Art La Flamme

My Top 5 Top 5

1. Top 5 Recording Artists

– The Clash
– Johnny Cash
– Stiff Little Fingers
– Led Zeppelin
– The JAMs / KLF

2. Top 5 Records for a Monday

– Social Distortion – Social Distortion
– AC/DC – Back in Black
– Go Home Productions – This Was Pop
– Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison
– Dean Gray – American Edit

3. Top 5 Books

– Getting Things Done
– Good to Great
– Blink
– The Wisdom of Crowds
– Moneyball

4. Top 5 Things I Miss About My Wife

– The smile she gets when she sits down to a fajita dinner I made
– Her habit of kicking me when she sleeps
– Her shedding
– Her leather pants
– That smirk she has right about now, reading this

5. Top 5 Things I Liked About This Movie

– John Cusack talking to the camera. Normally, this is a fatal error, but he pulls it off.
– The soundtrack. I had forgotten about Stiff Little Fingers (buy this) until I saw this movie (again) a few years ago. The Beta Band? Yeah, they are that good. Go buy this one single from iTunes.
– Jack Black. He’s on fire in this film, a complete spaz. Great character, one that I suspect is not too far off from the real Jack Black.
– Charlie. No, I don’t have any girlfriends from my past who turned out like her.
– Bruce Freakin’ Springsteen, making a cameo as himself to sing a song. Awesome.

Watch this movie once. If you like it, go buy it, because it’s the type of movie that you’ll want to see again in 8 or 10 months.

I may be in a rut. There’s this pattern emerging — a see a good movie, and then I see a bad movie.

This is a bad movie.

I did not think it was possible to find a bad Jack Black movie, but I have. Nacho Libre just isn’t a good movie, as much as I want it to be. Never has been, never will be.

OK, Shallow Hal was pretty bad. But it was really bad.

Black plays Ignacio, a monk who loves wrestling and really doesn’t like being a monk. He wants to be a luchador — a great wrestling performer. After a turn of events, he teams up with Steve, aka The Skeleton, to become Nacho, a masked wrestler. As a team, they are horrible, but they do make money just for participating.

And with the money, Ignacio can buy fresh food for his day job as the cook at the orphanage at the monastery. it’s better than nothing, but it’s still not what Ignacio wants out of life. He wants more. He wants to be a famous wrestler and, well, he also wants the nun that has started to teach at the orphanage. He’s in loooooooove.

With time, he wrestles more, they wrestle more, and they fare better.

It’s not all horrible. The midgets are funny. The crazy love life of The Skeleton is pretty funny. And the movie is rich in the culture of Mexico’s wrestling, which is pretty awesome.

But really, you can skip this. If you’re a hard core Jack Black fan, OK, see it. But everyone else — skip it.