![]() ![]() Still, it’s not at all clear what Sean is thinking. His first glimpse of Patiño’s character is hardly flattering, as Ernesto wipes his face with his shirt, exposing his potbelly in the process. Hoping to erase the “vicious circle,” as he calls this latest reminder of his ex, Sean heads to the hardware store to buy some paint, noticing a gaggle of dayworkers out front. Pinching his lips and fighting back the tears, Sean leaves rambling, unanswered messages on Carlos’ voicemail - like the passive-aggressive update in which he describes giving away a beautiful potted tree the couple owned together, only to be confronted by the weathered spot where it stood on the deck. ![]() If this were a mere breakup, as Butler leads us to believe, then Sean comes across as an oversensitive birdbrain, practically incapable of functioning on his own. The movie hinges on an ill-advised twist, misrepresenting for the first hour a situation that’s clear to all of Sean’s friends. It’s been six months since Carlos left Sean, and he’s still unable to move on. Graduating from “Magic Mike” eye candy to leading man, Bomer plays Sean, a gorgeous, stereotypically prissy SoCal weatherman who has a meltdown on air in the film’s opening scene, prompting his boss to insist that he take some time off. The irreverent title - Spanish slang for a handsome man, roughly equivalent to “hot stuff” or “mack daddy” - is a red flag in terms of what to expect from this well-meaning but smugly insensitive buddy comedy. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy, and a lot less problematic than hiring escorts off Instagram. Grateful not to be alone, and mistaking the non-English-speaking stranger’s silence for wisdom, he starts paying the guy just to keep him company, dragging him along for day hikes at Runyon Canyon and boat rides on Echo Park Lake. Or you could come up with something totally out-of-touch and off-the-wall like “Papi Chulo,” an egregiously miscalculated rent-a-companion comedy from Irish writer-director John Butler (“Handsome Devil”), in which an egocentric gay man ( Matt Bomer), abandoned by his longtime Latino lover, hires an undocumented handyman (California-born actor Alejandro Patiño) to erase all traces of his ex from around the house. There are plenty of ways to go about it, any number of which could offer a welcome chance to illuminate the ubiquitous but under-chronicled relationship between those two groups: You could make a sentimental dramedy about a cross-cultural friendship, à la “Spanglish” or “Green Book,” or maybe a tense thriller in which the risk of arrest and deportation reveals the lopsided power balance that locks immigrants into such servitude. Let’s say you want to make a movie about the dynamic between middle-class white folks and the undocumented dayworkers they employ (some would say “exploit”) in a city like Los Angeles. ![]()
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January 2023
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