Category: Blog Post

An Inconvenient Truth, 2006. Directed by Davis Guggenheim. Created by and Starring Al Gore (and, yes, today’s politicians are stars).

An Inconvenient Truth has been marketed, without a hint of irony, as ‘the most terrifying film you’ll ever see’. There’s some truth in that, though not, I think, in ways the filmmakers intended. For myself, watching Mr. Gore speak with passion and eloquence made me wonder just where this guy was back in the year 2000, and what this country would be like today had he emerged six years ago. To me, that’s terrifying.

An Inconvenient Truth serves two functions: to warn people about the dangers of global warming and to spring Al Gore back into the public eye. It succeeds quite well in both accounts, although I can say that, for myself, virtually none of Gore’s information was new. The film is terrifying if you’ve had your head in the sand for fifteen years or have gleaned all your news from Newsweek.

For a movie that claims to be bi-partisan, Truth clearly serves to jab at the current administration (no argument here) and gives us quite a personal bio of Mr. Gore–in fact, it often appears similar to those patriotic bios they show at conventions.

What concerns me is that An Inconvenient Truth, in my mind, has no place on movie screens. I don’t know quite how we reached this point, where our nation’s theaters have become marquees for what really amounts to propaganda–lest we not forget that propaganda is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we agree with it. But does it belong in a movie house? Look around, and now we’re seeing documentaries taking up tremendous amounts of space in our art-house theaters. There’s Michael Moore’s films, Super Size Me, The Yes Men (horrible), and the forthcoming Who Killed The Electric Car? and The US v. John Lennon… all of these films could be shown on PBS–Ken Burns does it, after all, to greater success than many of these movies–and leave the little space we have for foreign and indie films alone. By showing Truth in a theater, you’re really only attracting those people who are willing to go out of their way to see it. And those people are pretty much in your camp, anyway.

Gore is still his stiff self at times, and I’ve heard from not a few critics and friends how he still hasn’t got it, as in how Al Gore still couldn’t hold a crowd like, say, Jeb Bush. Which is sad, really: it shouldn’t matter whether a guy can’t come off as being someone you’d want to have a beer with, or whether he can do the job. At times Truth veers into the bizarre, such as when there are animations of polar bears and cute frogs. “You’ve got to save the frog,” Gore laughs. But then there are a few arresting images to go along with his portents of gloom and doom, such as giant fishing boats rusting in the nearly barren Aral Sea, an image of startling and terrible beauty. Perhaps someday Gore’s message will finally sink in; perhaps when he is someday president. An Inconvenient Truth seems aimed at both goals.

X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006. Directed by Brett Ratner, written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn. Starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellan (still the best reason to watch this series), Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Rebecca Romjin, Kelsey Grammar, Patrick Stewart, James Mardsen, Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Ben Foster, and character actors Josef Sommer, Anthony Heald, Michael Murphy, and Bill Duke.

X-Men III is a decent picture, a comic book picture, which is two strikes already in my book. The X-Men franchise has fascinated me predominantly because of the complexity of Magneto’s character. As played with great relish by Sir Ian McKellan, this Holocaust survivor is easily the most fascinating person in the whole franchise, someone you can relate to as well as hope for defeat.

As usual, the humans mean absolutely nothing, and it strikes me as the greatest weakness of the series that a relationship between a human and a mutant was never explored. Humans are so weak in these films that inevitably the plot always comes down to battles between the mutants, which leads me to wonder why in the hell is earth even in the picture? You could put the whole kit and caboodle on another planet, and you wouldn’t lose anything.

Once again, discrimination is the name of the game, and supposedly the X-Men series is a great lesson on the perils of prejudice. Hogwash. No one who cares watches X-Men for anything other than brain candy, and those who could stand to learn something about bigotry don’t learn from a comic book movie. In this episode, there’s a strong gay subtext: the father of a mutant seeks to ‘cure’ his son, who is about as homosexually iconic a character as I have ever seen in a mainstream film: young, with blonde locks, bare chested and in tight jeans, with angels wings. It’s as if Tony Kushner wrote the damn thing. Again, nothing’s wrong with this, except that this character has virtually no purpose except to fly around and save his father from peril.

X-Men has been rightly criticized for its ham-fisted direction, although I’ll say that Bryan Singer isn’t much better–a decent technician with little emotional connection to a plot. Brett Ratner just lets the thing fly, lots of explosions, lots of overacting that’s not kept in check (it wasn’t under Singer’s hand, either). There has been much worse fare this summer.

Nacho Libre, 2006. Directed by Jared Hess, written by Jared and Jerusha Hess and Mike White. Starring Jack Black, Hector Jimenez, Ana de la Reguera, and Darius Rose.

Mexicans sure are funny. This was hammered into my cranium about ten minutes into Nacho Libre. Early on, we see Jack Black serving grotesque meals to poor orphans, all the while talking like Speedy Gonzalez, that icon of Hispanic thespianship. Wrapped in sharp cinematography and a smart soundtrack and featuring a cast of bug-eyed, gaping children–all of whom are cute as buttons–Nacho Libre looks good, but could be the worst film I’ve seen this summer (were it not for some tight competition in the guise of Mission: Impossible, Poseidon, and The DaVinci Code). I’m not Hispanic, so I can’t say that this film insults my race; I can say that something this monumentally unfunny and mean-spirited insults me as a person.

Oddly enough, since I endured Nacho last Wednesday, the film has been widely praised as ‘sweet’. This is baffling. Nacho Libre dislikes many of its characters and has an outsider’s view of a culture, lazily researched. It’s ostensibly for kids but without a strong child character, just a selfish man in the character of Nacho and the actor Jack Black, who plays him. The plot is fast and loose, seeming more along the lines of one of those awful Saturday Night Live skit movies (Superstar, Stuart Saves His Family, etc.) and utterly without character. The humor as broad as Jack’s waistband, and I think there might have been ten laughs total in a packed theater.

The facts: Jack plays Nacho, son of a Mexican priest and a Scandinavian missionary, orphaned at a young age. Since losing his parents, he has been in charge of cooking hideous meals for the other orphans, basically green gunk that gives the priests diarrhea (thus begins the first of many unfunny bathroom jokes). Nacho loves the Lucha Libre wrestlers, those masked, caped buffoons who throw each other around in the ring, and who supposedly made some groovy films in the 70s, which this film utterly fails to pay homage to. Anyway, Nacho decides to become a Lucha Libre in order to get some glory and raise money so that the orphans can have something decent to eat.

Admittedly, you don’t need much of a plot to make a good comedy about Lucha Libre wrestling. Perhaps you don’t need a Hispanic playing the lead role, either–after all, Chuck Heston played a Mexican man in Touch of Evil, weakening a tremendous film (in Nacho, I yearned for the talents of the apparently too-thin John Leguizamo, or for side-kick Hector Jimenez to helm the thing).

“I pulled a Meryl Streep,” Black said, explaining his training for the role of Nacho. “I worked hard to perfect my accent. I wanted it to be kick-ass, but it was not easy.” That’s probably because it’s hard to be kick-ass like Streep when you’re a mediocre actor. Black is funny, but his ego demands to be center stage in this film, barely allowing other actors to breathe. And the film has its moments of thinly veiled disgust: Jack’s character is never humiliated to the extent of his pal Esquelito, who has shit smeared in his face, his hair pulled out, and is chased by a tremendously fat woman who has to crawl on all fours through tunnels like a sewer rat. It’s apparently fun to show this woman as being grotesquely fat, whereas Nacho is simply fat and fun, a man of eventual dignity.

Both the Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite and Mike White’s The Good Girl are rife with moments of loathing for characters unlike themselves– Dynamite still bewilders me; I thought it was fun to watch but filled, at times, with moments of unnecessary cruelty. And the girlfriend in White’s School of Rock is the one sour character in an otherwise charming film.

Perhaps I’d ignore much of this if the damn thing had just had a laugh or two. But the comic timing is leaden, and the scatological humor is so thoroughly out of place that the kids in the crowd didn’t even respond to it. Nacho Libre has the appearance of a movie that was fun to make, something that, had I been a member of the cast or crew, I’d have fond memories and a ton of belly laughs. Unfortunately, none of us were on the set, so we’re treated instead to an inside joke that barely registers a smile.

Nacho Libre is mercifully short, and when I emerged from the theater in my grumpy mood, I wondered to myself if white culture has ever had its movie equivalent, of people with goofy accents and a dumb plot with lame, insulting jokes.

Maybe it’s The DaVinci Code.