I watched all of Jack Black's Nacho Libre Confessionals, and while they got a bit dull at the end, I liked them overall, especially the ones with Jared Hess. I was really looking forward to seeing the film, but the reviews have been awful, so I had decided not to bother.
But Gwen liked it, so maybe I'll try after all. After all, I really did love Napoleon Dynamite, though not for the same reasons as some other people. The person who recommended it to me said it was the funniest movie he'd seen in a decade. For me, yeah, it was funny, but more than that, I totally related to the setting, which was very much like Wasco, California, the town I lived in when I was nine and ten, and I related to the dorkiness of the main characters.
One of my major crushes in grade seven was a guy that was a lot like Pedro. He was the class president too. And I was very uncool, like Napoleon's love interest. And in some ways, I was a bit like Napoleon himself. So it wasn't just about the jokes for me.
Gwen mentions racial stereotyping in Napoleon. I don't know specifically what the complaints were about stereotypes, but I do know how the treatment of race in the film bothered me personally. It was the notion that a woman like LaFawnduh would fall for a guy like Kip. Which, taken alone, could be nothing. It doesn't necessarily imply that a loser white guy is still a catch for an attractive black woman. Not necessarily. But taken together with the fact that the chick that Uncle Rico finally hooks up with appears to be native American, I'm left thinking, "What, so non-white women are just happy to get ANY white guy, no matter how much of a loser he is?"
If the racial stereotype complaints were about Pedro's cousins, well, yeah, they are a stereotype, but I didn't think the treatment of them was offensive. There were a lot of guys like that in Wasco, and I like to remember them and laugh with my sister. Same goes for LaFawnduh's converting Kip into a stereotypical black man. It didn't seem offensive to me, aside from what I mentioned above, and it was quite hilarious.
Anyway, so I've got to make some plans to watch Nacho, if only to decide for myself that it really is rotten.
