Star Rating: Casa de Mi Padre is the most tedious film of its kind since MacGruber – a strained effort that has little to go on apart from its one-joke premise, namely a Spanish-language American production that parodies Mexican telenovelas. When it had finally gone through all of its eighty-four minutes (which, by all accounts, is a very short running time), I had the unshakable feeling that the exact same story could have been told as a five-minute Saturday … more
Throughout the 80’s and into the 90’s, the Zucker Bros made a series of terrific films that fully embraced the cinematic parody. Nothing was sacred – indeed, they lampooned action films, police procedurals, war movies, and disaster flicks – and they succeeded largely because the makers embraced their insanity with broad strokes: they passed up on many little jokes that would’ve fine-tuned their comedies often in favor of the bigger laughs, and that meant keeping … more