Movie Nation

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.

“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

Yeah, he plays the father figure to three dorks searching for a treasure. But still, it’s an NBC-U-Peacock project. And he’s in it.

A November 17 release on Peacock.

Amazon is streaming this Deal with the Holiday Devil comedy Dec. 1.

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

Darin Scott directed, co-wrote and cast himself as the pre-Joseph Smith prophet Moroni from Smith’s “Book of Mormon” in a fourth century tale of white chosen people settling Pre-Colombian America, part of Smith’s 19th century religious text and historical thesis.

Smith “translated” this book from buried golden tablets which no else ever saw and which haven’t turned up since.

Of course, these days one must contend with auto-correct computer programs which rewrite “Moroni” as “moronic” (a couple of times as I type this), signifying…nothing, unless Joseph Smith was having people on and winking about it.

Billy Zane is the big name in the cast.

Dec. 8.

My review of “The Oath” is linked here.