watch the movie and you’ll see who I mean. Limited screen time means every interview has to advance our knowledge and appreciation of the art form.

The film’s history is solid in some regards, shaky in others. Sampling the first attempts at computer animation, using it for the Inside Big Ben sequence in “The Rescuers,” a test for a Disney CGI-assisted “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Aladdin’s” magic carpet and the ballroom breakthough moment in “Beauty and the Beast” take us through the baby steps that changed the way animation is filmed.

Making the historical point about how master animators became mentors of the last Golden Age’s stars further burnishes Disney’s “Nine Old Men” myth, the senior animators who tied later generations back to the “Bambi/Fantasia” era talents. Many a famous animator of the ’80s and ’90s learned at the feet of one of these figures, immortalized in “Frank and Ollie.” But read any reputable Disney biography. “The Nine Old Men” entered Disney lore because Walt promoted and lionized them for crossing the picket line to keep production going during the famous 1941 strike that unionized the cartoon studio.

I spent years covering this “Pencils” and “Pixels” struggle while working for the newspaper in Orlando, where “Mulan” and “Lilo & Stitch” were largely made at the now long-closed Disney’s Features Animation Florida. Deja, a couple of the “Old Men” and others interviewed in this film, Roy E. Disney and Katzenberg, Pomeroy and Pete Docter and the rest all put the best face on this “business” decision as it was happening — CGI requires fewer human artists — back then and even now.

Being brisk and cursory, “Pencils” skips over the many abortive efforts by Disney and others that always kept hand-drawn animation on the ropes between hits. There’s a mention of “The Fox and the Hound,” no discussion of the failures that preceded it and followed it. Bluth and Pomeroy’s later successes (“All Dogs go to Heaven”) and blundering later efforts with various studios are left out.

Big screen animation was on life support pre-“Little Mermaid.” TV animation had drifted to the point where few felt tempted to call it “art.” Overnight, all that changed. “Pencils” does a decent job of laying out how that happened and crediting those involved.

And if nothing else, it’s refreshing to remember Walt himself and others revive the word “cartoons,” which makes arrested development “animated” fanboys of today turn purple with rage. Yes, they were and are great artists. And yes, most of them would say their art is animation “cartoons.”

Rating: unrated, G-worthy

Cast: Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, John Musker, John Pomeroy, Jorge Gutierrez, Leonard Matlin, Mindy Johnson, Pete Docter, Mark Henn, Bruce W. Smith, Aaron Blaise and many others — narrated by Ming-Na Wen.

Credits: Directed by Bay Dariz and Phil Earnest, scripted by Bay Dariz. A Strike Back Studios release.

Running time: 1:24

“Satisfaction” ranks high up on the list of things a good thriller should provide, coming right after “thrills” and in the case of a horror film, hair-raising shocks and jolts.

Most horror movies adhere to a formula, so if you’re doing another version of “They’re picked off, one by one,” making the finale payoff with a surprise or two, a jolt and victims who fight back in the most satisfying ways is a must.

“The Conference” (“Konferensen”) is a Swedish bureaucritic-retreat-gone-wrong comic thriller. The “comic” side of things is a bit thin, as we see victims — the just and the unjust — meet their end in the usual (machete impaling, hanging by a flagpole or meat hook) horrific ways.

But by the time we’ve started to identify with this stressed, wronged public employee, that office pushover or this or that elderly cubicle drone, things get righteously violent in ways that satisfy even as the body count rises.

Tiny Kolarsjön, Sweden (It’s a real place. Ok, it’s actually a lake.) is about to break ground on a desperately-needed shopping mall, so its planning office is in a celebratory mood.

Boss Ingela (Maria Sid) has fudged the budget for them to take a celebratory “team building” trek to a rural resort, where team leader Jonas (Adam Lundgren) can do a victory lap with his lapdog/hype man Kaj (Christopher Nordenrot) there to prod everybody else into praising Jonas to the heavens.

But Lina (Katia Winter of TV’s “The Boys and “Dexter”), just back from a mental health leave of absence, isn’t in a celebrating mood. Others on their eight person staff have their doubts about this project — with a farmer they forced to sell, a developer’s sweetheart deal and the mall’s promised IKEA.

Even in Sweden they’re a little leery of IKEA.

“It takes money to make money,” Jonas chirps, breaking into English (the film is mostly in Swedish or dubbed if you prefer). “Dream work makes the TEAM work” is another American English bit of human resources-motivationspeak that bubbles into the conversation.

They’re just settling in to the resort where Jenny (Lola Zackow) presides over a tiny staff and sporty Cleo (Marie Agerhäll) will lead the “team building” exercises when things start to go wrong — the cook and others start disappearing.

A local mascot costume Jonas trots out falls into the wrong hands. And yes, the planners themselves join the ranks of the picked-off by a mascot-headed murderer.

An interesting choice in this Patrik Englund adaptation of a Mats Strandberg novel is having the women fight back with vigor, as if it’s their instinct to be on guard all the time against someone meaning them harm. The men? Not so much.

The characters are basically “types,” with Ingela being the boss who doesn’t want anybody questioning anything, accusing the newcomer Nadja (Bahar Pars) of sounding like “the Nuremberg Trials” for demanding details.

Jonas is the BS artist convincing everybody and the town they live in to give in to his bums rush about his Big Deal.

Torbjörn (Claes Hartelius) is the old guy who says “In MY day” more than once, in Swedish.

And Lina is the doubter who starts to see the big picture, if she can just survive long enough to put it all together.

Meanwhile, an unseen nut is hacking, stabbing and outboard motoring the planners to death.

The performances are adequate for the formulaic material, and the killings not as perfunctory as they might have been with victims frantically fighting back and learning about “teamwork” the hard way.

That makes for a Swedish thriller that picks off its characters, “Scream” or “Ten Little Indians” style, but satisfies us along the way, especially in the bang-up bloody finale.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Katia Winter, Adam Lundgren, Christoffer Nordenrot, Maria Sid, Eva Melander, Amed Bozan, Cecilia Nilsson, Bahar Pars, Claes Hartelius and Lola Zackow.

Credits: Directed by Patrik Englund, scripted by Thomas Moldestad and Patrik Eklund, based on a novel by Mats Strandberg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Filmmaker Ashley Avis made a pretty good modern American West version of the classic children’s novel “Black Beauty” for Disney a couple of years back. One thing she figured out adapting Anna Sewell’s novel is that it’s not really a “children’s book” at all, but a plea against the mistreatment of animals.

And another epiphany, shooting her film in and around mustangs of the West, is that all the years of TV news reports and TV magazine features about the Bureao of Land Management’s hand-in-glove-with-Big-Ranch-owners “management” of this symbolic animal of the West, hasn’t stopped the cruel “helicopter roundups.”

Over-“managed” herds are being decimated, with the BLM only fretting over the bad PR of the cynical sale of such horses to Mexican slaughterhouses, all to ensure “privileged” (fat cat) political donors secure all the water and public grazing lands of Arizona and Oregon, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming et al for their herds of sheep and cattle.

So Avis made it her mission to further publicize this inhumane treatment of the Spirit of the West, and this wasteful stealing-in-plain-sight, and brought her filmmaker’s eye to the animals she’s dead set on protecting. “Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West” is a blunt documentation of the “incompetent” and “conspiratorial” way the BLM and the under-exposed forces of greed go about this dirty business, hiding it from the public eye. And she accomplishes this via a gorgeous appreciation for the animals themselves.

The most famous herds have recognizable “family” members and a hierarchy, and people, including Avis have named the most familiar horses.

The filmmaker documents uneasy encounters with callous BLM underlings and functionaries, catching them in lies, the junk science the BLM uses to explain itself, all the rationalizing and re-rationalizing done in the name of “reducing” the herds to “protect the eco system,” when it’s the damned cattle and sheep who overgraze, foul water supplies and stress or wipe out native grasses and plants.

There’s a hapless BLM PR person who really should get another line of work, but no higher ups and no complicit members of Congress appear here to defend the way they fund BLM, which is only empowered to “manage” the mustangs, not the Big Donor ranchers and their beef-and-mutton-for-export business empires.

Avis interviews scientists, Native American advocates and assorted activists on this issue, from children on up, and notes how “attention” curbs the BLM’s excesses, but not witnessing their horse-injuring-and-killing roundups and penning up just emboldens this taxpayer-money wasting project and assault on “public” natural resources.

And she points her camera, from afar, at one main villian –– Dave Catoor, a man contracted to run the helicopters roundups carry out this Western “wildness” depleting atrocity and feed the horsemeat processing beast.

Yes, it’s a lopsided film. No, the Native arguments that “horses have always been here” and that herds that existed before the last ice age wiped out prehistoric horses in the Americas aren’t backed up by science (“Yet,” Avis suggests).

But there have been decades of reporting on this ill-advised and inhumane waste of a public resource, debunking the BS “overgrazing/starvation of the herds” spin the government and the political lackeys and Big Ranchers have shoveled out there. The junk science and obvious corruption of this has just grown more stark, the outrage more pronounced as bought-and-paid-for politicians and look-the-other-way bureaucrats refuse to honor existing laws or to change BLM practices and fire leaders who resist that.

Avis, who uses “feelings” and equine “family” and “freedom” a lot more than the handful of ranchers she talks to here would have, has made a film renewing this wild mustangs debate, one that uses striking images of beauty and “The Cove” expose style documentation of the cruelty and waste to pound home the point.

We’ve known about this forever. And the fact that nothing’s being done about it boils down to a handful of folks who need to be thwarted from committing these unjust and wasteful actions in our name, mismanaging our land and killing off a symbolic resource just because a few privileged old men want two more dimes to rub together in the pockets of their designer jeans.

Rating: unrated, some disturbing images

Credits: Directed and narrated by Ashley Avis. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:39

A cast of aces, a playful turn by Jamie Foxx, Bill Camp‘s volcanic villainy and the mere presence of Tommy Lee Jones make “The Burial” a courtroom drama well worth your time.

A true-ish account of a battle with everybody’s favorite bad guys — the funeral industry — features Foxx vamping as a theatrical attorney who plays juries like a fiddle and Jurnee Smollett (“Spiderhead,” TV’s “Lovecraft Country”) as his just as Black, just as quick to play the race card foe in a Mississippi contract case that is all about “greed” and predatory business practices in an industry infamous for them.

Foxx is Willie Gary, wildly successful personal injury attorney from that Personal Injury Lawyer Mecca, Florida, a hustler with his eyes on the cash-money prize and an Evangelist’s way with juries — especially juries with lots of Black members.

Jones plays Jeremiah O’Keefe, a Mississippi funeral home and burial insurance business operator in trouble with state regulators (In Mississippi?) for having tried his hand at investments that left him undercapitalized to honor the policies on his books.

He needs to sell part of the business to a Canadian funeral home and burial insurance empire callously run by a bottom-line-boosting tycoon named Ray Loewen (Bill Camp). O’Keefe’s longtime lawyer (Alan Ruck) handles the negotiations, right up to the point where it’s obvious the Canadian will never sign the contract, as he’ll be able to wait out the elderly O’Keefe into bankruptcy and/or death.

A young second-chair attorney (Mamoudou Athie) suggests they sue, and hire this charismatic fellow from Florida to fight the case. Because the suit will be filed in a mostly-Black county in Mississippi, probably tried by a Black judge. And self-made Willie Gary — given to referring to himself in the third person — relates to being Black and coming up hard and poor,a and Black jurors relate to him.

All this is over the objections of O’Keefe’s “let’s settle” lead attorney and O’Keefe’s wife’s (the great character actress Pamela Reed) protest that “old men don’t file lawsuits.”

It’s the OJ/Johnnie Cochrine ’90s, and Gary is “introduced” to his new client via a “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” tape. Gary, in all his splendor, humors young Hal Dockins’ (Athie) pitch, as it’s not his area of specialty, and plainly small potatoes.

But there’s Big Money in Death, as we’ve heard Camp’s Loewen chuckling to O’Keefe about the impending demise of 30 million Baby Boomers. This guy’s a bad actor in an industry infamous for them. And he’s worth billions.

Foxx and Smollett have a meet-cute scene pre-trial, each character none-too-subtly suggesting that she or he is more Black and more “street.”

Foxx and Jones play off each other in grand style, the gruff, blunt and unemotional old legend reacting to the charismatic, brash and peacocking younger legend. Foxx makes Willie’s every cocky line crackle with fun.

“You see me fighting a bear? Poor honey on it!”

I got a big kick out of Dorian Missick’s performance as one of Willie’s partners, his second snarky voice in an argument, a hip hop hype man for the boss.

The screenplay by Doug Wright and director Maggie Betts has an “everything in America is about race” subtext, because it is. Even trying a case between two white men in Black Mississippi has that as a flashpoint — lots of flashpoints.

Betts, who did “Novitiate” and further back, “The Carrier,” keeps this all on the “feel good” end of the spectrum and lets Foxx do his thing and everybody else take a shot at stealing this picture from him, and good luck with that.

Yes, it’s fictionalized and yes, it’s got lawyers on one side and funeral tycoons on the other so it’s not easy to root for either.

But “The Burial” makes an entertaining story about standing up to legal mistreatment, sticking up for the Little Man and punching up at predators who never seem to run out of ways to misuse and overcharge the grieving at their most vulnerable.

Rating: R for profanity

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones, Jurnee Smollett, Mamoudou Athie, Pamela Reed, Amanda Warren, Alan Ruck, Dorian Missick and Bill Camp.

Credits: Directed by Maggie Betts, scripted by Doug Wright and Maggie Betters, based on an article by Jonathan Harr. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 2:07

“Desperation Road” is a Southern Gothic tale of blood, family, a debt that may never be repaid and the debtor who is determined to change that.

Actress turned director Nadine Crocker’s cast gets the little things right as their director gets a few big things wrong in this story of small town crime, coincidence and the lingering ripples of a tragedy that throws one and all together in BFE, Mississippi.

The film, producers boast, was shot in a brisk 16 days in which a cast of seasoned pros — Garrett Hedlund, Mel Gibson and Willa Fitgerald of the “Scream” TV series and the new Netflix “House of Usher,” create hard lives they’ve lived, established relationships that we believe on screen and guilt and regrets we buy into.

And Crocker’s leaden, under-edited movie of a Michael Farris Smith novel sleepwalks us through those lives. It’s a slow-moving tragedy that never betrays the frantic pace of the production or gets up to speed at all. As Smith scripted it, did he refuse to slim this narrative down so that it plays in a way that holds our interest? Or does Crocker not get cutting for “pace” yet?

Fitzgerald plays a single mom scraping together enough money for a cheap motel by sex working the truckers who park outside. She’s in her late 20s and the mileage shows, but little Annalee (Pyper Braun) comes first.

A sexual shakedown by a local sheriff’s deputy turns deadly when she refuses to let herself be used by his “friends,” too. That’s when she gets his gun. And that’s when another movie dirty cop breathes his last.

On the lam and armed, a women’s shelter proves little refuge. She ends up carjacking a good’ol boy (Hedlund) at gunpoint.

Russell is fresh out of prison, and his return to town was accompanied by a beating. His dad (Gibson) figures ex-con or no, he needs a hunting rifle for protection. They’re not practical folks in this here corner of Mississippi.

Russell resolves to help this woman, who eventually reveals her name to be Maben.

“You don’t look like a killer to me,” he drawls. Where he’s been, “I seen plenty.”

He’ll have to keep that from his old buddy, Deputy Boyd (Woody McClain), maybe from his widowed Dad and Dad’s girlfriend Conseula (Paulina Gálvez) as well.

And he’ll have to steer even more clear of the vengeful, alcoholic Larry (Ryan Hurst), one of “the brothers” who beat him on his return and who plan to torment him to death, or so we gather.

Every actor in this picture makes the character feel lived in. Look at the way Fitzgerald scoops up young Miss Braun, a maternal connection from both that is credible from the start. Likewise, Gibson and Hedlund click as father and son, and Hurst shades his rage with layers of hurt and regret, a life unended by trauma years before.

But there’s no urgency to any of this. A cop-killer is on the loose, and the investigation isn’t that calling-all-cars/we-avenge-our-own emergency that reality and a hundred years of manhunt/womanhunt movies have taught us to expect. Maben’s in no mad rush to get away, and Russell is pretty laid back about everything he’s mixing himself up in.

That slack pacing gives us time to explore the dimensions of Larry’s pain and Russell’s guilt, but makes the tale’s coincidences stand out and lets impatience settle in.

Taking a pause for a bit of Mel Gibson theology may seem like a good idea.

“I got to believe we can be forgiven.”

And a few big moments happen. But Crocker dallies so much between them that we forget the stakes, as do the characters. “Desperation Road” staggers into “Slightly Inconvenienced Street,” and bores us to tears as it does.

Rating:R for some violence, sexual assault, language throughout, brief sexuality and nudity.

Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Willa Fitzgerald, Ryan Hurst, Woody McClain, Pyper Braun, Paulina Gálvez and Mel Gibson.

Credits: Nadine Crocker, scripted by Micheal Farris Smith. based on his novel. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:52

Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Blues fan Martin Scorsese must have had fun selecting the string band music, jazz and blues for his long period piece about the nearly erased history of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Some of the music is diegetic, played in person or spun on a 78rpm record seen in the scene.

Then there’s this tune Scorsese heard a lot when he helped assemble the classic documentary “Woodstock.”

It’s an old song revived by Canned Heat as a ’60s hippy anthem. Here’s the 1928 version we hear in “Flower Moon.”

The odd lovely moment slips into “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s grim and epic treatment of a systemic mass murder of Osage Indians for oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma. But then, when you’re Martin Scorsese and you put 206 minutes on the screen, something beautiful is sure to get in, if only by accident.

Scorese’s most indulgent film since the bloated gangster epic “The Irishman,” but with echoes of the patience-puncturing “Silence” and “Kundun,” “Flower Moon” is an intimate and detailed immersion in a horrific, slow-motion crime committed by a predatory political boss and his henchmen to manipulate, marry and even murder tribe members on “Indian land” that was rich with Oklahoma Crude.

It is forgotten “erased” history in the American epoch of manifest destiny and unfettered capitalism, and as such, it is designed to frustrate. Who are the “good guys” here? Who do we root for? Is justice coming, or at least comeuppance?

But the frustration extends to the “streaming length” “Netflix editing” of this bloated low-boil movie. Even with his trusty and equally-seasoned editor Thelma Schoonmaker — she, like Scorsese, is over 80 — the director of “Wolf of Wall Street” and the long and breathless “The Departed” turned in a cut nearly three and a half hours long.

Depending on how ruthless you are with repetition, excess coverage, scenes that add “color” but do nothing to advance the plot and indulgent pauses for self-conscious acting mannerisms (Jesse Plemons, take a bow, but blush when you do), this beast is burdened with 45 minutes or as much as 75 of pace-killing, story-deadening filler.

The film begins with a poetic prologue of oil discovery straight out of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and follows that with a  SECOND prologue of mock (and real) newsreel accounts of the richest people in America in the Jazz Age 1920s, the luxury-car (Pierce Arrow) luxury-goods buying Osage of Oklahoma.

I mean, I LOVE Scorsese. But come on. Choose ONE prologue.

I couldn’t stop thinking “Heaven’s Gate” as this crime-spree-as-saga unfolded, another tale of the unpleasant truth about America and The West. But that, at least, was burnished with the glow of grandeur, gorgeous images and compositions, production design that looked epic and lived-in, even if, like “Flower Moon,” it’s a tale where it’s hard to find somebody to root for.

We meet Ernest Burkhart, in uniform as he steps off the train in Fairfax, Oklahoma shortly after World War I. Played by a paunchy, 1920s dentistry version of Leonardo DiCaprio, Ernest is a man of simple wants and simple skills. He was a cook in the Army and ruptured himself so he can’t do manual labor any more. And “I love money.”

But not to worry, his uncle, the “King of Osage County,” rancher and deputy sheriff William “King” Hale (Robert DeNiro) can hook him up. There’s work, sure. But the money is with the Osage tribe, where the free-spending men are ripe for robbing, and women with a “full blooded stake” in their oil wealth, control of “head rights,” are there for the marrying.

The Osage are dying, and under suspicious circumstances, the viewer learns and Ernest eventually figures out. But not until after he’s met and taken a shine to fair Mollie Kyle. She’s played with a quiet, modest inscrutability by Lily Gladstone of “First Cow” and TV’s “Billions.”

Ernest finds himself smitten and ingratiated into the 25 families of Osage who supposedly hold the power in the place. But he’s also tangled up in his uncle and ruthless brother Byron’s (Scott Shepherd) assorted “jobs” related to procuring “head rights.”

In scene after scene, we see patronizing white banker “guardians” who make Mollie and others identify their status as “incompetent” when coming to them for their cash, unscrupulous doctors who “treat” Native Americans who all die by 50, many much younger, paternal King Hale and workers, servants and others who glower at the money the Osage have “but didn’t ‘earn.'”

Mollie, chatting in Osage about the white WWI veteran’s attention, acknowledges that this “coyote wants money.” “But he wants to be settled,” too. She warms to him.

It’s only after the marriage that we see the degree the Osage have been dehumanized by the racists in charge, and that worries about The Klan getting a foothold there are nothing, because the whole white power structure of the place is into killing Indians for profit.

The story is designed to frustrate because we keep waiting for conversions, characters to grow a conscience, for “The System” to protect victims from predators. Not in the unfettered 1920s, friends.

Tribal elders are at a loss. The days of Indian Wars are long past, they are few in number and now they’re being murdered with “no investigation,” one by one for this wealth they stumbled into.

“We can’t talk to the County” about this, one complains. “We can’t even go to The State of Oklahoma.”

And approaching President Laissez-Faire himself, Calvin Coolidge, seems as futile as it is desperate. But there’s this new tool in the Justice Department, the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation. That’s how ex-Texas Ranger Tom White (Plemens) is brought to town.

The leads are quite good, even if it seems DiCaprio is taking pains to sport the same puffy scowl, first scene to last. Other performances have an untrained-actor documentary reality about them, and some are “Come on, give the poor fellow another take” clumsiness. John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser are brought in for third act legal histrionics.

The music, musician cameos and period details are great, and I loved the way Scorsese stages the “Here’s what happened to everybody” epilogue, as a 1940s radio drama’s closing summation.

But the film is frustrating in unplanned ways, too. He’s made a grossly-under-edited picture too ready for its Apple TV+ afterlife, a drag that becomes an endurance contest without the dramatic flourishes to make anybody want to pause streaming it when they leave the room for a toilet break.

Compare this to Christopher Nolan’s flashy and brisk and quite long “Oppenheimer” and you’ll understand the difference between long and engrossing, and just long and wearing.

As with Cimino’s The West at its Ugliest “Heaven’s Gate,” Scorsese has delivered an ordeal pretty much guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth, one that in this case plays as pedestrian and repetitive, and never feels like an “epic.”

Rating: R for violence, some grisly images, and language

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons,
Tantoo Cardinal, Tatanka Means, Brendan Fraser, Yancy Red Corn, William Belleau and John Lithgow.

Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese, scripted by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book by David Grann. A Paramount release.

Running time: 3:26

You can’t really call it a preview when it’s the night before opening. But I missed it on the festival circuit and had to see it in a theater, no matter what my kidneys might say.

Three hours and 24 minutes of erased American history. Here we go.