Música purports to be “Based on a true story. Unfortunately.” Well, they got the unfortunate part right; as for the “true story” portion, if that’s true it means that the hero (co-writer/director Rudy Mancuso playing himself) is an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. That is what you call someone who sees and hears things that aren’t there and has conversations with inanimate objects, isn’t it?
There’s nothing “true” about Música, though; it is the story of either a guy who has watched too much TV and can’t tell fact from fiction, or a filmmaker who is full of shit. How else to explain that the script beats the dead horse that is the Two-Timer Date?
The movie opens with Haley (Francesca Reale) breaking up with the attention span-deprived Rudy, and rightfully so. I’d do the same if I were her; after all, why would a lovely girl like Haley waste her time with a dude whose goal in life is to become the Jason Segel character from Forgetting Sarah Marshall?
The equally lovely Isabella (Camila Mendes) catches Rudy on the rebound unbeknownst to Haley, who inexplicably decides that she wants to get back together with Rudy — so now the protagonist has two girls who are way out of his league vying for his affection. This seems more like Mancuso’s masturbatory wish fulfillment fantasy than a “true story,” but then bitches be crazy, right? (or at least they would have to be).
This already clichéd triangle leads to Rudy, for reasons that I don’t care about enough to go back to try to elucidate, having a date with the two ladies on the same night at the same restaurant with hilarious predictable consequences. There are three possibilities here:
a) Rudy is hallucinating that his life has become every sitcom ever and the whole thing takes place exclusively in his unbalanced mind. Not likely, since the scene is played straight, as opposed to the movie’s many fantasy sequences. Moreover, the screenplay never acknowledges Rudy’s obvious mental problems, which in turn means that he sadly never seeks the help he so desperately needs.
b) This really happened to Mancuso. I’m pretty sure that it didn’t, but if it did, he should have left it out of the film lest we think (as we do) that his life is trite and jaded, boring and confiscated (shoutout to Twisted Sister).
c) This most certainly never ever did happen to Mancuso, who nonetheless wrote and shot the scene because he is creatively bankrupt, has zero imagination, possesses not one original bone in his entire body, and hopes we’re undiscriminating idiots who were born yesterday and had heretofore never watched a single movie or TV show in all our lives.
I don’t know about you, but I’m leaning toward option C. The takeaway here is that you should get a life before you make a film about your life, and if you’re just going to make shit up, at least come up with an interesting lie. If I wanted a story about an overrated, talentless Latin American pseudo-musician, I’d just go read Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Wikipedia bio.
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