I know why you did not like it...

I agree with you 100%. I just got done watching this and you really will only get it if you understand Spanish.
It's a ridiculous film with ridiculous characters.

But my girlfriend and I were wondering how many barely English speaking Latinos have rented this thinking it's a serious "Narco Trafficante" movie, since most of those films are just as silly.

And that's funny.

OK, let's not be so exclusionary. Let's not worry about the people who don't like it.

People who like it don't have to be bi-lingual. It would help to have some sense what the last 30 years have been like clicking a remote through the multitude of channels and all of a sudden you're watching a Spanish-language movie or soap, but most El Norte viewers already do have that (plus a few high school Spanish classes.)

Also, anyone who has a sense of film history will recognize so much more. Spaghetti Westerns, Peckinpah, Woody Allen, all things 70s, Luis Buñuel Surrealism - never seen a movie so chock-full of cinema allusions while making fun of so many cinematic cliches.

For that alone, it's an instant classic. It's original art because it's so self-consciously derivative, which is starting to become the first coherent aesthetic of 21st century movie-making...

And then, of course, there's some biting socio-political commentary on U.S. - Mexico relations from border hysteria to cultural mania, and if you add the fact that there's some real funny laughs, well gee, how can this not be some kind of instant classic?

I'm not bilingual. I took a couple of years of Spanish in school, supplemented with a couple of years of Latin, giving me a nice base for understanding the Romance Languages, but that was nearly twenty years ago. My current grasp is...tenuous, at best.
That being said, I'm only about twenty minutes into the movie and I LOVE IT.

Human beings are an irrational species. Some are even afraid of pickles.

I have taken two years of Spanish so I understood a lot of it but most of the Mexican actors spoke too quickly for me to understand. Will Ferrell was much easier to understand, but I still didn't find this movie funny.

To contrast, I don't speak a lick of Mandarin but I thought Kung Fu Hustle was pretty funny. Granted it relies more on physical comedy so the language barrier isn't as important, but I am pretty sure this movie wouldn't have been funny even in English.

And I'd like to just add, the music toward the end in the scene where everyone's getting shot at outside the mansion? I recognized it right away from an older PC game called The Movies that let you make your own machinema styled movies. I even used it in one of my films. So clearly it's just stock music, not that I expected anything else.

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I got all that and I got the purposely bad everything and the movie was still a complete waste of time. If I spent $10 or ANY amount of money on this movie, I'd be pissed. If I spent a $1 at Redbox it would have been too much. I didn't even smile while watching this. The only good part is Genesis Rodriguez's ass shot and that was probably a body double.

I'm not bilingual nor did I expect this to be wills regular type of comedy. I really enjoyed it. I will be watching it again very soon. I do think I got some of the comedy because I've seen arrested development a million times and they have a sub story arc that involves aHispanic women and telenovelas. There are plenty of parts of the movie that I don't get such as the short cuts and the scene with the letter from the camera man. I can only assume this has been done in Spanish movies. I though the dialogue was exceptional and reminded me of a tarantino film.

Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken?

Thank you to the people who reply honestly.

To mackharder:

I do not believe that you speak Spanish. Further, I think that you had different expectations about the film.

Honesty is treasured.