Porn King (2005) – DVD

July 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blue Underground, Documentary, DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
directed by James Guardino

by Alex Jackson James Guardino’s Porn King is a sterling example of how not to make a documentary. It fails on every conceivable level–I seriously cannot imagine any possible way to justify this movie. Above all I feel a real anger towards Guardino: he’s wasting my time. He has nothing to say and no passion for the medium; he treats this film like a glorified lottery ticket to the big leagues. My beef with most documentaries is that they’re all steak and no sizzle. They have a subject but no particular opinion on it and have little desire to realize it cinematically. That’s considered a virtue in some corners. Many believe that information should be unaffected and vanilla–objective. The thing about objectivity, though, is that it subjugates the author, clouding him in anonymity and making him and his film invulnerable to critique. I end up writing the same thing about almost every documentary I review, because otherwise I would be forced to discuss the subject matter exclusively, and a film’s subject matter should never be the sole criterion by which to judge its quality.

Nanny McPhee (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, France, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by Emma Thompson, based on the "Nurse Matilda" books by Christianna Brand
directed by Kirk Jones

by Walter Chaw Often as garish and shrill as it is magical and enchanting, Kirk Jones' Nanny McPhee throws into sharp relief the difficulty of describing the tightrope so artfully navigated by Babe: Pig in the City. In its favour, there are strong, fairytale-sinister undercurrents to it that feel authentic where the darkness of the slick Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events felt, on the whole, manufactured and arch, and the film finds its surest footing in an idea essential to children's entertainment: that every action has a consequence. The answer to the question of what, exactly, is Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson), or what generator produces these Mary Poppinses like sexless, befrocked clergy attending wayward British moppets, is that Nanny McPhee is stuffy consequence personified–the element of parents and/or society that, often with something like a supernatural hand in the eyes of a child, embeds itself in a growing moral conscience. There's something grand and mysterious about these figures, and Jones allows Nanny the freedom to be as enigmatic, omniscient, and omnipotent as a superego on the wax.

Fetching Cody (2005) – DVD

July 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, DVD, Romance, Time Travel, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Jay Baruchel, Sarah Lind, Jim Byrnes, Robert Kaiser
written and directed by David Ray

Fetchingcodycapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Canada is a nation of amateurs. Some terrible national weakness has taught us to be sheepishly inexact, as if trying to tell a story or form a coherent argument were about showing up and meekly filling in time as opposed to a complex array of intellectual and aesthetic decisions. We'll do the job, but we won't do it precisely–and frequently, the results are empty shells like Fetching Cody. I wouldn't be nearly so angry about its failure if I didn't know that there were more like it–long, unbroken streams of arrested preadolescents looking to get points for being "serious" and "meaningful"–coming down the pipeline. Critics are probably the largest segment of the population who'll see them, which probably accounts for why we're terse in our dismissals: we know we'll wind up talking to no one but ourselves.

Ask the Dust (2006) – DVD

July 16, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by Robert Towne, based on the novel by John Fante
directed by Robert Towne

by Walter Chaw As a male of the average chauvinist-pig variety, you find yourself inclined to give Robert Towne's Ask the Dust the benefit of the doubt because he's convinced Salma Hayek to strip naked a few times and roll around in the surf. And yet the realization dawns inescapable that no matter the acres of flesh, the film is every bit as horrible as that self-serious, neo-camp sexploitation classic Original Sin (another noir based on a lesser-known, period-dependent novel–that one by Cornell Woolrich, this one by John Fante), with only the gender/race roles reversed–that watching naked Angelina Jolie writhe around with Antonio Banderas can be every bit as disturbingly sexless as Hayek and Colin Farrell doing same. Promising to follow the James M. Cain pot-boiler formula with its dense voiceovers and faux-sordid, sepia-stained sexing, Ask the Dust is actually just inert, a painfully-overwritten, impossible-to-execute picture loaded down with self-conscious slatted shadows and mirrors (and all manner of noir affectations) that isn't only set in 1930s Los Angeles, but plays exactly as anachronistic and fusty as most films produced in the Thirties, too. It's the kind of movie that makes much of a character's English-impaired malapropisms ("Not 'grew on me,' grew in me…like a baby," mewls Hayek's character in one of many excruciating proclamations); to its core, it's the kind of movie that sucks now and always has in exactly the same way.

Running Scared (2006) – DVD

July 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri
written and directed by Wayne Kramer

by Walter Chaw I liked Wayne Kramer's Running Scared because Running Scared isn't ashamed of itself. It's not terribly audacious (in direct contradiction to the consensus opinion that the film is "over-the-top," I found it to be sort of tame in its sexuality, violence, and atrocity) and it's not witty or smart or loaded with the archetype that a direct homage to the Brothers Grimm (the picture is set in the fictitious hamlet of "Grimley") would imply. Its prologue's cliffhanger, for instance, is paid off at the end in absolutely the most spineless way possible, betraying the dark fairytale template of which the film is so proud. (Fairytales were never this squeamish about strangers actually injuring–sometimes killing–children.) Besides, there's nothing terribly subversive about suggesting that the world is a dangerous place for kids. And yet, there is embedded in Running Scared's clueless schizophrenia (it wants to be edgy even as it's spending the majority of its energy on slick editing tricks, comic-book CGI effects, and a restless camera that doesn't hold still long enough for a fly to land on it) a nasty, seductive class of real cinematic infatuation and a knowledge, idiot savant-like or otherwise, of how to implicate a viewer in the things unfolding onscreen. A neat trick. Neater because the protagonist with which we suture, as it were, is played by one Paul Walker: possibly the worst actor the United States has ever produced, no matter what Armond White says.

Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll (1987) [The Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – DVD

July 13, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Concert Doc, Documentary, DVD, Music

***/**** Image B+ Sound A (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras A+
directed by Taylor Hackford

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One thing is clear from Taylor Hackford’s Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll: not even the most dedicated hagiographer could ignore the more irascible aspects of Chuck Berry’s personality. Leaving aside his arrests (something Berry forces Hackford to do) and sexual peccadilloes (no prompting required), there’s no denying a general self-possession and pig-headedness that would awe General Patton himself. That Berry can inspire loyalty in the many famous admirers he’s abused is testament to both his personal charm and his shattering influence in the field of rock-and-roll. Although one gets the feeling that people let their starry eyes get in the way of popping him one, he’s one hell of a camera subject and manages to grab your attention for the full two-hour running time.

Magic (1978) – DVD

July 10, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Anthony Hopkins, Ann-Margret, Burgess Meredith, Ed Lauter
screenplay by William Goldman, based on his novel
directed by Richard Attenborough

  Magiccap

by Walter Chaw I've never been able to contextualize Richard Attenborough's Magic in any meaningful way. I think the best William Goldman pulp novels (Control, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Tinsel) defy categorization and emerge as artifacts out of time and genre. The homosexual twists, the sexualized fairytales, the exploding breast implants, the first-person narration taken from "Fats's Diary" of Magic, his thriller about a mad artist engaged in that hard-to-contextualize discipline of ventriloquism…

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

July 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

Pirates2by Walter Chaw I've liked almost everything Gore Verbinski's done up to this point–he's treated genre pictures with a degree of sobriety that's refreshing when snarky post-modernism seems the golden mean. But Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (hereafter Pirates 2, though "Pirates Reloaded" is perhaps the more appropriate paraphrase) carries with it the taint of desperation that comes with impossibly raised expectations and a burgeoning "known" director who–for lack of a better idea–devotes himself to the notion that magnification is the same thing as inspiration. A giant budget and a franchise tag is an effective snuff to that alchemical combination of energy and brilliance that has thus far typified Verbinski's output, and Pirates 2 is exhibit one of just how boring an unimaginably expensive a blockbuster can be when it jettisons character and story in favour of gimmick and state-of-the-art-for-now special effects. The first of two consecutively-shot sequels, the movie has the added difficulty of being entrusted (like Episode II, The Two Towers, and The Matrix Reloaded) with the exposition third of the tripartite narrative arc. Pirates 2 is a middle without a beginning or end that tries to compensate for that deficiency by throwing money at the problem. Yo ho-hum.

BloodRayne (2006) [Unrated Director’s Cut] – DVD

July 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Kristanna Loken, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Guinevere Turner
directed by Uwe Boll

by Walter Chaw It seems sort of pointless at this juncture to keep kicking at Uwe Boll–indeed, there's a minor backlash against all the lash, most of it dedicated to defending the Kraut Ed Wood along the lines of his latest, the excrescent BloodRayne, as being only as bad as ordinary bad films and not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail. The secret to this bountiful wealth of backhanded praise, Boll has discovered, is found somewhere in the intersection of gratuitous gore and gratuitous nudity–both virtues forgiving a multitude of the director's other shortcomings (a tin ear, a blind eye, a plugger's grace, and so on), because it transforms his sword-and-sorcery saga into something that looks and sounds just like the crap most of us squandered our misspent youth surfing for on late night cable, tissue in one hand, lotion in the other. Without stretching too extravagantly, it's easy to see in that great sloppy act of pubescent self-abuse the very same method guiding Boll's hand at the camera through his ersatz trilogy of terrible. Fair to wonder a time or two over the course of the film if someone should invoke the Geneva Convention and get the fuck outta dodge. I guess there's a purpose to everything under the sun, and BloodRayne, based on a video game series of the same name, must be around to give hope to anyone with a camera in a country with a tax loophole that they, too, can make really bad movies with which to waste other peoples' lives.

Lifespan (1976) [Uncut Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Belgium, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Netherlands, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C-
starring Klaus Kinski, Hiram Keller, Tina Aumont, Fons Rademakers
screenplay by Judith Rascoe, Alva Ruben, Alexander Whitelaw
directed by Alexander Whitelaw

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lifespan appears to be comprised of inserts from somebody else's movie. It huffs and puffs in expositional voiceover largely because it hasn't written any self-evident drama–we see loving shots of scenic Amsterdam and a lot of people walking in/out/through buildings, but nothing that might actually clue us into what the hell is going on. You could (as the special features on the film's DVD release do) insist that this is a Last Year at Marienbad-esque ploy, since there are other elements to support that thesis. Alas, Alexander Whitelaw is no Alain Resnais, and his rudimentary exploration of the meaning of eternal life sounds most like a biology student on the make. Aside from a bit of gratuitous skin, there's almost nothing to watch–but all sorts of terrible, pretentious things you never need to hear.

Masters of Horror: Chocolate (2005) + Masters of Horror: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005) – DVDs

July 4, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Television, Thriller

MASTERS OF HORROR: CHOCOLATE
Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Henry Thomas, Matt Frewer
teleplay by Mick Garris, based on his short story
directed by Mick Garris

MASTERS OF HORROR: INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD
Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Bree Turner, Ethan Embry
teleplay by Don Coscarelli & Stephen Romano, based on the short story by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli

by Walter Chaw Add to the hypocrisies and inconsistencies plaguing Mick Garris's Showtime-broadcast "Masters of Horror" the fact that Garris has the audacity to dub himself one of the titular Masters (on the strength of which, Sleepwalkers or Riding the Bullet?). When Stephen King unofficially bestows upon you the title of best steward of his work to the screen, you need to take a full step back and assess King's track record in the medium. If Garris considers himself to be on a par with any of the other directors in this show's roster, he's got another thing coming–the pudding and the proof being his episode Chocolate, presented by Anchor Bay on an exhaustive DVD as part of their second wave of "Masters of Horror" releases. Lacklustre and non-starting, it stars a craggy Henry Thomas as Jamie, a creator of artificial food flavourings who one day discovers that he's occasionally channelling, Being John Malkovich-like, the consciousness of someone else. That someone else is French-Canadian hottie Catharine (Lucie Laurier), who, as is given away in the trailer and the box text, kills someone, inspiring putz Jamie to travel to the Great White North in search of his bloodthirsty Beatrice to declare his undying love.

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (2005) – DVD

July 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Keith A. Beauchamp

by Alex Jackson For most of us Americans, our view of the pre-civil rights movement South has focused more on the sun than on the storm. While Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks are an established part of our cultural history, the lynching of Emmett Louis Till has more or less floundered in relative obscurity despite being just as if not more essential to racial progress. We understand, in a perfunctory way, that those who led the civil rights movement were heroes, but our understanding of what they were fighting against is diffused and vague. So… Martin Luther King, Jr. made it so that blacks could sit at the front of the bus and use the same water fountains as whites? That is essentially all that this period of history has come to mean in a society that believes children should be protected from the uglier facts of history at the cost of retaining an ignorance of a backyard holocaust. The greatest achievement of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, perhaps its only real achievement, is that it provides some sort of visual record of this time and place. The film works on the most primitive level of documentary cinema: it educates you about something important that has otherwise been grossly underexposed.

Monterey Pop (1968) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

July 3, 2006Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Concert Doc, DVD, Music, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras A
directed by D.A. Pennebaker

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible for a certain generation to not feel wistful looking back at Monterey Pop. Those who only know a world with a DVD for every band might be blasé about an early concert doc with mere clips of soon-to-be foregone conclusions, but for those who can remember a time (or have endured the rantings of those who can remember) know that in the Summer of Love, a music festival wasn't just the names above the title. The film captures the relaxed atmosphere surrounding some fabulous furry freaks safe in the knowledge that they were about to take on the world; the music is but affirmation of the groundswell bubbling up in the milling crowds. D.A. Pennebaker's camera is deft enough to capture the mood in addition to the tunes, coming up with something more than a hippie variety act.

Valley of the Dolls (1967) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 30, 2006Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Paul Burke, Sharon Tate
screenplay by Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley, based on the novel by Jacqueline Susann
directed by Mark Robson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's little left to say about Valley of the Dolls that hasn't already been said by either its contemporary critics or legions of mock-adoring fans. The former were correct in establishing it as a cynical cash-in crushed under the weight of its vapidity, the latter justified in their identification of its trash playground of mansions, film sets, and nightclubs as the ideal stage for queening and camping. By all rational standards, the movie is awful, yet its rapid-fire stream of meshuggah takes it into some realm of nonsensical fantasy that makes it as good or better than successful films of its genre. There are so many critical errors in judgment that they meld together to become a hyperbolic cocktail that goes to your head and knocks your legs out from under you.

Eraserhead (1977) – DVD

June 29, 2006Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates
written and directed by David Lynch

Eraserheadcap

by Walter Chaw MustownDavid Lynch makes documentaries of the human subconscious. He captures–in a deadpan, almost scientifically-objective way–the processes through which we assimilate and interpret machine-fed data, replicating in that sense the sort of Pop aesthetic of Warhol's ilk without the snarky sense of milk-fed superiority. Take the cultural cues in his work: the Rockwellian Americana he essays in Blue Velvet; the Bauhaus by way of Antoni Gaudi of Dune; or the late-Hitchcock identity puzzles he rejiggers in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive–both commonly seen as satires of what they represent but more accurately described, perhaps, as simple, uncommented-upon representations of what a lower layer of consciousness might consider to be unadorned gospel. Call the best moments of his best films Expressionism of the Id. (Mulholland Drive could be Vertigo shot by Hitch's bile and libido, unchained and unembarrassed.) Lynch's pictures are the very opposite of pretentious: they're unguarded images projected directly from a place of null intentionality. If the aim of art is to touch the sublime, to strum the thread of the collective unconscious that binds us each to each, as it were, then Lynch becomes a figure like Rainer Maria Rilke or William Blake or Beethoven–or in filmic terms, like Luis Buñuel or Carl Theodor Dreyer or moments of Sergio Leone.

The Short Films of David Lynch + Dumbland (2002) – DVDs

June 29, 2006Posted in1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: David Lynch, DVD, Esoterica, Short Films

THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH
Image A Sound A Extras B-

DUMBLAND
Image B Sound A-

by Bill Chambers One is tempted to appropriate Jean-Luc Godard's oft-misquoted "The cinema is Nicholas Ray" in discussing the origins of David Lynch, whose blossoming sophistication unwittingly paralleled that of film itself. From the magic lantern-style innovation of his sculpture installation Six Men Getting Sick to the fixed camera placements of The Alphabet to the rudimentary narrative of The Grandmother (whose heavy's freakishly accentuated jawline transforms his countenance into that of a snarling villain in the "Perils of Pauline" mode) to, finally, the total aesthetic compromise of the shot-on-video The Amputee, the first few entries contained on "The Short Films of David Lynch" imply that there is only one destiny for the medium, whether its evolution is spread out over a century or concentrated in the time it takes for an artist to develop a conscience. If most film students go through a similar rite of passage, there's often an attendant, ineffable impatience with primitive techniques in undergrad films that's absent in Lynch's early work.

Superman Returns (2006)

June 28, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

Supermanreturnsby Walter Chaw The saddest, most desperately lonesome and melancholy mainstream film in recent memory, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns is about loss and, as a Scrabble board early in the picture denotes, alienation. It's about fathers and sons and, by extension, why so many of our mythologies are about sons divorced from fathers who spend the rest of their lives, nay, the rest of eternity striving for impossible reunions. Prometheus is mentioned by name while Atlas, Christ, and Lucifer are referenced in image, Singer's transition from fallen Titans to fallen Angels an ineffably graceful symbolic examination of where, exactly, comic-book martyrs and gods (of which Superman is both) place in the modern spiritual pantheon. Superman is a figure at a juncture in the middle of pagan and Christian just as he's become something like a transitional icon bridging science and religion, classic comics and the modern superhero era, and Americana and the Wasteland. In the film, Superman is a character warring between what he wants and the destiny his father has charted for him–and aren't we all. When a child in Superman Returns takes a picture with his cell phone that we recognize as the cover for Superman's debut, 1938's "Action Comics" No. 1, it's at once bemused and in love with Richard Donner's original vision of the hero, but most of all it's eloquent in its assured, maybe even prickly, recognition of where we were and what we've become.

Caché (2005) – DVD

June 26, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Hidden
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Walter Chaw Gone uncommented-upon in greater detail, a glimmer of hope does exist in Michael Haneke’s difficult Funny Games, the scabrous Austrian auteur’s last picture that dealt with a brutal home invasion. Therein, the victims overcome their tormentors and are well on their way to freedom when Haneke inserts himself as the capricious godhead of his own piece (indeed, a director is never anything else) and rewinds the film like videotape, providing a different eventuality for his players. It’s a move as audacious and wry as anything in Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (and as existentially devastating as anything in Pirandello), something that’s earned Haneke his reputation for uncompromising–some would say sadistic (or intellectually austere)–morality plays about apocalypses proximate and ultimate.

Orca: The Killer Whale (1977) – DVD

June 26, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Thriller

Orca
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek
screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati
directed by Michael Anderson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was scared off of Orca, widely considered to be one of the worst films of all-time. The movie had a reputation as a bad Jaws rip-off and my last viewing of a bad Jaws rip-off was Lamberto Bava's Devilfish on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which was awful enough to make me question what I was doing spending my Saturday mornings watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Well, I'm pleased to report that Orca's reputation is completely unwarranted. Critics and audiences were wrong, they just didn't get it. They labelled it a "Jaws rip-off" before setting foot in the theatre and watched it on autopilot.

Nacho Libre (2006)

June 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, Héctor Jiménez, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess & Mike White
directed by Jared Hess

Nacholibreby Walter Chaw Nearly unwatchable from an aesthetic perspective, Nacho Libre is also invasively offensive and cheap-feeling in its gags, its performances, and its targets. Lampooning Mexican professional wrestling seems an onanistic pursuit at best insomuch as, clearly, the sport is already busily in the process of self-parody–but letting Jared Hess (single-handedly bringing the Special Olympics to Wes Anderson) tackle it along with Jack Black doing an "oh Ceeesco" accent in skin-tight tights is a particular kind of torture. The film's going to have its defenders (Uwe Boll has his defenders, too, I hasten to add, as does Hess's Napoleon Dynamite), and I'm thinking that it's going to be along the lines of "Well, sure, it's not Citizen Kane." But does anyone go to anything expecting it to be Citizen Kane? Moreover, have people who like this bullshit actually seen Citizen Kane? It's germane to talk about this because sooner or later it has to be pointed out that pictures like Nacho Libre exist because pictures like Napoleon Dynamite were popular: mean pictures about small-minded folks picking fun for no profit at slow-witted caricatures of racial groups and social classes. Pictures like this exist because people are used to lowering their expectations so much that they're actually irked when someone doesn't. It's most instructive to take a minute to look at how low we go now to construct the straw dogs we mock.