Nacho Libre
Jack Black in stretchy pants: a monastery cook who moonlights as a luchador to buy the orphans better food. Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follow-up gave the 2000s an entire dialect of quotes delivered in one gloriously unplaceable accent.
Nacho Libre, released June 16, 2006 by Paramount and Nickelodeon Movies, was director Jared Hess's follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite, co-written with Jerusha Hess and School of Rock's Mike White. Jack Black plays Ignacio — "Nacho" — a friary cook at a Mexican orphanage who secretly dons a mask and cape to wrestle for money, teaming with his scrawny partner Esqueleto against the ring's reigning legends while nursing a chaste crush on Ana de la Reguera's Sister Encarnación. The premise sounds like pure invention, but it leans on a real man: Fray Tormenta, a Mexican Catholic priest who spent 23 years as a masked professional wrestler to fund the orphanage he ran.
Audiences showed up immediately — a $28.3 million opening weekend, second only to Pixar's Cars — on the way to about $99 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. Critics mostly shrugged (39% on Rotten Tomatoes; Roger Ebert grumbled that it takes real effort to make a Jack Black comedy that doesn't work), but the film skipped past them straight into the middle-school vernacular. "Get that corn outta my face!" "I get to wake up every morning, at 5:00 AM, and make some soup! It's the best." "They don't think I know a butt load of crap about the gospel. But I dooo." For years, no cafeteria conversation was safe.
It aged into exactly the kind of comedy the 2000s did best: modest, deeply weird, infinitely quotable. A Nintendo DS tie-in game arrived that October, the soundtrack's mariachi-fuzz needle drops became recognizable on contact, and Nacho's anguished falsetto singing remains a load-bearing meme two decades on.
Similar items
Napoleon Dynamite
A deadpan indie comedy about an awkward teenager in small-town Idaho navigating high school, family chaos, and his own social ineptitude. Released in 2004, the low-budget film became a quotable phenomenon with unforgettable moments — "Gosh!", "Vote for Pedro", tetherball showdowns — and spawned endless merchandise and T-shirt catchphrases.
School of Rock
Jack Black fakes his way into a prep-school substitute-teaching job and turns a class of fifth-graders into a rock band. The trick that makes School of Rock immortal: the kids were real musicians playing live, so every scene of them discovering rock and roll is actually happening.
Juno
Elliot Page's whip-smart pregnant teenager, Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning screenplay, a hamburger phone, and a Moldy Peaches soundtrack: Juno was the indie monoculture moment of 2007. Made for about $7 million, it earned $232 million and four Oscar nominations — and for a solid year, everyone you knew talked a little more like Juno MacGuff.
Meet the Parents
Male nurse Greg Focker spends one weekend trying to impress his girlfriend's ex-CIA father and destroys everything he touches — the polygraph, the altar, the septic tank, the cat. Ben Stiller squirming under Robert De Niro's stare gave the 2000s its shorthand for meeting-the-in-laws dread, and put the "circle of trust" into the vocabulary.