Where was Nacho Libre Oaxaca filmed?

Nacho Libre: Comedy. Starring Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera and Hector Jimenez. Directed by Jared Hess. (PG. 91 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

In this schizophrenic production, director Jared Hess ("Napoleon Dynamite") knows just one thing, that Jack Black is funny. The audience knows that, too. Black plays Nacho, a cook in a Mexican monastery, and at one point he makes a speech about how wonderful his life is, sleeping alone every night and getting up at 5 in the morning to make soup for orphan children. He's trying to make it sound good, but the tight smile on his face and the screwy look in his eyes reveal a frustration bordering on madness. Black does that well, the man who tries to contain himself but can't.

Black is also funny singing. He has funny expressions. He's funny when looking at a beautiful nun (Ana de la Reguera), and he does a funny Mexican accent, one that's almost real but isn't quite. Here and there, "Nacho Libre" plays like a satire of a rags-to-riches drama, and Black matches that by speaking his lines as though he were in the most earnest drama ever made, pushing it to the ridiculous. Yet for all that, the comedy is hit and miss, with good bits interrupted by dead patches. It's a movie to root for more than to enjoy.

Hess' reliance on Black results in a bland but eccentric approach to filming "Nacho Libre." If you see the movie, note how infrequently Hess puts Black in a two-shot. That is, if he wants to show him in conversation, Hess rarely has Black share the same frame with another actor. Instead, he films him from the waist up, facing the camera, almost looking directly into it. This approach works so long as the camera is on Black. He's fun and volatile, and he usually does something interesting. But the approach comes with one problem: It means that half of every scene doesn't have Black on screen. It has whatever actor he happens to be talking to, and this constant cutting to the other actors, who have very little going on, creates a stilted, start-and-stop quality.

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This style may have been intended as a parody of a familiar dramatic style. In fact, everything about "Nacho Libre" sounds like a recipe for drama, except Black. It's tells the story of a man, orphaned as a boy, who grew up in a monastery and is scorned by the monks for his bad cooking. Secretly in love with the lovely Sister Encarnarcion (de la Reguera), he wishes she'd renounce her vows and marry him. Then one day he sees a pro wrestler surrounded by glamour and adulation, and wrestling becomes his symbol for everything his life lacks. And so he begins his wrestling career, getting beat up every night and still carrying a torch for the sister.

Curiously, these wrestling scenes are not especially funny, just lighthearted, and that only occasionally. The world of wrestling is taken seriously, as is the world of the monastery. In fact, it would be difficult not to take either seriously, given the realism with which they're presented. "Nacho Libre" was filmed entirely in Oaxaca, and the old missions, the bleached rock and the real Mexicans in the wrestling arenas ground the movie in a world too tangible for comic casualness. Black stumbles into this world with all his comic gifts and wrestles it to a draw.

Where was the final scene of Nacho Libre filmed?

What movie takes place in Oaxaca Mexico?

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Is Nacho Libre a Mexican movie?