Casa de Mi Padre

Directed by Matt Piedmont

(R)

**

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This spoof of a Mexican B-movie “demands that you not take it seriously, and for the most part that’s easy to do,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Will Ferrell plays the dim-witted son of a Mexican rancher, and the film’s “biggest joke” is that the American star speaks Spanish throughout without ever winking at “the hyperserious proceedings.” The “sincerity of his performance” makes the character only seem more foolish as he falls in love with his brother’s fiancée and is compelled to battle a vicious drug lord to save her. All this plays in Spanish, and as an ersatz low-budget telenovela, complete with sloppy editing and “obviously painted backdrops,” said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. Though the effect would be funny in an online clip, “padded out to feature length” the joke “wears thin.” But if you can avoid trying to locate the point of the parody, it actually “gets funnier as it goes along,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Look at it as “post-Situationist conceptual art,” and you might conclude, as I did, that “most of it is executed to dadaist perfection.”