Echo Park L.A.

No one is perfect and this film may have its flaws but what a realistic and refreshing look at LA! The young actors do a great job, portraying their characters genuinely -- no trickery, no exaggeration. The film-makers successfully depict the Echo Park area, with its people and its traditions as well as the new challenges facing the populations of Metropolitan LA. It is indeed good to see Los Angeles in a new light, with its culturally rich neighborhoods that tend to be either forgotten or ill-represented by mainstream Hollywood films. My personal pleasure: finally a film with actors that look like and speak like the characters they embody! The Spanish spoken is correct and accents are credible! Definitely recommend it.

2006 Sundance Film Festival Quinceanera, for the Hispanically challenged, is a traditional ceremony and celebration of a girl's 15th birthday, her transition from childhood to maturity. In this movie, the event centers on Magdalena, an otherwise role model of a girl and daughter of a part-time preacher who gets pregnant before her 15th birthday, despite her claims to have never had intercourse. To manage the conflict at home, she moves in with her Great Uncle Tomas, who also houses Carlos, her tattooed and tough-guy cousin who is also estranged from his parents, mainly because he is gay.

By all accounts, this movie ought to be panned. The script, while evenly paced, never rings true. Most of the characters are flat. The acting lacks inspiration or enthusiasm. But still, I was moved, because at the heart of the story is the impact of Uncle Tomas, who with the wisdom of the aged is able to look beneath the surface of these two young cousins and see only goodness. He is filled with kindness and compassion, although the movie never let's itself get nearly as schmaltzy or overly sentimental as my description of it.

I suppose this idea of accepting the differences in people—Hispanics, gang-bangers, gays and pregnant teenagers—is tired and hackneyed in its political correctness. But there's something about a glimmer of truth that is warm and enlightening. So, that said, I dug the movie.

Side note from the writer/directors: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland are gay and live in Los Angeles. Wash is British. And it so happens that two of the main characters in the movie are gay lovers, living in Echo Park in Los Angeles, one of whom is a Brit. So naturally, someone in the Sundance audience asked them if these characters were, you know, autobiographical at all. And naturally, they said no, it was just a coincidence. And I guess I believe them because they had the guts to write these characters as not entirely likable. In fact, if Pat Buchanan had written he script, someone would have accused him of being homophobic. Strange but true.

In Echo Park, Los Angeles, the teenager Eileen May Garcia (Alicia Sixtos) has a dream fifteen years old party. Her cousin Magdalena (Emily Rios) is fourteen years old and will be the next in the family to celebrate the "Quinceañera". However, her father is the local preacher and security guard and cannot afford and expensive party and Magdalena will wear her cousin's dress and dreams on arriving in a limousine like Eileen did. However, her dreams are shattered when she finds that she is pregnant of her boyfriend Herman (J.R. Cruz), in spite of being virgin. Her father expels her from her home and she moves to the house of her uncle Tomas Alvarez (Chalo González), who lodges his troublemaker gay nephew Carlos (Jesse Garcia) in his house, and the trio raises family bonds.

"Quinceañera" is the evidence that it is possible to make a great movie with a very low-budget, supported by excellent screenplay and performance. The enlightened character Tomas that survives selling "champarraro" is one of the most beautiful I have recently seen. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Meus Quinze Anos" ("My Fifteen Years")

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today." Isaac Asimov

There isn't much more that could happen to a 14 year-old Latino girl than occurs in Quincearnera, a stew simmered in the Echo-Park section of Los Angeles.Change is the dominant motif as it affects every major and sub-plot point to the point that nothing is explored in depth while much happens.

Before the celebration of her Quincearnera (15th birthday, when a girl becomes a woman, Magdalena (Emily Rios) is pregnant although the circumstances are questionable if not downright miraculous; bad boy brother Carlos (Jesse Garcia) is gay; they and their old uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), who has kindly sheltered the two after they are shunned by the family, face eviction as the area is going to gentrification faster than you can say the film's title. The change also visits her dad, who struggles to accept his shameful daughter despite the cultural negativity.

Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland drive their camera through and around the streets of Echo Park and the yards and living rooms to fulfill the promise of the production company, Kitchen Sink. The kitchen-sink movement in the 50's and 60's especially in England showed basic working class family life, such as Mike Leigh currently does, and still allowed the old higher-class staples of irony, tragedy, and comedy take their rightful place. In Quincearnera, however, the topics are subsumed under the change idiom, allowing the directors to use the gays-smartly-investing-in real-estate motif without much to say other than rents become very high.

Although Magdalena's pregnancy seems to be the center of the tale, the film also touches on the changing fortunes of minorities, the emergence of gays as both owners and landlords, the challenges of adolescence, and the power of family. For those subjects, I applaud these directors.

I think this movie will have universal appeal. This story of family learning to accept each other, along with coming of age, and changing urban centers will resonate with people around the country no matter whether they know what a quinceñera is or not.

The cast is mostly non-union, and the performances they give are brave and fresh. Three cheers for Emily Rios and Jesse Garcia, who played the leads, and cousins, who are struggling with acceptance from their parents, and take shelter with their elderly great-uncle.

I also saw this at Sundance, and the film got a standing ovation. I was surprised it took both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards, but not surprised it resonated on such a fundamental level with the cast.

Directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer said they began writing the story on New Year's Day of 2005, and the entire thing came together fast - 3 weeks for financing, another three to film on their very own street of Echo Park.

I think it's specific enough to interest people, and universal enough to keep them watching.