Your reaction to the movie, Casa de mi Padre, may very well depend on your tolerance for so-so jokes. Dunno about you, but I only have the patience to hear bad jokes once. When I first hear a so-so joke, I tend to smile little and laugh less…then I find an excuse to go do something, like file my nails, floss my teeth or clean a kitchen drawer. For sure we all got more important things to do and this is exactly all you need to know about Casa de mi Padre.
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Believe you me. A movie by that title and with Will Ferrell as the lead was very intriguing to me, and I think I’m a wise latina. But much to my lagrimas, in less time that you can make an instant cup of café con leche, I realized that Ferrell and his pretty amazing Spanish are not enough to keep afloat this American production of a Telenovela spoof, which goes on about 80 minutes too long. In fact, time does not go fast enough between the sort of tarantinoish exciting opening credits to the bland and bizarro closing ones. But, hey, not all is lost…at least now we know what a 84 minute-long SNL skit looks and feels like. And its not as much fun as you expected.
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Bummer. Big time bummer. Or better said, ay, mujer, que pena…
In the first opening minutes when we realize that Ferrell is speaking fluent Spanish while riding a horse in what seems like it could be a western are all fun and games. Even my fellow movie goers agreed. So far so good. Now, a Spanish-speaking Ferrell can only hold our interest for so long… so mis cuates Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna are definitely welcomed, wanted and appreciated in every frame that they grace with their lovely presence.
Granted that Diego Luna, with his dirty hair and long tresses, makes for a very believable Mexican drug lord, while his best friend Garcia Bernal (in the role of the villain La Onza…get it?!!) makes for just a good looking one.
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Either way, even in this incoherent story (a requirement for any SNL drama) about a father ( the late Pedro Almendariz) and his two sons (Luna and Ferrell), and a fiancee (the lovely Genesis Rodriguez, the real-life daughter of the “Rey” of Telenovelas in the 70’s, crooner Jose Luis Rodriguez) with a notorious provenance, nothing comes together the way it should. Sure, nothing is supposed to make sense in this spoof…and that they got right…not much does.
Ferrell is playing it straight…along with everybody else. Mmmhhhh….well, at least in the telenovelas, someone is in on the joke…mainly the audience…but it’s a guilty pleasure…where we expect the unexpected in an expected type of way…
We don’t expect Ferrell to star in a telenovela, yet he does. We don’t expect Ferrell to play a Mexican convincingly, yet he does. We don’t expect Ferrell to speak Spanish well, yet he does. But we expect him to be funny. And here, he came up way short. And this my friends, es un crimen!
Runtime: 84 long minutos/Rating:R for sangre, violencia, sexo y drogas
-Cali Tomayo
