FELICIDADES A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2001 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
Lucho Bender's FELICIDADES is a comedy with multiple, overlapping storylines all set during Christmas Eve in Buenos Aires. It wants to be a heart-warming film, but it comes across flat and relatively humorless. The only big laugh at our screening came from the death of a little dog, a scene better played for tragedy than comedy.
As the movie opens, a comedian (Carlos Belloso) at a Bat Mitzvah is rattling off corny jokes. He tells his audience that he performed plastic surgery on his wife. He cut up her credit cards. A very untalented comedian, he is particularly proud of his Flipper voice impersonations. He ends up giving a ride to one of the partygoers, and they run out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
Another story involves a motor-mouth paraplegic. He cons a reluctant Good Samaritan into helping him out, but his helper wants to get back to his new find, a beautiful woman named Laura (Silke). Laura's claim to fame is her revealing red dress. Meanwhile cops are doing some illegal ransacking of a criminal's apartment. As their witnesses, the police pull in a guy who's been looking for a toy for his son for Christmas and an old man who is in bad health. (I'm not completely sure why they felt that they needed observers.) And these are only some of the menagerie of characters.
The movie marks time until it ends spectacularly. All of the characters appear in a musical montage set to a rock version of "Silent Night" and sung in English. It is a truly magical moment. It's too bad that the rest of the picture isn't up to this level.
FELICIDADES runs a long 1:40. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. It is not rated but would be PG-13 for the animal death scene. The film would be acceptable for kids around 10 and up.
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