Double Movie Review

Cassie and I watched two movies this week, Nacho Libre and An Inconvient Truth (opposite ends of the spectrum huh?). Nacho Libre is the next movie by Jared Hess the man who brought Napoleon Dynamite. I am a big fan of Napoleon Dynamite and was looking forward to this movie (also because I’m a big fan of Jack Black). This movie brought me back to think about why ND was a good movie. It is difficult to make a good movie without a plot, like NP, and make it work. What made it a great movie was that it had so many lines that I found myself repeating over and over again. People also can relate to the huge loser in High School who just didn’t get it (by being that loser or seeing him in the hallways). We can also relate to the people in high school who thought they were hot shit. In total we know that high school was marginalized and didn’t matter, some learn this after high school and some way past high school. Ultimately that is what I think NP is about, how little high school matters. NP was in an isolated part of the United States where the people there are even more isolated and generally don’t know what goes on beyond their little worlds, and they don’t care. That is why I think is behind NP that makes it a great movie.

Nacho Libre (Free Nacho) has Mr. Black, but little else. There was one scene that was fucking hilarious, and it wasn’t because of Mr. Black. Jack himself acts like himself and it is old enough where it really isn’t that funny. The strange thing is that I can relate to knowing someone who wanted to become a professional wrestler (you the man Scott) but I could not see anything like that in this movie. Like NP there are a lot of long blank stares in the camera by unusual looking people, but it is not funny here because it is difficult to understand what people are thinking. The wrestling scenes themselves are boring and unfunny and without them there is little else. There were many points in this movie where I thought about leaving and sneaking into Tokyo Drift. This is a bad movie. Mr. Black, it is time to make a movie that can show your acting talent (like Adam Sandler did with Punch Drunk Love) and if this is the only “type” of movie that Mr. Hess can make please stop making movies.

An Inconvenient Truth on the other hand is not a funny movie, but the few jokes that Al Gore (The Goremeister) made got more laughs than Free Nacho. This is a good movie, not a great movie, but a movie that everyone should see. The looming ecological (economic, political, etc…) crisis is an inconvenient truth so the title says it all. The movie is bits of Al Gore’s speech on global warming interlaced with parts of Al Gore’s life. The flow of the movie is great and one can get a sense of why Al Gore went into politics and why he’s so emotional about this issue. There are a few things that I learned but the ultimate end of the movie remains the same. Global warming is a fact, there is no debate, people don’t want to recognize these facts because they are inconvenient, and this selfishness is denying our children a real future. The interlacing of Al Gore’s life works great because we can see how the world has changed and how attitudes have changed about a great deal besides environmentalism. Then we’re left to fit it all together. People have accused Gore of inducing fear, strangely these are the same people who are constantly screaming “terrorists,” “9/11”, and “radical Islam,” but Al Gore never tells the viewer what to think. The facts are presented and the viewer is assumed to be smart enough to come to their own conclusion. This is not one of the best movies of the year, or ever, but it is a movie that everyone should see.