Nacho Libre: Worth Another Look.
October 14th 2006 00:41
Black in orbit
Nacho Libre will not do as well in Australia. There were three people and us in the theatre. It is worth another look and it may make cult status like the other comic masterpiece of Jared Hess, Napoleon Dynamite. Did I say other masterpiece meaning that Nacho is also a master work?
The other Jared Hess film, Napoleon Dynamite is a genre gem, no argument. My oldest son has perfected the Napoleon Dynamite way of running and never fails to bring a laugh.
The plot of Nacho, in miniature is this. Black is an orphaned monk Ignacio. He is probably only a monk because he was raised in a Mexican orphanage and so there was no other career. Hopeless in the priestly duties he is made the monastery cook. Because of the poor diet, he is unable to make any thing other than rather disgusting nachos and corn chips. The latter are donated by a restaurant in town and it is while collecting these on his lawn-mower-scooter hybrid that he discovers the world of the Luchadors, the flamboyant Mexican wrestlers. He wants to become one to save his impoverished orphanage and to impress the new nun, Ana de la Reguera. Ana comes from that wonderful line of beautiful, petite Latin actresses like Selma Hayek and Penelope Cruz that look as though they spend most of their time getting depilated. Black and the corn chip thief Esquelto, played by Hector Jimenez, go on to wealth and fame as they struggle against a long line of amazing wrestlers including a pair of dwarf twins who look as though they just stepped out of a Grimm Brothers nightmare.
Not every one likes Spanish food (or the poorer Mexican variant) but will acquire the taste if they eat around. It’s the same with the culture. Much of what happens in Nacho will not mean much to Australians but in the US it will be gold. Much more of America speaks Spanish than is realized here. When you are in Florida it is language number one, not English. Jared Hess captures what it must be like to be Latino, and Mexican. This last sentence is meaningless, of course and I cannot really say it but it sounds good in a movie review.
Sexy Nun
Jack B is of a long tradition of fat American comics. He isn’t that fat, thank god. He is not so fat, for example that he is uncomfortable flinging himself around the place but if he went on a diet he would lose a lot of fan mail. He is also ostensibly vulgar but manages to carry this off because a lot of Mexico is in the toilet. Toilet humour is a very dicey genre in any culture. He is also a superb developer of the plot in which poor have-nothing people make good but when they make it good it’s an elevation from the grubby to the ridiculous rather than the sublime to the ridiculous. The new clothes are expensive but exquisitely tasteless.
Grubbiness is what Mexico is all about too and Hess does portray this well. There is also the ever present corn, transmogrophied into every imaginable dish including a missile which ends up in the eye socket of a Mestizo villain and something Australians wont understand, the richness of salad. Jack Black really begins to bring about a change in the orphanage diet when he presents his Ana with a bowl of greens in a grand gesture which he completes with a flamboyant spray of bottled salad dressing.
Nacho is an authentic though vicarious visit to a part of the Americas which you will never see on tour but will recognize if you ever go there. You will see the diet, the country side, the people and their all embracing religion which seems to offer them elevation from squalor to kitsch. For that reason it is enlightening. As well as this, there is the vulgarian humour but that fits precisely into this ethnos. It is enlightenment. Australians should take a look at it because the comedy makes it an easy journey.
They will understand a lot more about the Spanish variant of Catholicism. Black successfully parodies the saintly tradition of living in the wilderness and the iconicism which so often burdens the immature catholic in which he thinks every tortured statue of Christ is really watching him in his paroxysm of guilt.
At the end of the movie, all the good ending stuff that usually occurs in this typical plot is realized but with the funny irony that happiness in Mexico is little more than clean clothes and a bus trip to Xochicalco.
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Comment by Aaron
But, then again a lot of people liked it, like Napoleon Dyanamite, which I again also hated. Even more than Nacho Libre.
Aaron.
Comment by spain01
Juan Carlos
spain again
While your'e about it
Viva l'difference
Fire News Blog
Cities dying of thirst.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by spain01
Juan Carlos
spain again
While your'e about it
Viva l'difference
Fire News Blog
Cities dying of thirst.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by spain01
Juan Carlos
spain again
While your'e about it
Viva l'difference
Fire News Blog
Cities dying of thirst.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by spain01
Juan Carlos
spain again
While your'e about it
Viva l'difference
Fire News Blog
Cities dying of thirst.