BEFORE: Will Ferrell carries over again from "Superstar", and after tonight, Movie Year 10 is half over. Hmm, June 1, that seems about right - 150 films in 5 months, with 7 months to go, and even though I'm not planning to take any time off in July this year, I can take extra time off in September or November/December. I think my Summer Rock Concert chain will take me to about Movie #3,035 and if I factor in 20 horror films in October, that leaves me with only 45 more slots to fill. If I can fill up the month of September, that will leave just 15 slots for November and December. Seems about right, I get too busy with the holidays sometimes to keep the schedule up anyway. But yeah, I'm already trying to block out the end of 2017 - I wish I could say I'll make progress on the list during what's left of the year, but 153 films on the main list, and another 133 on the list of films to try to add, I'll probably end up making negative progress this year. Right now I'm blaming Netflix - but maybe next year I can get the numbers moving downward.
THE PLOT: Scheming on a way to save their father's ranch, the Alvarez brothers find themselves in a war with Mexico's most feared drug lord.
AFTER: It took me a while here to realize that they weren't serious in making this movie - I mean, obviously it's in the style of a Spanish telenovela, but it's not an outright "Airplane"-style spoof. But then again, I don't watch a lot of telenovelas, or even clips of them since "The Soup" got cancelled, so I can't say that I know all the tropes or got all of the references. But it took noticing that the horses were completely fake in the close-ups, along with all the fake backdrops and rear-projection driving scenes to determine that nothing here should be taken seriously.
Yes, the whole film is in Spanish, and that could have something to do with why I haven't seen this film airing on premium cable, and it's been six years since its first release. Are the U.S. distributors so sure that no English-only Americans would give this film a chance that they've essentially relegated it to streaming-only? I had to watch this on Netflix, which sort of puts it in the same league as disappointments like "Butter" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" - or maybe there are just too many movies these days for the cable channels to air them all, who can say.
(Meanwhile, my downstairs cable box has decided to stop showing me all of the premium channels, except for Showtime Family and Encore Family. Yeah. Rebooting the cable box didn't help, so I called the Evil Cable Bastards and they said that it's some kind of connection problem, perhaps because my cable box is so old. I prefer to think that since my bill was $30 overdue for a couple days last week, someone made those channels "unavailable" to me to teach me a lesson. I've got someone coming today to check my cable signal, but if his solution is to replace my old cable box with a new one that won't allow me to dub movies to DVD, then maybe it's time to go all Netflix & iTunes. I've got enough films on DVD to hold me for a while, and half of my Summer Rock Concert series is on Netflix).
We have this thing called subtitles now, and that makes a film in any language watchable, but since that means that a viewer has to concentrate on the film, and not check their text messages or play Candy Crush on their phone (or do a jigsaw puzzle on the iPad, trust me, I feel your pain) then we start to see why foreign films don't catch on with today's audiences. But just because this is in Spanish, that doesn't mean that the story has to be super-simple so that American people can still follow it. Or maybe it does, if the story has to be told in really simple Spanish so that the one American actor can be fluent in telling it. I thought Ferrell did all right, though, but I'm not fluent in Spanish at all.
And then there's a big cop-out near the end, where instead of a climactic showdown between the coyotes and the (puppet) Jaguar King, the film pauses and a written message from the film's camera man appears on screen, apologizing for a technical mistake on the set that caused the death of several crew members and prevented the wonderful sequence from being captured on film. Lame. The lack of something is never as funny as the presence of something, although I suppose perhaps whatever battle the audience could imagine is better than watching puppets fight. But we'll never know for sure. This is the same comedy bit that Seth Meyers does from time to time when he pretends to go on a rant about some topic, and the network supposedly doesn't want to air his personal views, but a "technical issue" prevents them from editing out the footage. Gee, the same technical issue happens about once a month - there's no issue that would prevent a TV show from cutting around footage that they don't want to use, a technique they also use frequently by cutting to a shot of the audience whenever they want to edit out a monologue joke that doesn't land. So really, it's just an excuse to kill four minutes of screen time.
Also starring Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "Babel"), Diego Luna (last seen in "Rogue One"), Genesis RodrÃguez (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Pedro Armendariz Jr. (last seen in "The Mexican"), Efren Ramirez, Adrian Martinez (last seen in "Focus"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "The Founder"), Manuel Urrego, Sandra Echeverria, Luis Carazo, with cameos from Molly Shannon (also carrying over from "Superstar"), Dan Haggerty.
RATING: 4 out of 10 cigarillos
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