The D Gets a “B”

You’ll find mucho heavy-metal music on my no-fly list (not that anyone is keeping score), and there’s an awful lot of terrible hard rock that I find impossible to stomach. Can’t stand any of the dimwitted, party-hearty 1980s L.A. hair bands (all Poisonous Motley Ratts to me), and their Euro counterparts. Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Scorpions, and their dungeons-and-dragons-y ilk make me laugh derisively. And other than getting a chuckle out of old drug-addled Ozzy, the only thing I like about Black Sabbath is one of the group’s earliest tracks, “Paranoid.” And only as a quick jolt to the brain pan.Yet I love many tracks by AC/DC, Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Deep Purple and glam-rockers such as T. Rex, Slade, and Mott the Hoople, because their music is catchy and melodic rather than ponderous or droning, and their lyrics tend to be clever rather than dopey. I perk up when I hear the Zep, even when the tempo crawls, the band galumphs along like a drunken brontosaurus, and Plant’s words are nothing more than hippy-dippy blather. And I’m a fool for Metallica’s thundering “Enter Sandman.”Then, there’s my affection for the folk-metal duo Tenacious D - actor-musician Jack Black and his partner-in-sonic-japery Kyle Gass, who trade in comic, grandiose, but acoustic approximations of the quintessential, screechy, idiotic, Satan-obsessed heavy-metal that I hate. Paradoxical? Nah. The D is funny, and Black and Gass are decent musicians.In small doses (a song or two, or a short film or skit), Tenacious D is simply hilarious. Even though they obviously love the overwrought crap they’re parodying, the quality of the burlesque garners enough laughs to excuse their fealty to the likes of Ronnie James Dio, etc. An entire album is a different story, as the welcome wears thin. So I expected the duo’s new feature film – a highly-fictionalized origin story titled “Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny” – to try my patience as it recounted how Jack met Kyle, started up the act, and achieved rock-and-roll transcendence in pursuit of a magical, cursed guitar pick that insures stardom at a cost.One of the posters for the film Tenacious D: The Pick of DestinyInstead, it turned out to be a pretty entertaining, laugh-inducing ride from its scatological animated opening to its climactic battle with – yep! – Satan himself, as perfectly portrayed by (Spoiler Warning!) none other than Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana fame. There are also great cameos from Tim Robbins, Ben Stiller, Meat Loaf and a few others, as well as a lot of wacky, similar-sounding tunes from the D.Is it vulgar and silly and disposable? Yep. Could it have been improved by trimming 15 minutes from the running time? Probably. Is it as funny and charming as “School of Rock,” which also starred Black? Nope. Will it thrill fans of the D and amuse a lot of the rest of us? It is destined!