Depending on who you talk to, this HBO fantasy series is either a sophisticated political drama with sword and sorcery trappings — admittedly more sword and less sorcery — or a blatant excuse for some softcore porn exhibitionism.

I’d say it’s both, and the tug of war battle between the two factions is more likely to be the undoing of the show than, say, the child actors growing up too fast.

For those who have never watched, the show is based on a series of books by the unfortunately suspender-wearing author George R. R. Martin about the political realignments in a madeup world that vaguely resembles some barbaric period on earth.

The series follows the lives of people in various places during these conflicts, most notably two prominent families, the vile Lannisters and the rugged Starks. What has garnered as much attention as the sophistication in plotting and intensity in performances is the show’s tendency to indulge in exposition dumps amid fairly graphic sex scenes. I say fairly because though pretty much everything on a woman is revealed to the camera, less of the male characters play peek-a-boo with the audience, and if it’s two male characters having sex, you won’t see anything as graphic.

Though there is some male eye candy, it’s never required to sit doggie-style on a bed with clear lighting and the saliva of the scene’s director practically dripping on its rear-end while HBO counts its money.

Two women? You see almost anything your brain can conjure up, complete with long explanations of plot points that the writers are too lazy or rushed or something to just demonstrate with actual story.

The problem here isn’t that there are sex scenes— this is not about being prudish; go on, have sex scenes— or that the sex scenes represent lazy writing. The problem is that the sex scenes are meant to be part of a larger expression of the gender politics in the show, but the way the scenes are realized undercut any such meaning and, instead, work against the bigger point.

It’s like the old cautionary drug and sex films of the ’30s that wallowed in the behavior they supposedly railed against. More to the point, it’s not about the characters having sex — it’s about the viewer watching them have sex. And that’s an entirely different thing.

The idea is that within the world of “Game of Thrones,” women are objects, disposable in many cases and often just used and humiliated as receptacles for the base requirements of the male body. Point well taken, I say, especially when juxtaposed to stories of women fighting for their place in society and using the tools the men give them in order to seize power—“Game of Thrones” is full of these stories. The lot of women— and what they do to survive — is at the center of the show and part of its strength.

The problem is you can’t rail about women as objects and then use them as such on your own terms. If the sexual interaction in the show is supposed to be part of the unpleasant lot of women in this world, then why isn’t the sex presented as unpleasant and reflective of this situation?

“Game of Thrones” has publicly prided itself on a gruesome, violent realism of a darker, though admittedly made-up, era.

This permeates all portions of the story, especially with the craggy, portly, hairy, old, misshapen men cutting things off of each other and stabbing everyone and living in filth. It’s a grim view of humanity — except when a naked woman is involved, then all these counter-aesthetics are thrown out the window.

Why no gross, hairy, scarred women having unbearably repulsive sex?

Why are rapes or beatings featuring naked women shot with a gauzy steam and anticipation similar to the sex scenes? It begins to feel manipulative, and that’s a crummy feeling in otherwise well-realized fiction.

The real problem with the show is that roughly 90 percent of any given episode— it varies — doesn’t focus on hot women servicing male cast members.

This means there’s a whole lot more in there that’s worth seeing. It’s this 10 percent that’s causing all the issues — 10 percent, I have come to understand, that isn’t reflective of the books the show is based on, 10 percent that comes down to Hollywood producers who don’t trust the actual material to maintain an audience.

That 10 percent represents a casual form of sexism that too often gets overlooked in film and television. I think one day these moments will be like those unsettling ones when you’re watching a wonderful film from the 1930s when, out of nowhere, a black person finally appears as a servant and utters something in a dialect and delivery that is so comically racist that you can’t believe such an era ever existed.

It’s horrible, it’s disrupting, and it’s embarrassing for us in the future who witness such ugliness in works that are otherwise worthy and intelligent.

It also represents a missed genre opportunity. Like the “Lord of the Rings” films before it, “Game of Thrones” has the opportunity to not live up to the wider expectations that the fantasy genre merely exists as wishfulfillment for 13-year-old boys.

Such a shame that it insists on giving ammunition to every naysayer hoping to tear it down because they hate the clichés of the genre “Game of Thrones” is supposed to transcend.

“Blue” follows a trio as they skip school in order to hit the waves, but they find themselves tempted by rumors of gruesome remains of a dead body on the train track. They don’t run right out there to see the thing, though— they meander, they quibble, they curse, they cause harmless trouble, they act like kids who have broken the leash.

But there’s a provincialism endemic in small-town life, which often rears its ugly head in everyday rhetoric as racism, and such is the case here. Not overt racism, but the first pings of fear when difference makes itself apparent.

In this case, it’s the slow but steady integration of weird, blue blobbish people from the sea who are washed ashore in odd little homemade boats and stand out from the bland whiteness of the typical dullness. They are not the center of an invasion story, but the edges of a feeling that pervades “Blue,” the notion that something is changing, that the reasons the town was manufactured in the first place are rapidly dissipating.

It’s a surreal and sometimes silly stage, but Grant’s power at taking this cartoon version of his own hometown and expressing the isolation that is part of his heritage is powerful and appropriately unsettling. What could have been a tossoff tale about three kids goofing around in a beach town in Australia becomes something much, much more. It’s an attempt to focus on the beginning of something in the haze of childhood, haunting and a bit confused, an experience we all face in our efforts to compile our own histories.

The piece follows the stories of four archetypal characters as they make their ways across Italy and along the Mediterranean Sea. At center is a scholar, who has lost her luggage and spends the course of the opera trying to get it back and encountering the other characters. Their inner lives are realized through video, and music unites them in action.

The performance of “Oceanic Verses” takes place tonight at the museum at 8.

The version being performed at Mass MoCA will be a semistaged one, concentrating on the film aspect of the multimedia presentation, and the four leads and how they come together with the technology. Later performances will incorporate both a full chorus and choir as it moves toward its final version.

The project began as a commissioned piece of music four years ago. Carnegie Hall asked Prestini for work, and she chose as her subject matter the area where she was at a residency — Lecce, in the Salento area of Italy — where she had been working with kids in a foster care home.

“I ended up recording them, which I do often, and what emerged from that beautiful session was a beginning of falling in love with the folk music of the area,” Prestini said. “As I began to investigate the folk music, I began to put together a collection of songs of poetry and scenes of the area that inspired me.”

The commission gave Prestini an immediate opportunity to apply what she was learning into thematic terms, wrapping her musical ideas within four archetypal characters, who became the muses for the piece, alongside meditations on various other texts, poems and songs relating to the region.

“It was more abstract; it was the poetic essences of these characters,” said Prestini. “There were these pillars in my own mind of what I wanted the story to be, to explore this woman who ends up at some point getting lost in the arc of the opera, and I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore motherhood. There were these pillars that I wanted to explore, but they have become much more concrete in this newer version.”

Expanding on the themes and music came with the realization that she also wanted to expand the creative scope. She had already brought filmmaker Ali Hossaini in to be part of the project, and after performing the piece at Carnegie Hall, enlisted Donna Di Novelli to work on the libretto for a fulllength opera version of the piece that not only mined the same concerns in a different way, but also gave the source poems and songs a new context within a stronger narrative that captured the poetry of the Italian landscape as Prestini encountered it.

“When you go there, there’s this sense of a fading civilization, and yet it’s ripe with hope for new direction,” she said. “That’s because of the patterns of immigration that have gone through this land for centuries.” These patterns trace Prestini’s early childhood there, as well as the music that comes out of her.

“It was a place that I had left at a very young age,” Prestini said. “I think I was 2 or 3 and we had moved to a border town in Mexico, so it took a long time to get back to Italy and to understand it in terms of how it would have specific resonance in my own art. This was the first time that I went and I actually did see something that resonated with me. What it was was the music. It was these patterns of immigration, and it was this land that was slowly falling apart and had a very, very strong beauty.” The opera is multi-lingual, most notably incorporating different dialects into the presentation, as well as the language Griko, which is currently spoken by only about 400 people.

“I speak several different languages and I think in different languages, and I wanted to create a piece that felt natural to me in terms of these different characters,” Prestini said. “They have these incredible moments in the opera where it just felt more natural to have them sing in the original dialect.”

Griko is derived from Greek and is mostly limited to the areas of Salerno and Calabria in Italy. Its place in the opera is most profound when the main character has a breakdown and, at one point, hears a song in Griko that becomes transformative and also brings Prestini’s work in the area full circle.

“It’s sung by the children, which in fact was the song that I had recorded many, many years before when I was in Italy,” she said, “and then juxtaposed with the understanding of the words that the woman choir sings, which forces her to take a really good look at her own life and the decisions she’s made.”

“All of this is to say that it’s so strong to hear this song sung in this language that is disappearing and that thread of cultures that are fading, of languages that are being lost, is definitely woven into the tapestry of the opera.”

The multi-media presentation is integral to the emotional weight of the opera and is the center of Prestini’s creative concerns for more than a decade. It’s become such a natural coupling for her that the realizations are seamless in her brain— she can’t, at this point, have one without the other.

“I’m always thinking about imagery and I’m always thinking about words, and I’m always thinking about electronics,” Prestini said, “and as I’ve been working more and more in multimedia, it’s been a very natural, fluid process. I definitely write music and have a very specific image in my mind.”

At the same time, as Prestini creates that balance, she refuses to skimp on the music, which may well function as the foundation of a sturdy whole work.

“The reality is that it’s very important to me that the music stands on its own,” she said. “We live in this world of visuals and through visuals, our minds have become so much more facile. So, if I’m going to create a piece like this, I’m going to want to think extraordinarily deeply about the visual counterpoint and anything else going on.

“What I’ve learned, and what I’m learning, when you do a work like a video opera, it’s an incredible balance. It affects staging, it affects pacing and the sets, and you want to make sure that certain things are foreground and certain things are background. But in terms of why I’m so passionate about it is that I believe that if you’re going to do multimedia, it should be done really well and really thought out and with equal attention to each discipline.”

Multimedia productions also offer the chance for her, as a composer, to work in collaborations that musical composition wouldn’t typically offer as well as direct the course of her own creative output and the results of those endeavors.

“It’s a whole other level,” said Prestini. “The really good thing about commissioning your own work and working this way is that there’s no set path. You decide how you’re going to collaborate, you decide who you’re going to work with, and you try to get it as right as possible. I’ve learned so much from the techniques of filmmakers and the techniques of poets and visual artists, and it’s actually affected how I create music.”

These methods from other artistic disciplines that Prestini has learned not only contribute to the richness and process of her composition work, but contribute to the shared areas of the collaborates, in which each becomes part of a whole creative body that must work with as few bumps between them as possible.

“If you work with a filmmaker or visual artist, they think much more abstractly and as composers,” Prestini said. “We have to think about the horizontal nature of music, like how does it work in time. I found it was much easier to create visual timelines to be able to all be on the same page. It’s just a beautiful process of learning how to communicate and learning skills and constantly refining the poetic counterpoints.”

The end goal, as evidenced in works like “Oceanic Verses,” is not an opera with visual components, but like the landscape it seeks to reflect, a multisensorial piece of art that might boast strong parts but transcends them all when brought together in a way that you couldn’t imagine them separate at all; they form something entirely new.

“It should be so fluid that it almost feels like one expression, one mode of expression,” Prestini said. “It’s a form of synesthesia.”

Hogencamp was beaten to near death by five men outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y., went into a coma and came out with scant recollection of his past life. His way of rebuilding the self has been to document his life — both inner and outer — through a series of stunning photographs, in which dolls inhabit a miniature world he created in his back yard called Marwencol.

Malmberg’s film of the same name — his directorial debut — has gone onto widespread acclaim, receiving numerous awards and honors and offering Hogencamp with a feature length film that explains his personality and his work to the world. This gave him a platform for understanding what had happened to him and who he had become.

For Malmberg, it was a fortuitous pairing that led to creating a work that reflected what he had always wanted to do, in subject matter and process.

“It was very much a case of me and the people I was working with, and Mark, traveling down the same road,” he said, “because of his memory loss and because of his brain damage, it was the perfect fit of these people going, ‘We’re going to figure it out together.’ Those were some of the most satisfying things, giving him that sense of closure.”

Malmberg had already been on his own creative journey when he encountered Hogen camp’s work. More to the point, he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with the creative side of his film pursuits. His years in film school gave him practical skills and experience, but he was unclear how that would translate into personal work, and that sent Malmberg on a road of creative soul searching.

“I found that I had the most fun doing little goofy things by myself,” Malmberg said. “So when it came time to graduate, I didn’t quite understand how I was going to run a crew of 100 people and be a, quote-un quote, capital-D director, and still do a good job and do something that was interesting to me and something that was close to the kinds of films I really liked, which were artistic, interesting films.”

Editing became the skill that brought him regular employment, and the resulting stints editing documentaries helped him realize that the form was very reminiscent of running around on your own with a Super 8 camera in film school — casual, intimate, immediate and personal, as well as the thing he most loved to do.

” ‘Marwencol’ was definitely a synthesis of all that work,” Malmberg said. “I always felt like the editing was always practice, practice, practice. It’s wonderful work, and I loved cutting more than anything. But in the back of my mind, I was hoping that it could be practice for something that I could do.”

Editing also prepared him for the true challenges of documentary filmmaking and where they deceptively existed in the process; they weren’t quite what Malmberg thought it was going to be.

“I thought it was going to be directing exercise, but the directing part was easy,” he said. “Here’s this subject, who’s literally photographed his inner-self. It’s not like I need to bring out a fancy camera. The challenge was the ed it ing, trying to do the detective work, the psychological stuff. They become the same thing after awhile.”

Malmberg initially thought he was going to dip his toes into documentary filmmaking, but found Hogencamp held much more substance behind his work than either imagined. Hogencamp was a mystery to be solved, and the process of filming only accentuated the levels that Malm berg would have to peel away for a comprehensive film that did justice to the photographer and his work.

“I thought ‘I’ll try directing a short,’ and I think the week I decided I was going to do this, I saw his photographs and thought, ‘Okay, this is my short,’ ” said Malmberg. “I thought it would be this clever little eight-minute short and it was just going to be so simple. I had already mapped it out in my mind. You fool yourself that you get to decide, so I had it all storyboarded, and then I went out and met him, and he filled in all those things that I was imagining. But there was clearly 100 things more, so I just kept filming and filming and filmlng, and slowly that clever little short went to the wayside and I was 300 tapes in.

“I feel like documentary can work really well when it’s about something that’s hard to define, the gray area stuff. At least for me. Maybe it’s be cause I like to edit and think about stuff more than I like to shoot it. I like subjects to be complicated. You’re going to be working on it forever anyway, so you might as well go on this big journey.”

Encountering each other gave Hogencamp an extra di mension to his own journey while offering Malmberg a subject that demanded investigation and affected him emotionally, not just as a project. The film became as much about Malmberg’s creative awakening as anything else.

“He was really not only an amazing person, but somebody who was really at the crossroads and was willing to share that,” Malmberg said. “That’s the rarest thing in the world.”

The film ended up being embraced by audiences as well as the subject, so much so that Hogencamp carries around a copy with him for whenever people don’t understand him — he can just hand it over as his explanation.

“Mark always said to me, it was like a chorus when I first met him — no one understands,” Malmberg said. “No one un der stands. That was the first note card I wrote. No one un derstands. Make them understand. My job at that time was to figure it out and then present it in a way that people would then understand him.”

The film Malmberg is currently working on has similar origins and themes when it comes to the concept of art as a tool for self-discovery and expression of the soul to the point that the art is actually an alternative version of the reality it is meant to represent.

Malmberg’s film will focus on an Italian hill town that has existed since the 1400s and its very unusual practice of the last half-century, which has seen it mount a play each year in which all the townspeople play themselves and the drama addresses all of their issues. Often, the town will invite others they might have a conflict with in order to spur conversation.

“A few years ago, there was a modern bungalow-style development being built down at the bottom of the hill,” Malmberg said, “and they were very upset about this and felt like it was affecting their town. So they wrote a play about that and invited the people from those new houses to watch the play and discuss.”

The project began with a chance encounter four years ago that Malmberg would not have thought would ever lead to anything.

“We were early for dinner and we had 20 minutes to kill, and we went in this painter’s studio,” he said. “This man was painting in the corner and he invited us in, but he was clearly very intent on what he was doing. I remember thinking, ‘What’s going on with this guy?’ I really wanted to find out more. Turns out he’s the guy who directs the plays and has been involved in the theater for their entire history, and is one of the leaders of this theater group. It’s strange to me that we were here and it just popped in my head.”

The project has made Malmberg realize that his job is literally answering one of the most basic questions everyone asks themselves at any given moment of the day.

“You walk down the street and you think, ‘What’s that guy’s story?’ ” said Malmberg. “You never expect to find out, so it’s weird to me that we’re actually here now, four years later, when that day I said, ‘Hmm, what’s that guys story?’ “

Malmberg says the first guy he thought that about, Mark Hog encamp, has seen his own transformation continue on from brain damage survivor to photo grapher to documentary subject.

“I swear he feels like a different and better person,” Malm berg said. “He’s much more social. He’s got a girlfriend. He’s really much happier. He’s in a position now where he’s going to start selling his artwork.

“I saw him last in August of last year — my wife and I went out to dinner with him, which he never would have done in the first place. The most I could get him to do was go to Burger King, because he loves Burger King, but we went to a nice sit-down restaurant in Kingston, and it dawned on us during the course of the meal that he had really changed. He would say himself that he’s grown up through all this.”

As a side product of his own development, Hogencamp has given Malmberg the opportunity to do what he always felt he wanted to do — and the per spec tive to know how to do it right.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s a ton of money in documentaries, anyhow, so you might as well do what you really care about,” Malmberg said. “You’ve got a choice, and there’s no point in selling out in documentaries. What’s the price being paid? Just go do something interesting.”

Much of the population still hasn’t encountered science fiction in its literary form, and that’s an important distinction. The written word often re vealed the genre as one of satire and surrealism, as well as scientific and technological speculation, where everything came together in a way that masked social criticism as something fantastical. Science fiction in its literary form is the exact opposite of most examples of it on the screen — it is often subversive.

Right on time, to prove that point, is this graphic novel adaptation of the Jack Vance short story of the same title, which tells the tale of Edwer Thissell, the new consul on the planet Sirene who fumbles along in a series of cultural mishaps that defy mastery. In a set-up worthy of Lewis Carroll, has to function on a world that, among other things, requires masks (governed by a complicated, symbolic hierarchy) be worn in public, that communication is achieved through a litany of musical instruments and song styles. Social cues on Sirene are realized through an etiquette born on an alien world and, therefore, the furthest thing from natural behavior and consideration to an off-worlder. When Thissell is charg ed with the task of tracking down an off-world criminal, he must navigate these differences to the deficit of his pursuit.

Humayoun Ibrahim’s European illustration style — and presentation of action — draws a direct line between classic science fiction literature and its spiritual descendent in the visual arts. Not the screen versions that the public embraces to the tune of billions of dollars a year, but the more thoughtful, experimental form of the graphic novel, which is in service to the larger point of view inherent in Vance’s work.

If anything, “The Moon Moth” shows just how natural and powerful the two forms are as a team, and begs for further explorations in mining the rich philosophies of science fiction past for a new audience seeking substance rather than just special effects.

This is partially a problem of language and time. The further we get away from the period in which Lovecraft wrote — the early 20th century — the more alien and impenetrable his language can become. He was a verbose guy, given to narrative histrionics, and while this all added up to a one of a kind style, it also obscures some of the pleasures of his ideas to modern and, especially, younger audiences.

“The Lovecraft Anthology” attempts to reconcile that by adapting several of his short stories into graphic form, allowing the language to coexist with the stark visuals he conjures for more clarity and chills. It’s an entirely successful collection that gets to the heart of what Lovecraft stories are about. Of course, they’re about all the things many other horror stories are about — paranoia, fear, darkness, monsters, mysteries, secrets, the supernatural — but these are just the singular parts of them. Together, Lovecraft’s stories hint at something larger going on in the world, something hidden away that is slowly returning.

The seven stories contained within, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” realized by creators like Ian Edginton and D’Israeli — and there isn’t one better than the other in the bunch, they are all great and equally successful — work together to make clear that central horror.

There is something wrong in the world, some universal secret stretching back to the earliest days of the universe, that lies at the center of the Lovecraft mythos. He used these central ideas to craft his tales, and editor Dan Lockwood has brought together a group of tales that understand they are all bits of the same story, required to drag you into their own horrors while playing an integral part as a piece of a delicious, nightmarish puzzle that calls for further volumes.

Sendak’s picture books were unlikely successes in some ways, in that they often honed in on the darkness of children and respected that color with sensitivity and intelligence. So it is with this French film, which tells the story of a real world Max, navigating a reality created by unreliable adults and shifty peers, and displaying his disappointed ferocity as his only coping mechanism, despite the judgment who some who demand children act as if they don’t have the same depth as their aged counterparts.

Cyril (Thomas Doret) is an orphan, whose father has abandoned him to a children’s home, although he refuses to believe his father would do such a thing — certainly it’s unthinkable in regard to someone you believe loves you — and continues to act out like a caged animal in an effort to retrace his father’s steps and be reunited with him.

Cyril’s hostility to the grown-ups who try to reveal the truth to him as cold logic, presented through the testimonials of people who saw his dad move and the actual sight of the abandoned apartment, only grows. But a chance encounter with a woman in a doctor’s office as Cyril finally breaks down during a flight from his keepers dictates his next trajectory.

Samantha (Cécile De France), a hair dresser, tracks down Cyril’s much-missed bicycle and ends up, at Cyril’s request, becoming a weekend foster parent. With patience and love, she attempts the difficult task of navigating what the boy needs emotionally to come to terms with reality and what he has no clue he really needs. She fumbles, as does Cyril, but what unfolds is a remarkably realistic and respectful tale that champions a child’s emotional depth and acknowledges the right to mess up on the path to growth.

“The Kid With A Bike” makes plain that what people take to heart are their own experiences. You can lay out reality as a series of charts and graphs and hard proof, you can tell them how things should be based on your own experience, but each person walks an individual line and each realization must be made by yourself in the end. Children have that capacity as much as adults, and the dictatorial confines of adult society are often more than the grown-ups can even function within.

In an unexpected way, this is an exact reflection of the world Maurice Sendak wrought. In his classic “Where the Wild Things Are,” it’s not just about children running wild, but about children being human, warts and all, and the understanding of humanity that is required for all of us to live together.

Such is the case with “Kid with a Bike” and, much like “Where the Wild Things Are,” it’s final prescription is hopeful, respectful, understanding and without any sentimentality. It’s a hard life, but sometimes we can make it harder than it needs to be on others, and that — to directors Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, as well as Sendak — is as unnecessary as it is vicious.

“North Carolina: Where you can marry your cousin, just not your gay cousin,” the image read as it spread across Facebook and elsewhere.

Some might say this is banking on a Southern stereotype to combat something that is purely political, that it’s a low-blow sort of rebuttal and downright offensive.

As stereotypes go, though, it’s true. Completely true. And I can tell you about it firsthand.

My ancestors are from Georgia and Virginia. All of them. As near as I can tell, the Georgia ones kept their skeletons enough in their closets that I have no clue what sort of degenerate behavior they got up to, but, oh, boy, the Virginia ones. My grandmother and grandfather were first cousins, and their tale of forbidden love that is condoned by the law dived further into stereotypical Southern gothic drama by incorporating attempted murder, madness and God-fearing Christianity into the mix.

But I won’t elaborate.

I will, as a defensive qualifier to my own biology, say that I have seen a bit of research lately that says the whole first cousin thing is not as big a deal as we all think. Studies have shown that such pairings pose no higher chance of birth defects than couples who don’t share the same grandparents, and while my investigations into these matters are purely casual, the sources of my reading convince me that science is on the side of first cousin marriage.

But still, there’s the ick factor, right? I mean, it’s your cousin.

But that’s just me. And probably you. The social norm is that you don’t marry your first cousin. However, I don’t think any state ever felt the need to put it in their constitutions that marriage is a sacred contract between two people no more closely related than second cousins.

The opposition to gay marriage is almost always brought up as one created over religious concerns. I don’t know if you’ve read your Bible lately, particularly the details of lineages that lead to kings and saviors, but there is an awful lot of intermarriage going on, and not just between cousins. It’s no big deal when half-siblings Sarah and Abraham tie the knot. In turn, Abraham’s brother married Abraham’s daughter — hey, family tradition.

More to the point — didn’t Adam and Eve’s children populate the world? Brothers and sisters? That’s okay, I guess, as long as it’s not brothers and brothers, or sisters and sisters.

The thing is, the Bible doesn’t have much to say about gay marriage. I have searched and searched and searched, and found several passages speaking about gay sex, but I think we can all agree that sex and marriage are two different actions. At best, the Bible has more of a problem with the gay honeymoon than the marriage part.

The larger point, though, is that these laws in the Book of Leviticus are cherry-picked for political purposes. It’s decreed in Leviticus that the man laying with man stuff mostly comes into play, the same book of laws that demands we not let cattle graze with other kinds of cattle, we don’t cut our hair or shave or, my favorite, handicapped people cannot worship God.

Really, that’s there: “For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. 18 No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed.”

Any farmer in North Carolina who lets his different breeds of cows graze together, any man in North Carolina who shaves and person in North Carolina who sits in a wheelchair but goes inside a church, I demand constitutional amendments to take care of each of you. But keep interbreeding — that is a Biblical tradition worth clinging to, obviously. And my grandparents thank you.

Katzenjammer boasts four multi-instrumentalists from Norway — Oslo girls Anne Marit Bergheim, Marianne Sveen, Solveig Heilo and Turid Jørgensen — who create songs from a variety of sounds — from feel-good folk to torch songs to punk to Balkan styles and more — that they toss up into the air and let fall in the most unexpected places. Together, the foursome has mastered a total of 25 different instruments, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if each one was utilized on this tour de force.

The musical kaleidoscope begins at full power with the title track, a brooding Danny Elfman-esque dirge that starts out with musical box delicacy and then segues into the stomping acoustic empowerment song, “I Will Dance When I Walk Away,” which surely deserves to be a major pop hit in our country.

Nothing you remotely expect follows. “Cherry Pie” is an adorable, naughty, sing-along bit of ragtime, while “Land Of Confusion” dredges up an overwrought and goofy Genesis song from the 1980s and gives it the darkness and power it probably never expected even of itself.

Highlights from there include the Celtic head bobber, “Rock-Paper-Scissors”; the insanely frantic and cartoonish “Cocktails and Ruby Slippers,” which mixes Nina Hagen shrieks with an Abbaesque vocal chorus; the punk-screamer “Loathsome M” and the furious prog-metal, Hungarian opera that is “Gypsy Flee.”

If music is a multi-purpose item for you — if you like to dance to it, sing to it, tap to it, think to it and drink to it, if it’s a item of pleasure and a platform for learning — then this is surely your album of the year.

There are lots of people in the world ready and willing to tell you how you should live, and in doing so, display a moral disgust as the justification for their harassment. In the Hungarian film “Delta,” this dynamic is treated with an artful elegance and emotional distance, as director Kornél Mundruczó examines familial closeness, biological and spiritual bonding and the tremors that erupt from behind closed doors.

Mihail (Felix Lajko) returns home to find his estranged mother, only to be introduced to a half-sister (Orsolya Toth) he didn’t know he had. Exhibiting an immediate connection like magnets, sister Fauna drifts over to stay with Mihail at his father’s homestead, which he has decided to reclaim and build a house on. It’s no wonder they gravitate toward each other — the waterfront village is grim, its inhabitants insular and hostile, and if their mother is indication, a woman’s lot is to be passed from man to man to man, upon early death from alcoholism. Given that there seem to be few women in town, it’s a horrific future to look toward, and the other main part in the male hostility toward Mihail.

What unfolds does contain very subtle — and, yeah, tasteful — incestual eroticism, but in the context of the film, you can’t help but sympathize with the choice of the brother and sister, and, in fact, it almost seems that the brother has returned in order to provide his sister with all the parts of a family she has been deprived of for years — father, brother, husband.

If the emotions of the film sometimes seem reserved, it’s as much a reflection of the lead characters as it is an aesthetic choice. Both brother and sister keep their emotions safe behind their stoic faces, hidden from the world they inhabit.

Who can blame them? It’s the sort of place where revealing something honest is a weakness, and in the war of survival, a weakness is to be used for victory.

Despite the reservations in their faces, they can’t undo the ultimate weakness they reveal to their community — their devotion to each other. Such ties fester in the decaying hearts of the other people living there.

“Delta” challenges the viewer in the same way popular and excellent foreign films like “Incendies,” “Melancholia,” “A Separation” and “Dog Tooth” investigate situations that offer an opportunity for the moral high ground, and insists that we bathe ourselves in the same ambiguity the characters do for the simple reason that life is far from simple and we all have to live together.