Casa de Mi Padre

Posted on March 15, 2012 at 6:11 pm

You think having sunny-spirited Californian Will Ferrell play the son of a Mexican rancher is not goofy enough? How about if the entire movie is in Spanish (with subtitles)? You want goofier? I got your goofy right here. The entire premise of the movie is that it is a humorous take on a genre that is largely unknown to its intended audience. The result plays like an extended “Funny or Die” short, engagingly loopy and unpretentious but overlong and uneven.

Ferrell’s great appeal as a comic performer is the way he commits so completely to whatever his character’s dim but utterly earnest world view is supposed to be. Whether he is an elf or “Hank the Tank” or a high school cheerleader or banging on a cowbell, he is completely on board. Here he joins with Mexican stars Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna (who co-starred in “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Rudo Y Cursi”), and Latino actors Genesis Rodriguez (“Man on a Ledge”) and Efren Ramirez (“Napoleon Dynamite”) in the story of a rancher with two sons, Armando (Ferrell) and Raul (Luna) and the drug kingpin (Bernal) who wants their ranch and the woman both brothers love.

Armando is a rancher at heart, but his father does not respect him, reserving his love for the son who left home and became successful in business, Raul. When Raul returns with his beautiful fiancee, Sonia (Rodriguez), they hope the ranch’s financial problems will be over. But it turns out Raul’s money comes from drugs, and the rival drug lord Onza (Bernal), who has his own relationship with Sonia, wants to eliminate the competition and punish those who dared to challenge him.

The film embraces the cheesiness of its melodramatic plot, clunky (at least in translation) dialog, and limited budget, and the best jokes are the cheery and sometimes absurd asides that go on at the edges of the frame. Thankfully, its humor is based in a genuine affection for its source material, the soapy, low-budget telenovelas (and the traditional Hollywood Westerns that influenced them), respecting the heart of those stories and their audiences. The cast is terrific, especially Bernal, who can make smoking two cigars at once look menacing and the beautiful Rodriguez, and everyone in the cast is clearly having a blast. There are some moments of loony hilarity, but it would have worked better as a short, as the concept gets played out quickly. Si casa no es tu casa.

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Happy Leap Day!

Posted on February 29, 2012 at 7:00 am

Celebrate the day we observe just once every four years with The Pirates of Penzance, the delightful Gilbert and Sullivan musical about a man who thinks he is turning 21 but, because he was born on leap day, has had only five birthdays. He has been indentured to pirates (his nurse misunderstood when his parents told her to apprentice him to a pilot) and looks forward to coming of age so that he can leave them. But since he will not have his 21st birthday for decades, he is not legally an adult!

The Joneses

Posted on August 10, 2010 at 8:10 am

Why do we want what we want? I don’t mean world peace or for our school’s team to win the NCAA championship, but why do we want a particular brand of shoe or phone or perfume? Is it because we think we will be able to appropriate some of the glamor of the celebrities who endorse them or the happiness of the people in commercials who seem to be having so much fun? And how can companies sell products to consumers who skip the ads on television and use pop-up blockers online?

This provocative new film takes current marketing trends and tweaks them just slightly for a sharp, witty, and revealing take that shows us, among other things, that we never really leave middle school when it comes to wanting to be just like the cool kids.

A new family moves into a wealthy neighborhood. They are attractive, charming, and very friendly. They love to entertain and they are always helpful in suggesting products to help you feel better, smarter, and more successful. “What are friends for?” they smile when thanked.

They seem to have it all — and by that I mean every high-end, desirable, utterly enticing gadget, fashion, and accessory you might see in a luxury magazine or on a red carpet or in the SkyMall catalogue. Their name is Jones, as in keeping up with — and as in Jonesing for all of their goodies in an attempt to achieve their effortless glamor.

They’re not a family. They are “stealth marketers,” placed in wealthy neighborhoods to push products. Kate (Demi Moore) is in charge. She has been “Mrs. Jones” with six different “husbands” in different neighborhoods. The new “Mr. Jones” this go-round (David Duchovny) is a former golf pro and car salesman named Steve. Kate teaches him the power of ripple effects — you sell more by influencing the local influencers like the most popular hairdresser in town and the guy who works in the pro shop at the country club. Meanwhile, the fake Jones kids are in high school, pushing lipstick and a rum drink in a sack. “You can’t just sell things; you’re here to sell a lifestyle, an attitude,” their supervisor (60’s supermodel Lauren Hutton) crisply reminds them. “If people want you, they’ll want what you’ve got.”

All goes well at first, the smooth operation contrasting with their neighbor’s clumsy efforts to sell her Mary Kay-style cosmetics. Steve reassures himself that he’s only “making a match between great products and the people that want them.” But then things go very badly, with tragic consequences.

Duchovny and Moore are just right, both deploying and mocking their movie star glamor. In the past, both stars have traded on a talent for blankness (yes, that is a talent), allowing us to project our own feelings onto them. Here, both are a bit more vulnerable and accessible. The exceptional supporting cast includes Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth, as their fake children and Chris Williams as the hairdresser. And watch for the movie’s own stealth marketing through its product placements — almost all of the items used by the Joneses are real. If you leave the theater thinking you really should pick up one of those phones with real-time video or a Japanese toilet, ask yourself why.

CONTEST ALERT: I have three DVDs to give away to the first three people who send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Jones” in the subject line. Don’t forget to include your address! Good luck, and thanks very much to Fox for providing the DVDs.

The Informant!

Posted on February 25, 2010 at 8:08 am

Like some of the food made with the substances produced by the corporation at the heart of this story, this movie is pleasant but leaves a sour aftertaste. It is inspired by the real-life story of one of the most massive cases of corporate corruption and crime in US history. Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) paid the then-record antitrust fine of $100 million and its top executives went to jail because of a global conspiracy to fix prices and production in violation of antitrust laws. None of this would have been uncovered without the cooperation of a top executive named Mark Whitacre. This film’s decision to present the story as farce and to focus on Whitacre and his flakier qualities is entertaining but unsatisfying.

Matt Damon plays Whitacre with an extra 30 pounds and a toupee that looks like a bird’s nest. He is a PhD but he is less an absent-minded professor type than a free-association, mind-like-a-pinball machine type, and we are privy to his thoughts as they go off in an almost random assortment of directions, often missing the point of what is going on around him as he muses about various questions and reassures himself. When the FBI is brought in to investigate an extortion attempt he reported, Whitacre tells the agent (“Star Trek’s: Enterprise’s” Scott Bakula) that he knows about something much bigger. This leads to an undercover operation spanning years and continents as Whitacre wears a wire to tape more than 200 conversations. He was one of the highest-ranking corporate officials ever to work as an informant. He was also embezzling millions of dollars and having a breakdown, possibly as a result of the stress of leading a double life.

Director Steven Soderburgh also gave us a moving drama about the feisty heroine Erin Brockovich, whose failings were quirky and endearing. Now he brings us a story about another real-life whistleblower presented as farce, with a bright, sit-com-y score by Marvin Hamlisch and the pacing and fonts of a 70’s comedy, familiar faces from television (including Tom and Dick Smothers), and seems to do everything possible to keep us from caring about the squirrelly main character. Whitacre, an accomplished man with a PhD (and now has several post-graduated degrees) who was a rising star at the company, comes across as clumsy, clueless, and narcissistic. We hear his random thoughts about an incongruous variety of topics. They come across as the musings of a doofus but they also show us his scientific curiosity and analytic distance. And we see how both contribute to his success and his downfall.

The film touches on the incongruity of his being sentenced to a jail term more than twice that of the executives responsible for crimes many times the order of magnitude in size and impact, but the reaction it seems to expect from us is a “what do you expect” rather than any sense of outrage. Once again, those who steal a small amount from hundreds of millions of people receive nominal consequences while those who steal a substantial sum from one place take the fall. Economists estimated that the cost to American citizens of one price-fixing case involving electrical equipment in 1961 was greater than all of the robberies of that year. The cost of the ADM price-fixing, based on the explicit view that “the customers are the enemy,” is incalculable. This film perpetuates the lack of understanding about these crimes in favor of cheap shots at the life-shattering impact of the investigation and the enabling, even exploitive behavior of the law enforcement officials who used him and then left him to deal with the consequences. Worst of all, it leaves us with a feeling of smug superiority when it should be illuminating the kind of thinking from both corporate and government officials that led us to the current financial collapse.

Funny Face

Posted on February 9, 2009 at 8:00 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	All Ages
MPAA Rating:	NR
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	Some mild sexism reflecting its era
Date Released to Theaters:	1957
Date Released to DVD:	2009
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004IK30LO

My second DVD pick of the week for Valentine’s Day is the other new Audrey Hepburn release, “Funny Face,” a gorgeous musical set in Paris with Fred Astaire and songs by Gershwin. The title tune, and “How Long Has This Been Going On” and “S’Wonderful” have become standards, and the non-Gershwin numbers like “Think Pink” and “Bonjour Paris” are lively and well-staged.

It’s the story of a shy bookstore clerk with an interest in French philosophy who gets invited to Paris as a model and agrees to go only because it will give her a chance to meet the philosopher she most admires. She thinks that fashion is silly and superficial. But the photographer (Astaire, playing a character based on Richard Avedon) shows her the passion, dedication, professionalism, and artistry required and the philosopher shows her that he does not always practice what he preaches. The film is a delight. Be sure to watch for a rare screen appearance by Kay Thompson, the author of the “Eloise” books, as the magazine editor, and some real-life supermodels spoofing themselves.

Funny Face