Trey Parker and Matt Stone Venture from South Park to Develop a Dilapidated Denver Dining Destination
DIRECTED BY ARTHUR BRADFORD/2024
For many, watching a renovation disaster is irresistibly delicious. When the subject is a beloved and legendary local Mexican eatery, that appetite can only be that much stronger. But for South Park and The Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it proves to be recipe for serious indigestion.
The new feature-length documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! chronicles the pair’s endeavor to resurrect the titular Denver, Colorado dining establishment, Casa Bonita, following its closure in 2021. More than just a unique eatery, Casa Bonita is warmly remembered for its labyrinthine layout, its amusingly idiosyncratic live entertainment (which included cliff divers plunging thirty feet into a pool revealed to frighteningly close to an active electrical service box), and shoddy food. Multimillionaires Parker and Stone count themselves amongst the many thousands of people with strong, fond nostalgia for this terminally “whitest Mexican place ever”. They even immortalized Casa Bonita in a seventh season episode of South Park in which Cartman has his way with the place.
Sure, the costumed characters’ schtick ranged from hammy to irritating, and yeah, the food was one step removed from the lousiest of frozen dinners, but there was simply nothing else like it. When Parker and Stone make the knowingly haphazard decision to buy the place, fix it up, and bring it back better than ever, they had no idea how deeply this particular money pit would sink them. They’d set aside $6.5 million to give Casa Bonita a classy rehab and majorly improve the food and quality of the entertainment therein. Over the course of many long months and in the face of a glaring litany of uncovered jaw-dropping mortal safety hazards and structural concerns, that budget would prove laughably naive.
On paper, ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! as realized by filmmaker Arthur Bradford (who makes solid use of the many hours of on-site footage shot during the project, keeping narrative-furthering “talking heads” to a minimum), shouldn’t work as a compelling movie. While the scope of the undertaking does balloon uncontrollably as we go, the problems faced neverhteless remain solvable with large sums of money. And the ultra-wealthy duo in charge have already essentially committed to doing whatever is necessary to get Casa Bonita reopened in style. In short, it’s mess after building code mess addressed again and again with more money for more contractors being thrown at every problem, and a continual recommitment to making the restaurant live again, no matter the financial hit. There’s never any doubt that the place will reopen and reopen in superior style. (If it the effort failed, would we have this doc?) Yet, compelling it is.
It likely comes as no surprise that much of the film hangs on the outsized personalities of Parker and Stone. In not only having generated an incredibly enduring hit TV show, but continuing to successfully promote themselves as comedic entertainers plops them into the rarified Winsor McCay mold of the extrovert animators. Even as Stone drifts into the background of ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, his presence as half of the central equation is undeniable. (Parker states that Stone is more of “the money guy” in their professional partnership. Stone just sardonically chuckles at the deluge of massive problems that come up with Casa Bonita).
It is Parker who is the greater driving force behind the Casa Bonita project. He is portrayed as a verbose wistfully nostalgic perfectionist who can’t help but put his mark on the place with a rash of eleventh-hour changes to the aesthetic and time period the restaurant plays in. Instead of its old 1870s theme (replete with cornball cowboy characters running around), Parker decrees that it will be the 1970s, with the animatronic prospector now wearing a Farrah Fawcett t-shirt. It’s the whim of an exhausted rich funnyman all tapped out of fs to give.
Nobody may’ve ordered a film length documentary about the stupidly expensive rescue and eventual reopening of Casa Bonita, (though Stone and Parker no doubt greenlit this film in hopes that it will, in some small way, help pay off its own subject’s renovation from hell,) but unlike Cartman, it plays well.
