Pretty Fluff

Nacho Libre is not a particularly good movie. It's better than The Break-Up, but so is contracting cholera. Jack Black is a genius of some type, though, and his physical insanity is worth several good laughs, especially during the first few wrestling scenes, during which I laughed out loud.

For such a silly exercise, the movie is strangely beautiful. Its locations and color schemes and soundtrack create a pleasing aesthetic experience, and as I've said a thousand times before, I think we have Wes Anderson to both thank and blame for this. (His influence is in almost every frame, not to mention the use of music and the pseudo-emotional-heaviness wafting through the entire hollow escapade.) We seem to have lost a certain kind of absurd comedy plainly packaged -- Caddyshack and Stripes come to mind -- and this development is a mixed bag. It means we have much more attractive fluff, but that very attractiveness raises our expectations of the material, which rarely rises to meet the sophistication of the bells and whistles. Even Anderson, whose first two movies were brilliant, reached the level of well-decorated pointlessness with The Life Aquatic.

Meanwhile, Jack Black is interviewed in today's New York Times Magazine, and I got a kick out of this exchange:

And how did you end up as the lead singer in a comedy band, after studying Shakespeare and Brecht and serious drama at U.C.L.A.?

Comedy seemed a lot less pretentious to me. There is something about acting, about believing it is real, about Strasberg and "Feel the coffee cup, feel the coffee cup, it's real." It's all just so touchy-feely.