Casa De Mi Padre

A joke? Maybe, I'm not sure.

Hi Everyone! I'm gearing up for a convention, and persistent snow obstacles have kept me from striking distance of a movie theater, so here's a weird one for you. Travelling into benighted, dangerous territory, I got really bored several months ago, and with the whole of Netflix's library at my fingertips, I made some legitimately poor watching decisions, even by my generous standards. One of them was this very bizarre Will Ferrell movie, Casa de mi Padre. For starters, this movie is almost entirely in Spanish, with the exception of a few interactions with American border patrol (with special guest appearance by Ron Swanson, not really but you know Nick Offerman). So that's pretty unusual, because I frankly didn't realize Will Ferrell spoke that much Spanish. Everyone else in this movie is pretty much Spanish except for Will Ferrell, who plays Armando Alvarez, a ranch-hand who has lived and worked on his father's ranch all his life. The ranch is falling on hard times, but when Armando's brother Raul returns with his fiance and money from his business ventures to settle all the ranch's debts, things seem to be taking a turn for the better. Only naturally, Armando falls for Sonia (the fiance, entiendan?) and also his brother is obviously a drug dealer, who angers Mexico's biggest narcotraficante, and what follows is a plot-line worthy of daytime Telemundo.

"Get me all the bacon and eggs you have son."

But forget about the plot. The plot was stupid. Deliberately so. It is making fun of movies that are really like this. That being said, at times it's a little too good at impersonating them. At what point when you are watching a movie that makes fun of a type of movie by being dead-pan just like it, are you just plain watching that kind of crappy movie? (that might literally be the worst sentence I have ever written in my life, but I can't think of a better way to explain it). There were definitely parts where the humor got thin and I realized I was just watching a shitty western melodrama in Spanish with subtitles. Apparently sometimes in attempting to mock and destroy something, we run the risk of becoming that very thing.

This scene was really epic, or it was supposed to be before
maybe someone on set got eaten by a live coyote (not really).

That's not to say that the movie is never funny, or is just plain terrible (I mean it is but on purpose) I just wish that the movie wasn't so stingy with its jokes, and hadn't spread them so thinly throughout this feature length movie (thankfully it's on the short side, coming in just under 90 minutes). For instance, Nick Offerman's absolutely ridiculous and bad Spanish, along with his slightly-more-angry-and-racist Ron Swanson character. For instance several spots in the movie where the movie literally derails, due to "technical difficulties" in a Monty Python style text scroll over about something happening to interrupt the movie. Those are really funny moments to me, the kind of humor that I enjoy in movies, and that I wish there had been more of. More visible boom mics and obvious editing errors (there are a few, but too scattered for my liking).

Behold him in all his fuzzy glory.

But clearly the best part of the movie, is the massive white animatronic tiger puppet that talks to Armando. No I'm not kidding, some sort of mystical white tiger speaks to Armando in a deep Spanish voice, advising him about how he should conduct his life and resolve the conflicts in it. It is simply so weird and goofy that I couldn't help but find it hilarious. After all, we could all use some sort of Mayan tiger god helping us out with our lady problems, or helping us deal with los narcos.

Behold the sun god, Wilfarletatl.

So it isn't like this movie has no redeeming qualities, it just has comedy spread so thinly throughout its delivery that there were honestly moments where I wasn't sure what kind of movie I was watching. It was like when you meet a person who's sort of scary and they make some off-color comment that sounds like a joke about how they're planning to blow up their office, and you are honestly not sure if you should laugh along with them, or if you are legitimately in the presence of a psychopath. That's sort of how this movie made me feel. I'd say you need to watch it for yourself to decide if it made it over the line into good-bad, instead of just bad-bad. Certainly though, if you're looking to be weirded out, give it a watch.

That's all for today! I'll be at a convention all weekend, so I'll see you all on Tuesday!