Movie Nation

Titillatingly transgressive and deliriously blasphemous, “Dicks: The Musical” barrels through the “Oh no they didn’ts” fast and furiously, a movie so self-conciously gay, outrageous, rude and gay again that one wonders if only George Takei should be allowed to review it.

But we all know “Oh MY” would never do.

Raunchy, vulgar, campy and lower-than-lowbrow, it’s a cult film based on a cult musical and decidedly not for every taste. It’s the sort of spoof that religious cranks could embrace because it plays with their darkest “projected” phobias. No, not the pizza parlor thing.

“Look, Ethel! ‘They’ ARE into bestiality, incest and a Gay and Gay Friendly ‘God!'”

But get past the shock value of it all, the jolt of having “SNL” standout Bowen Yang lead one and all in a closing chorus of “God is a (gay slur that starts with “f” and sounds like “maggot”), and just one question hangs over the afterglow, or if you prefer aftertaste.

Is it funny?

Yeah, it pretty much is. Spit-takes, giggles, guffaws and airless, jaw-dropping “Oh no they DIDN’Ts” are scattered throughout this film starring the guys who conceived it — Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp. It’s brought to the screen by the cinema’s reigning shock jock, Larry Charles, who graduated from “Seinfeld” to “Religilous” and assorted “Borat” outrages, a director who knows where the laughs are and never ever hesitates to step over the line.

“Dicks” is about two big city sales “bros” — womanizers, woman-users, gauche yard dogs in every meaning of the word. But Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson) are but filling a void at the center of their empty lives. One grew up without a father, the other without a mother.

Yes, they’re twins, separated at birth. And it takes several minutes, a couple of double entendre production numbers about how “I’ll Always Be on Top” and a vamp by Megan Thee Stallion, their new “lady boss,” because such creatures now exist to them, before they figure out all this singing about how “No one understands what I’ve been through” is in vain.

Craig and Trevor know exactly what each other have been through because they’re “identical” (ahem) twins.

Once they figure that out, there’s nothing for it but to find a way to reconnect their parents “Parent Trap” style. The problem is, Evelyn (Megan Mullally SINGS!) is a wheelchair-bound ditz who probably doesn’t need a wheelchair. And Dad (Nathan Lane at his Nathan Laniest) realized he was gay, “queer as a three dollar bill,” a long time ago.

The movie, with a few sidebars into the realm of “sewer boys,” is as simple as that — comically misguided parental match-making, which with sexuality now being embraced as a “fluid” thing, isn’t all that far-fetched, a lot of sight gags (fake movie/play posters with a gay bent — “Lube!” is the word now that “Grease!” isn’t) — and a flurry of funny outtakes under the credits.

But Sharp and Jackson, wholly immersed in characters they’ve been taking over-the-top for years, are a hoot. Lane is a hoot-and-a-half, especially in the outtakes. Yang reminds us he will say, do or sing anything to get a laugh. Ms. Stallion leans into her raunchy brand with brio.

And Mullally, a gay icon among gay icons, all but steals the show — singing with a lisp, mastering the electric wheelchair as sight gag, indulging in all the openly-expressed vulgarisms network TV didn’t allow her to vamp on “Will & Grace.”

If you’re easily offended, or even have a modest vulgarity/raunch threshold, “Dicks” isn’t/aren’t for you. But in a midnight showing amongst the also-not-easily-shocked lovers of cult comedy dirty laughs, “Dicks” would be hard to beat. Ahem.

Rating: R, for all the reasons you’d expect, and then some, honey

Cast: Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, Megan Mullally, Nathan Lane, Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen Yang

Credits: Directed by Larry Charles, scripted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp. An A-24 release.

Running time: 1:26

We could all use something a little sunny of Middle Eastern origin right about now. This autobiographical (“ish”) dramedy by writer-director Maryam Keshavarz fills that need.

“The Persian Version” tells us the story of an LGBTQ Iranian-American daughter trying to “understand” and appreciate her not-quite-estranged mother, to heal the rift between them.

Think of the film as “The Joy Luck Club” with Iranian immigrants, as imagined by Gurinder “Bend it Like Beckham” Chadha. Yes, there’s music. And dancing.

It’s meandering and a little messy, and voice-over narrated almost to death. But the vivacious presence of newcomer Layla Mohammadi as spitfire daughter Leila and Liousha Noor as Shireen, her stern, disapproving “Strength of Silence” mother carry it with flashes of snark, spite and soul.

The first act is mostly about Leila, her life — gay, divorced, still calling her “ex” — and her beefs with her family. The second half is Leila’s mother’s life unraveled for her daughter’s and our inspection, including the “scandal” in Iran that pulled the family out of that country in the ’60s, as acted-out and narrated by younger Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet).

“I come from two cultures that used to be really in love with each other” Leila narrates — often to the camera. But Iran and American broke up. For most of her life, she’s been a “child of divorce,” “too Iranian in America, too American in Iran.”

Somehow, as the only daughter in a family of eight sons, she made her own way, got through grad school and followed her dream of “being the next Martin Scorsese,” making movies.

Her mother doesn’t approve of her sexuality, her stubbornness and her life choices. But Leila, with help from her live-in grandmother (Bella Warda, “screen presence” personified), she gets a handle on Mom’s struggle just as she learns she’s pregnant from a one-night-stand with a guy (Tom Byrne) Leila confused for a “cross-dresser”at a Halloween costume party.

He’s not gay. He’s “in ‘Hedwing and the Angry Inch” at a theater across town. And Max couldn’t help but be turned-on by Leila’s provocative “burkini” (bikini under a half-burka) costume for the night.

Messy? You don’t know the half of it. Keshavarz (“Circumstance” and “Viper Club”) takes us through Leila’s childhood, reducing her eight-man crew of brothers to “types,” dissects her parents’ marriage, embraces her mother’s real estate broker connection with immigrant buyers and skims over what Leila might do with this “relationship” that resulted in a baby when she’s pretty seriously invested in the whole lesbian thing.

Max? “He’s a thespian, not a lesbian,” because somebody needed to say it.

The narrative is a tad confusing in a “Which part of the timeline are we on now?” sense. And the structure makes “Persian Version” play like two movies grafted onto one another with the shared crutch of endless voice-over narration to make it all come together.

But there are moments of tear-jerking warmth and transgressive ebulliance.

Being women, mother and daughter could travel to Iran in the ’80s during the Iran-Iraq War without the risk of being drafted. But little Leila from the “good Muslim family” took it on herself to free the Ayatollah’s proles by smuggling “Michael Jackson, Prince and Cyndi Lauper” cassettes into the Islamic Republic.

A courtyard production number of Iranians dancing and interpreting “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is the gushy, life-affirming jolt of cuteness you didn’t know you needed right now.

Mohammadi, who’s had one-off roles on a few U.S. TV series, announces her leading lady presence with authority here, coquettishly playing to the camera and the viewer as she narrates her self-proclaimed “f–k-up,” status, eye-rolls her mother’s belief in “Shia magic realism” in moments of crisis and brushes by the menfolk in the family, save for dad’s need for a heart transplant.

The entire enterprise is a tad ungainly, rigidly structured in two halves but drifting off mother-daughter message with scenes of adorable cuteness and deflating patriarchical sexism in Islamic form. Shireen was forced to marry at 13, for instance.

Our writer-director seems to go easy on her villains here, mainly because she’s grown up enough to recognize one’s own responsibility for “living my truth” and being a happy, unselfish human being.

“The Persian Version” goes astray here and there. It pulls a few punches and leans on “cute” and near endless voice-over exposition. But it plays, and it’s the sweetest thing we’re likely to see with anything Middle Eastern about it this fall, and is worth seeing just for that.

Rating: R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Layla Mohammadi, Niousha Noor, Kamand Shafieisabet, Bijan Daneshmand, Bella Warda and Tom Byrne

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maryam Keshavarz. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:47

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

This period piece looks wicked fierce.

“Prison is no place for a young lady.”

The class conscious over-achiever, the “destined for greatness” ego, the epic scale and Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s “War Pigs” set the tone.

This looks more like a sure thing than the Joaquin? As Napoleon? earlier takes did.

Thanksgiving.

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

Time to saddle up…or strap on.

Something.

Yeah, it’s like that. With Megan Mullaly and Megan Theeeeeeeeee Stallion and Nathan Lane and Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp.

And Bowen Yang.

Of course.

It opens Friday. Is America prepared?

“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

A chilling take on family, home life and universal family ideals — getting ahead, “providing.” Only a monster presides over this family.

Like an even darker version of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas?”

“The Zone of Interest” opens in limited release Dec. 15, from A24.

If Jeffrey Wright is typecast in the movies, it’s too often as the smart, patient and effortlessly cool Black man who saves James Bond’s cookies or helps the hero figure it all out.

But every now and then, he gives us a little “street,” and he’s always pin-your-ears-back funny when he does. I used to follow him on Twitter, back when there was a Twitter, and he’d unload on racists, Trumpists and others in a way that made you wonder which Jeffrey Wright is the REAL Jeffrey Wright. Even typing, this great character actor is really good at playing roles.

Interviewing him didn’t give away the game, either. Quiet, considered answers to questions. Maybe he’s typecast as the smart, thoughtful guy for a reason.

About damned time he got a prestige picture leading man part.

Here, he’s a novelist forced to be Blacker in his fiction, with amusing results. Black screenwriters talk about this all the time. “Make this show/movie Blacker” according to the perceptions/tastes of a white producer or viewing public.

Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross and John Ortiz are among the familiar faces in this Toronto Film Fest award winner.

“American Fiction” opens for Oscar qualifying Dec. 22, wider release in Jan.

The preview/trailer is below. Here’s a link to my review of the film.