I had heard so much about A Day Without A Mexican before its release, but I never got a chance to watch it in the theaters. Now that I've seen it on video, I get an idea of why it was gone from theaters so fast. They took a great idea and went nowhere with it. In fact, the movie is so unambitious that in retrospect I'm amazed I ever thought it was an interesting idea at all.<br /><br />It is no secret that the immigrant workforce in California and indeed of much of America is the foundation of our economy, which is why it should have been so obvious of how little there was to do with the premise of Mexicans disappearing and leaving all of the poor, helpless Americans to pick their own lettuce and tomatoes. The result that we get is a preachy joke of a mockumentary that takes America's tendency to look down at immigrants and turns it around, augmenting the snobbish tone that this places on Americans so much that it removes any sense of realism from the story and turns it into a schoolyard lecture peppered with stupid jokes and shallow stereotypes.<br /><br />Maybe it's because I live in California, but I like to think that the vast majority of Americans with two brain cells working at the same time already knew everything that this movie had to say. The only way you could not know the importance of the migrant workforce in this country is if you've lived on Mars for your entire life. In a cave. With your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears.<br /><br />It's clear how strongly the people behind the film felt about how overlooked migrant workers are in America and especially in California. I completely agree with them, but it doesn't change the fact that the movie is an absolute mess. It's badly written, badly shot, and full of cheesy caricatures of Americans, each one designed around a single common prejudicial view that so many Americans tend to have towards Mexicans, like that everyone who speaks Spanish is Mexican or that anyone who refers to themselves as "latino" is Mexican.<br /><br />The people behind the film feel so strongly about the points that they're trying to make that they can't help scrawling little factoids across the screen like this is an informational film or an educational film or one of those Pop-Up Videos on VH-1. Remember those?<br /><br />The problem is that this extra effort to slap the audience over the head with individual facts that point to a larger truth that the vast majority of the audience already knows causes the film to fall on its face.<br /><br />I've always said that I'm amazed at how the migrant workers are forced to work brutal, manual labor for wages that barely allow them to survive, while people like lawyers and actors are paid millions and millions of dollars. It's not that I think actors are overpaid, on the contrary, really, I think their salaries reflect the amount of money that they personally are able to generate, but if every actor in the world went on strike or if every lawyer went on strike, the vast majority of us would be unaffected. But if migrant workers all went on strike or all decided to go to their home countries (like so many bigots in America stupidly wish they would), the country would almost immediately fall apart.<br /><br />Look at it this way, if truck drivers stopped driving, Los Angeles would be out of food in six days.<br /><br />Maybe that would have made an interesting movie, to have all of the migrant workers band together and decide to do something active to benefit themselves and each other. To leave the country that so misuses them and leave us to figure out how to fill the jobs that, ah, what was it Bush said? "The jobs that Americans won't take."<br /><br />Instead we get this stupid, stupid premise about all of the Mexicans simply disappear without a trace, only to magically reappear at the end unaware that they were ever even gone. It's a ridiculous way to bookend what could have been a valuable, introspective film.<br /><br />And don't get me started on The Fog That Surrounded California. No phones or Internet or even short wave radios could penetrate it, so Californians were left completely on their own. What about cars? Could those penetrate the fog? How about airplanes? Oh wait, the talking heads on TV told us not to approach the fog, so I guess that was out of the question. The movie places that little warning in there just as conveniently as it forgets about how many millions of people are entering and leaving the state of California at any given moment by countless methods of transportation.<br /><br />Sadly, the movie has a great point to make, but it is a point that needs to be made in a way that can't be so easily written off as a stupid, childish joke. And a mysterious fog and the mysterious disappearance of millions of Mexicans is a stupid, childish joke. The only good part was how the movie showed that if millions of people disappeared all at once, those jerks in the little toy carts would still be driving around putting parking tickets on the windshields of the mysteriously disappeared.<br /><br />Evidently the filmmakers had a bone to pick with meter maids, too.