My friend KJ responded to my request for post topics with this: “The most awesomely bad movie you’ve ever seen and why.”
Sometimes you are presented with a question and it takes a few minutes of deep thought and reflection to come up with the answer that truly lies deep in your heart. This was not one of those situations. Before I even finished reading her question I had a clear answer in mind.
Ladies and gentleman, I introduce to you the most awesomely bad movie I’ve ever seen: A Day Without a Mexican (ADWAM).
In college, I took a class called Diversity in American Politics, which explored the “stories of five groups who have been a part of the American political story,” including Mexican Americans. Yes, that was me quoting from the syllabus I found in 30 seconds of searching because I am the world’s most organized person:
Anywho, we read a book for each group, and pairs of students led class discussion one day based on each text. My friend Jason and I were assigned George Sanchez’s “Becoming Mexican American.”
In these discussions we were encouraged to use some sort of visual/multimedia element, and somehow on Netflix we stumbled across ADWAM. It seemed like an intriguing premise when discussing immigration policy and the place of Mexican immigrants in the United States. What if all of a sudden every Mexican in California disappeared? What if everyone who denigrated Mexicans and wished they would leave got what they wanted?
Well, in reality the movie is a disaster. The height of its ridiculousness is the green fog that is responsible for the disappearing.
While writing this I asked Jason to sum up the movie in one tweet:
@cjhannas so wait, is this a mockumentary or not? Wait, are they serious? Is this…what the…man I could go for some guac rn.
— Jason J (@JinDenver) January 28, 2016
I don’t think we made it 20 minutes through the movie before deciding there was no way we were going to actually show any of it during our presentation. Though according to the grade sheet we did mention it during the discussion.
And in case you’re wondering, we got a B plus.
