CASA DE MI PADRE (Two Stars)

 U.S.-Mexico; Matt Piedmont, 2012 (Lions Gate)

In Casa de mi Padre, Will Ferrell and some friends from Mexico, including those two talented fugitives from Y ti mama tambien, Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal,  make fun of bad Mexican movies —  especially lurid telenovela serials about obsessive romance and family intrigue and dark dirty secrets: dumb shows that rot the brains of couch potatoes south and north of the border.

Give Ferrell credit. He approaches the project with real De Niro-like determination, playing his entire part in Spanish — a language that he had to learn phonetically. But though he does a his usual brilliant  job of playing a vacuous dolt (like his Saturday Night Live triumph with George W. Bush), the movie may be too dumb for its own good.

Ferrell, his beady eyes clouded in  doltdom, the words chewing in his mouth like big juicy burritos of addled sentiment. plays the majestically foolish, buttock-fondling Armando Alvarez, a doofus virgin and a lousy rancher who — as Ferrell imagines him — is also being played by a lousy actor. Armando roams the range of El Rancho de mi Padre, in the grandeur of MexicoScope, with his two dopey sidekicks Esteban and Manuel (Efren Ramirez and Adrian Martinez). These range scamps live it up vacuously, hiding behind rocks to watch drug executions by the evil fashion plate drug fealer Onza (Bernal), and engaging in dopey sidekick high jinks.

Poor Armando is disrespected by all. Armando’s father, Don Ernesto Miguel (played by the late Pedro Armendariz, Jr., son of the John Ford stock company stalwart), thinks he’s a buffoon. His brother Raul (Luna) — who has returned to the rancho to pay off their debts by dealing dope like Onza — thinks he’s a lovable fool. His brother’s knockout fiancee, Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez), thinks he’s sort of a cute fool. Indeed, she seems unaccountably more attracted to Armando than Raul, possibly because he’s the star of the movie.

The rest of the cast tries to match the El Dopo levels of Armando’s witless histrionics. But, even though they’re mostly Hispanic and can speak the language without teleprompters, almost everybody in Casa de mi Padre acts as if they’ve learned their parts phonetically. They also seem to be trying desperately to keep from breaking up into helpless laughter as they say their lines. (You may not share their dilemma.)

That Casa de mi Ensemble includes the movie’s most unusual character: a stuffed snow leopard who drops by occasionally to peer at Armando and his Two Stoogelitos and offer pearls of wisdom. (In this context any half-grammatical sentence of five words or less that contains a complete thought might qualify as a pearl of wisdom. Examples: “Life is a snow leopard‘” “Life is a telenovela‘” “A telenovela is life,” “Snow leopards scare me,” “I’ll have huevos rancheros without salsa,“ and “Armando is a buffoon.” ) At the end of the movie, Dan Haggerty (of Grizzly Adams ) shows up and offers, as his pearl of wisdom, the suggestion that we all have a joint — something he doesn’t seem to have learned phonetically.

The movie was written by Andrew Steele (of Saturday Night Live), directed by Matt Piedmont (of Saturday Night Live) and of course stars Will Ferrell (of Saturday Night Live) — and it might probably star more SNL alumni if they’d been willing to learn their parts phonetically too. It’s almost all in Spanish, except for Haggerty as Grizzly, and Nick Offerman as a villanous DEA agent, who seems to have wandered in from the Saturday Nght Live version of No Country for Old Men. It’s all subtitled. And I swear, as I looked around at the audience around me , they were laughing phonetically. But not very often.

I’ve never watched a telenovela, though I’ve skipped past what might have been a few (they were certainly bad enough) while channel-surfing. But I don’t think this is a very good idea for a movie — even though the actors all seem to having fun, especially Haggerty. Most of us don’t know enough about telenovela conventions to catch all the jokes. We can tell Casa is supposed to be bad — especially when Ferrell and Rodrigez go rocking along on unseen fake horses before an out-of-synch moving background — or when a scene involving the snow leopard and some pearl of wisdom is interrupted by a long foolish confession (supposedly from the 2^nd assistant cameraman), that the sequence had to be scotched for accidental destruction and technical ineptitude. (It would have been funnier if the 2^nd assistant had gone on camera and confessed, but fallen out of the frame when the drunken third assistant cameraman dropped the camera and passed out, on the snow leopard, just as it offered a pearl of wisdom.)

Anyway, when good actors play bad actors giving bad performances in a bad movie, there’s a thin line between bad and good and bad-good or good-bad. But aren’t these people really just taking away work from genuinely bad actors? What about genuinely bad movies like, say, Casa Nine de mi Padre from Outer Space or Armando and Armanda or The Snow Leopard Speaks? Is this fair?

I have an idea. Why not take this same excellent cast and make a comedy about a cut-rate Tijuana movie company, trying to crack the American Spanish-speaking market, who hire an arrogant, egotistical, dull-witted American actor (played by W. F.) who has to learn his part phonetically and who keeps screwing up his lines and whenever he forgets them, yells “Huevos Rancheros! Cojones! Cojones!“ The cast of the movie, called Casa de Huevos Rancheros, or maybe Casa de mi Cojones, would be a stellar group including a phony dope dealer, played by Luna, who hides his dope in a stuffed snow leopard, played by Bernal. The preoccupied director would be acted by Fred Willard, and the film would also costar Genesis Rodriguez and her sisters Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers.

By the way, I wrote this review phonetically. I bet you couldn’t tell. (In Spanish and English with English subtitles.

Extras: Commentary  by Will Ferrell, director Matt Piedmont and producer-writer Andrew Steele; Featurette; Deleted and Extended Scenes; Ads. Note: This Commentary was learned phonetically.

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