Saturday, July 22, 2006

A Cute Little Movie

This will easily be the shortest film review I've ever written, but I feel it's worth writing anyway, if only because I'm afraid the movie reviewed won't last very long in Philippine theaters.

Nacho Libre, a movie about a cook in a Mexican oprhanage who secretly longs to wrestle as a luchador, reteams star Jack Black (King Kong) with writer and co-producer Mike White (School of Rock, Orange County). Jack plays Ignacio, a.k.a. Nacho, whose life as a cook is miserable but for the fact that he loves the orphans he cooks for (and the nun who shows up one day to teach them). Things change for him when, upon running into a street vagabond named Esquelito (Hector Jimenez), he feels he has finally found his tag-team partner and ticket into lucha libre glory. The movie enters laugh-a-minute territory from this point and doesn't stop.

This film, otherwise a cut-and-dried kid's movie, is infused with Black's borderline insanity and wonderful antics, but without the crassness which usually turns him off to some viewers. He elevates the material past mere straight-up slapstick and really makes this 100 minutes time well-spent.

Audience response here doesn't seem too favorable, so I exhort anyone who reads this movie to go out and see this movie, and take your kids, too; it teaches selflessness and how to have a really good laugh.

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