Casa de mi Padre (2012)

Umm, did I miss something here? Did Will Ferrell think, "Damn, Jack Black got to do Nacho Libre, but I wanted to do it!" and then through himself on the floor kicking and pounding it with clenched fists until he realized, "Ah ha! I will do a melodrama!" At which point he had his helper monkey bring him his cell phone so he could call his agent and get him looking to put this film together.
I get that this is a spoof. Really. But spoofs generally come out of a love for the subject being spoofed and/or poking fun at the audience's guilty pleasures. I'm trying to decide if this is a spoof that just didn't click with it's audience of one, or if it's just offensive because they're intentionally exaggerating stereotypes for an audience that is not too familiar with the genre being spoofed. I'm not saying that they were trying to be offensive, per se, just that I think this film was in spots. Okay, I think they were trying to make a really funny and perhaps even poignant spoof of Mexican melodramas and soap operas and just kind of missed the mark and ended up being a little offensive along the way, which I have to believe was unintentional. Okay, I don't have to believe this, but I do. Helper monkey aside, every interview I've seen with Ferrell, whether he's joking around or not, he seems like a really nice guy. But he also has a weird sense of humor that I don't think always transfers well. Yet it could be that I am not the target audience. I came out of watching Step Brothers thinking that there were a couple of funny moments but that it was really banal, whereas my teen-aged nephews thought it was the funniest thing since Paul Blart, Mallcop. Which says more about our different tastes than anything else I could say.
What's good about this flick? Well, seeing Genesis Rodriquez butt was okay, but the immediate following scene where her and Ferrell's characters are supposed to be making love and he is very noticeably dry humping a manikin is very damned funny. Along the same lines are the white tiger puppet and fake horses used in some scenes. Not so funny, more what-the-hell is the scene where Ferrell drives into town to confront his brother and they use a (bad) model and toy cars pulled by visible wires.
This film was listed in an article of the "19 best films of 2012 that you didn't see". That is mostly true - if you leave out the word "best", I would completely agree. Though, I do admit the possibility that of all of the 2012 films that came out and that I didn't see, that this is one of the 19 best - the point being that I didn't miss that many good films. This is a bit unfair to the list which did have Robot & Frank (the only one on the list that I had seen) and that was a very sweet little movie.

Casa de mi Padre on IMDb