Nacho Libre
PG, 100 minutes
Now playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6
In Nacho Libre, Jack Black has turned himself into a sight gag. His hair permed, a mustache crawling across his upper lip, he cavorts about the screen in one of the most ludicrous outfits since Howard Stern fouled the air as Fartman. There’s a pair of stretchy pants, over which Black’s capacious gut pours like lava. There’s a cape, for that superhero je ne sais quoi. And there’s a cover-the-entire-head mask that makes him look like an escapee from a bondage-and-discipline convention. But if that still isn’t enough to get you rolling in the aisles, throw in a dirt-cheap Mexican accent, which Black wields like a weapon, slaying the audience before it’s had a chance to ask whether any of this is working. Oh, and a brief look at Black’s butt cleavage. Chris Farley, where are you when we need you?
With his ability to disappear into that fat-guy persona, Farley might have made something out of Ignacio (Spanish for “ignoramus”?), a Scandinavian-Mexican friar/cook who longs to be a luchador (which is like our professional wrestlers, only even less professional). And Black certainly has his moments, as when he launches into a mariachi serenade straight out of the Tenacious D songbook. But the movie seems to think that the audience will be sufficiently amused just watching Nacho get clobbered, in and out of the ring, by a succession of midgets, giants and every size in between. Determined to make it in a field for which he seems supremely unqualified, Ignacio keeps coming back for more, accompanied by his string-bean tag-team partner, Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez). And that’s pretty much it for plot.
Director and co-scriptwriter Jared Hess got by with even less plot in his first movie, Napoleon Dynamite, which alerted an entire generation to the pleasures of tater tots. But Jon Heder’s Napoleon, a geek’s geek who refused to hide under the bleachers all day, seemed like the real deal—that guy who sat next to you in math class, drawing pictures of unicorns. Black’s Ignacio, on the other hand, seems a little forced. The movie itself—which was shot in Mexico with a number of Mexican actors, both amateur and professional—has a pleasantly strange vibe, like one of those East European comedies where the local customs would baffle an anthropologist. But the scriptwriters haven’t figured out how to fully exploit this milieu. Pinned against the ropes while being relentlessly pummeled, Black ends up being all dressed up, with nowhere to go.
The Lake House
PG, 105 minutes
Now playing at Carmike Cinema 6
Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock emote up a storm—well, a light drizzle, anyway—in The Lake House. But it was the house I fell in love with: It’s one of those all-glass pavilions on stilts that only a movie star could possibly afford. So gracefully does it hover over the water, both spoiling and enhancing the view, that you keep being distracted from the holes in the movie’s plot. An epistolary novel set in the age of You’ve Got Mail, The Lake House asks us to believe that Reeves’ architect/developer and Bullock’s doctor have occupied this crystal palace in separate years, and are only able to communicate with each other via snail mail from their respective time periods. Can their blossoming love break the bonds imposed by the space-time continuum? Can they meet at The Shop Around the Corner? Somewhere in Time? An Internet café?
Reeves and Bullock met in Speed, of course, but that little piece of hell-on-wheels wasn’t known for its romantic subplot. Here, director Alejandro Agresti (Valentin) slows things down considerably, and he goes for a more somber mood, with the sun rarely peeking through overcast skies. Reeves is bummed because his father (Christopher Plummer), a world-class architect who designed the house at the lake, is also a world-class bastard. Bullock is bummed because… Well, it’s not quite clear why she’s bummed, but she’s quite clearly bummed. Overall, the actress shows little of the warmth that usually offsets that slight chilliness in her screen presence (except in Crash, of course, where she was pure frozen tundra all the way). Agresti, who’s Argentinian, takes a chance by allowing these two sad sacks to wallow in their own self-pity, and you know what? It pays off.
Pays off eventually, I should say. As in Sleepless in Seattle, our romantic leads spend most of the movie apart, and neither of their stories is especially compelling—but they accumulate power as they go along, culminating in a scene where, plausibility be damned, they meet briefly at a party. I would never have thought Reeves could pull off such a scene; he’s the Al Gore of actors, earnest and dull, especially when trying not to seem so earnest. But he’s starting to settle into his stiffness, and occasionally even convert it into gravitas. And his line readings have gradually become looser, more real. Bullock maybe takes the dour thing too far this time (she’s relentlessly downbeat, except for the ugh moment when she plays chess with her dog), but it’s the movie’s dourness, its refusal to let gray skies morph into blue, that makes it such a refreshing weepie. After all, who wants their tears glistening in the sunlight?