'Dicks': An overdose of campy spirit

 

   Dicks: The Musical  carries on a heavy flirtation with transgression before delivering a reassuring message about the legitimacy of all kinds of love. 

   Director Larry Charles (Borat) turns a show written by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp into an upbeat big-screen musical that leans heavily on old-pro theatrical skills provided by Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally as a long-divorced couple.

 The movie tells the story of identical twins (Jackson and Sharp) separated at birth. One grew up with Lane’s character; the other with Mullally’s. 

   When the twins, who don't look alike, meet as adults, they attempt to reunite their parents -- a difficult task because Dad is openly gay.

   Mom, whose vagina has separated from her body (don't ask), spends her time in a wheel chair. Dad, by the way, keeps two hideous mini-monsters caged in his home, lovingly referring to them as his "sewer boys." They were captured in city sewers.

   Charles brings the musical numbers to the kind of boil that can elicit applause from an audience that’s willing to go along with the movie's profanity and even sacrilege. Bowen Yang appears as God, another gay character. No need pointing out who might be offended.

      Megan Thee Stallion portrays the boss who supervises both men, each of whom considers himself a crack salesman. 

      I don’t know precisely what Charles had in mind but I took the movie as an encouragement to consider the strange relationship between form and content. Charles astutely follows the form of a musical, paying careful attention to when tunes appear, how they're staged, and who performs them. 

     As a result, he provides genre kick without us having to worry too much about the sentiments being shared.

     Still, if you’re not up for a dirty-talking movie, there’s no need to try this one. Dicks delivers a mixed bag of rapidly fired jokey dialogue, but is less successful at making the grotesque amusing.

      And even if you're ready for everything Dicks has to offer, you may wish the movie seemed like a less self-conscious attempt to demonstrate how rude, crude, and naughty it can be.

What to make of ‘Beau is Afraid?’

   
   

    Artificial trees rotate, changing colors during the production of a play that's being staged outdoors in what seems like an enchanted forest.

   In a decaying urban neighborhood, the streets teem with miscreants, one of whom makes a habit of running about naked before repeatedly stabbing random passersby.

   A psychiatrist asks his patient whether he has thought about killing his mother.

   An aggressively cheerful suburban couple cares for a man the wife ran over with her car, putting him up in a room belonging to their snarly teenage daughter.

    On first impression, these images defy connection, but they're all part of director Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, a three-hour mashup of styles, locations, and concerns held together -- more or less -- by the performance of Joaquin Phoenix.

    The always adventurous Phoenix portrays Beau, a character whose interior life may be the sole source of this darkly funny, highly inventive, and sometimes wearying movie.

   In fairness to Aster's outsized ambitions, it would be wrong  either to advise viewers to see or avoid a movie that, at least for me, sustained involvement and sometimes amusement for nearly two hours and 30 minutes of its running time.

    Fearful and anxious, Beau serves as a springboard from which Aster launches a parade of images, many startling, eerie, and impressive. 

     Aster (Hereditary and Midsommnar) mixes humor with horror as he unleashes a wild psychological storm, much of it revolving around Beau's mother issues.

     We meet Mom in flashbacks and in the film's final segment. Zoe Lister-Jones plays Beau's mom as younger woman, and Armen Nehapetian portrays Beau as a 13-year-old whose sexual development can't escape Mom's supervisory attentions.

     In a bravura performance, Patti LuPone turns up as Beau's adult mom. Throughout the movie, Beau tries to reach Washington state for his mother's funeral, a conceit that takes him from slum, to suburbia, to forest, to a dazzlingly home in Washington. 

     Once unleashed, LuPone, launches into tirades fueled by furious resentment about how much she's sacrificed for Beau, a character who seems to be stuck in a some indeterminate limbo.

     Beau Is Afraid is so packed with characters and set pieces that it's impossible to mention all of them without writing a review that would rival the movie in length. 

    Highlight performances include: 

    Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan as a suburban couple who lost a son during a war in Caracas, Venezuela. No, the imagined seems to have nothing to do with anything.

    Kylie Rogers keeps up with the weirdness as the daughter of this suburban couple, who also house an emotionally damaged veteran (Denis Menochet) in a trailer in their backyard.

    Parker Posey appears in a sex scene that's both thematically significant and starkly funny.

    A beautiful, haunting animation sequence qualifies as a kind of character in itself.

    Hints of other movies waft through the weirdness. Maybe it's me, but I felt traces of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz.

    It's impossible to discuss the movie's ending without spoilers. All I'll say is that Aster seems to arrive at three points at which the story might be over. I experienced a letdown each time I realized that wasn't the case. Aster had more to show -- if not to say.

    Does of all this work? It's a fair question but one that admits of no simple answer. Watching Beau Is Afraid, I sometimes wondered whether it might have made a dozen brilliant short films. I  also wondered whether David Lynch could have hit the same kind of notes in a more economical two hours. 

   And, yes,  the overworked and somewhat stale mother/son dynamic wore itself out.

   And yet ... 

   Time may reveal whether Aster's movie should be considered a fragmented work of genius or an incoherent oddity or something else entirely. 

   Whatever it is, Beau Is Afraid deserves not to be dismissed.

Snow White as warrior princess

This version of Snow White is great when it comes to upholstery. The rest? Not so much.

Call her "Snow." That's what everyone in the movie Mirror Mirror does, so you might as well join the crowd and bring a heavy helping of contemporary informality to a classic fairy tale.

We're talking about Snow White, the mythic beauty who probably is best known for being a character in Disney's first, full-length animated feature, which hit the nation's screens in 1937 and spawned one of the most durable trivia questions ever: Name all seven dwarfs. I usually forget Bashful, but that's another story.

The Snow White story has been through a variety of mutations, and now arrives on the screen as a tale narrated by the evil queen (Julia Roberts), a woman who presides over her kingdom from a golden clamshell of a throne and who becomes the main attraction in a movie dominated by outlandish costumes, lavish sets and hairdos so preposterous they look as if they belong in a topiary.

It's almost as if the filmmakers knew they lacked a great story and decided to dazzle us with production-value footwork. We're even treated to a CGI monster for Snow (Lily Collins) to fight.

That's right. Director Tarsem Singh (The Cell and Immortals) has concocted a version of the Snow White story that turns pretty, pure Snow into a warrior princess. The screenplay by Melissa Wallack and Jason Keller also transforms the seven dwarfs into mini-warriors and bandits who leap about on stilts and, most irreverently of all, turns the handsome prince (Armie Hammer) into a bit of a bumbling doofus.

The movie thrives on upending fairy-tale conventions, toppling or toying with some of the genre's hoariest cliches. Fairy-tale bashing is always welcome, but this edition of Snow White is more about production design than anything else, and despite a lot of trying, Mirror Mirror can't sustain the spirit of abandon that would have made it soar. The movie creeps right up to Tim Burtonesque weirdness without quite going over the oddball edge.

An ultra-arch Roberts may not make the greatest evil queen ever, but she seems to be having a good time. An under-utilized Nathan Lane has an amusing turn as advisor and henchman to the queen. If you get bored, you can admire the work of the make-up department, which has given Collins's face the radiance of a polished apple. (Yes, the screenwriters find a way to work the fabled apple into the script, but if you're looking for the satisfactions offered by a traditional telling of a beloved tale, you'll be disappointed.)

The dwarfs? They're much less cuddly than in the Disney version, which, I suppose, can be considered a form of progress. But the film doesn't go quite far enough with its wit and has almost no flare for satire.

I had no say in the matter, of course, but if it had been up to me, I'd have scrapped "Snow" and gone with Ms. White -- at least once or twice.