In Any Language, Will Ferrell’s ‘Casa de mi Padre’ Is One Note [SXSW 2012 Review]
Posted on Friday, March 16th, 2012 by Germain Lussier
We all have our favorite “so bad they’re good” movies. They’re films with poorly written scripts and terrible performances, but huge entertainment value due to, or in spite of, near-total incompetence. Casa de mi Padre, Will Ferrell‘s Spanish-language comedy, was conceived and executed to be one of those films. It’s filled with totally self-aware mistakes in editing and production design. It has wooden performances and crappy dialogue. The idea was those gags, coupled with the fact that everyone is speaking Spanish, should be funny.
What Ferrell, director Matt Piedmont and writer Andrew Steele neglected to realize, though, is the reason “so bad they’re good” films usually gain that moniker is that the filmmakers crafted every moment with the best intentions… they just failed miserably. The Casa de mi Padre team is making a bad movie on purpose so those “best intentions” aren’t there. That, in turn, sucks the heart out of the film. As a result, it just lays on the screen lingering in mediocrity. And there are no “so mediocre they’re good” movies. Read More »
