JACK BLACK AND NACHO LIBRE

(An only partly music-related post)

I have always greatly enjoyed the actor Jack Black. He's got a childlike innocence and a gift for physical comedy that I find very appealing. And he seems to be a big music lover. In a recent New York Times magazine interview, he praised the Raconteurs, the Strokes, and Radiohead. He was brilliant in his scene-stealing role as an obnoxious record store clerk in High Fidelity. And despite its rockist bent, School of Rock is one of the best movies ever about music, in particular about music as a liberating and non-conformist force.

So I'm pretty psyched to check out any flick that Jack Black is in. When I saw the preview for Nacho Libre, it looked hilarious and a must-see for me. But my first thought was also, "How the hell are they going to pull this off and not be totally offensive?" Given Hollywood's long and shameful history of minstrelsy, white actors taking non-white roles is not such a good look these days. But I was determined to reserve my judgement. After all, white performers like Danny Hoch -- and more frequently, non-white performers like Sarah Jones and Anna Deavere Smith -- play characters of all different races, and their work serves to challenge racism rather than reinforce it.

Unfortunately, the movie was hugely disappointing -- hardly any laughs! -- and what little humor exists is derived from the unlikely spectacle of seeing Jack Black play the part of a wide-eyed but good-hearted Mexican with a funny accent. Okay, he's supposed to be half-Scandinavian or something, but still. The rest of the all-Mexican cast are basically caricatures. Sure, it's a slapstick comedy, so it's meant to be cartoonish. But all together, the film felt pretty uncomfortable to me, if not flat-out racist. And it's just unfunny. Steer clear!

Hopefully, Jack Black will come back hard with the Tenacious D movie. (I'm not giving up on you, Jack!) His comedic talents were severely underutilized in the recent King Kong remake -- which was even more racist than Nacho Libre, but that's another story -- so Nacho was a step in the right direction in the sense that he was back to his outrageous self. Too bad it sucked...