July 15, 1994

MI VIDA LOCA (MY CRAZY LIFE) is the third film from writer/director Allison Anders. Two years ago I reviewed her 1992 release, GAS FOOD LODGING. That one was about a young woman growing up in a fictional desert town, this one is a fictional portrait of young cholas in a real neighborhood of Los Angeles.

I’ve heard of Echo Park, didn’t know its history, but as soon as they showed the picturesque little lake with swans and everything I thought “Oh shit! That’s the place from ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION.” The opening narration does not mention that actully-kind-of-good 1991 TV sequel about a giant alligator in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood under threat of gentrification, instead looking back to the silent era of film: “We have a lake that’s been here since the ‘20s, when movie stars had love nests in the hills.” I read that there were studios in the neighborhood then, and the 1914 Charlie Chaplin films TWENTY MINUTES OF LOVE and RECREATION were filmed at the park. That must be crazy to see your neighborhood in a movie from that long ago. Even from 30 years ago is cool, though.

MI VIDA LOCA is divided into chapters, or stories, each title accompanied by tattoo style art. The first one introduces Mona, a.k.a. Sad Girl (Angel Aviles, CHAIN OF DESIRE) and Marivel, a.k.a. Mousie (Seidy López). Mona explains how when they joined their gang there were only a few names left and some people thought it made no sense she got stuck with “Sad Girl.” She was too happy for it. “They don’t say that to me no more,” she says, and I knew this movie would be at least as good as I remembered, maybe better.

Mousie and Sad Girl were best friends until they both got pregnant by the same guy, Ernesto, a.k.a. Bullet (Jacob Vargas, ERNEST GOES TO CAMP, THE PRINCIPAL, GAS FOOD LODGING). He’s an interesting character because he comes across like kind of a nice guy even though he sells heroin and goes between two women we like much better than him and tells them the same sweet nothings. Their rivalry boils over to the point where they’re supposed to fight. Mousie has this talk with Ernesto where she worries she’ll die and tells him to make sure to tell her kid about her. “Maybe he’ll remember all the toys I got him.” That right there tells you how very too-young-to-die she is. Ernesto tells her not to worry, she’s his homegirl, he will protect her. He said the exact same thing to Sad Girl earlier, though.

He sounded so sincere the first time, but he doesn’t do jack shit to protect them. Doesn’t try to talk them out of it, doesn’t even show up. There’s some drama about how both of them are given an old gun “for confidence” under the theory that they won’t have to use it because the other won’t have one. Luckily SPOILER they both back down, but elsewhere Ernesto gets shot dead by one of his customers.

Most of the vignettes that make up this movie connect in some way to the same object: Ernesto’s treasured mini-truck Suavecito, which has hydraulics, an airbrushed mural of a babe holding a gun, some gold-plated engine parts, the works.

I like all the politics around this thing. He got it from a guy who was locked up. He keeps it in a garage and doesn’t tell either of his ladies about it because he doesn’t want them to know he’s spending so much money on it while they can barely feed their kids. When he dies the Locos want to enter it in a car show to honor him and to win a $500 prize to give to his family. But the Locas call a meeting to discuss talking them out of it because they know you have to be a member of the car club to win. They want to sell it instead and split the money between Sad Girl and Mousie’s kids, but also some people think some should go to other people too, including Whisper (Nelida Lopez), who was with Ernesto when he was killed, got shot in the leg, still walks with a cane.

And the other thing is there’s this guy El Duran (Jess Borrego, NEW YORK STORIES, BLOOD IN BLOOD OUT), an older zoot suit type of guy from rival neighborhood River Valley, drives around in a classic car with three babes, kept coming around menacing Ernesto because he said he was promised Suavecito by the previous owner, now trying to get it again.

I really like Whisper, who from what I understand is a real Echo Park resident who really went by Whisper. She’s involved in shady shit but she has this sweet gentle voice, she always sounds so innocent. Great, authentic screen presence. The combination of pros and non-pros in the cast works really well, but she’s a standout.

The movie explains how there are generations in the neighborhood. Everyone learns from the older ones, then judges them if they start trying to change their life, while they judge the younger ones for being crazier than they were or not dressing as nice or whatever. When Giggles (Marlo Marron, All My Children) gets out of prison they all treat her like a rock star but are a little disappointed she keeps talking about learning computers and getting a job. It’s not easy, though, as an ex-felon, so it’s tempting to go back.

Another o.g. is Big Sleepy (Julian Reyes, DIE HARD 2, PREDATOR 2, ALLIGATOR II, POINT BREAK), and they explain how the names are re-used so there’s also a young Sleepy (Gabriel Gonzales) and just because of the name Big Sleepy feels a responsibility to look out for him. There’s a good scene where Sleepy gets teary talking about his friend dying and is embarrassed about it, but Big Sleepy tries to be supportive. They’re not always macho.

Another subplot is about Sad Girl’s sister La Blue Eyes (Magali Alvarado, SALSA), who’s not in the gang and is all about studying, but she falls in love with a convict after seeing his poem in Teen Angels Magazine and is distraught that he was supposed to get out and meet her but stood her up.

I love the novelistic way it all unfolds, switching narrators and points of view throughout and getting deeper into what have been side characters. Even El Duran gets a part late in the game where he talks poetically about the L.A. River and then explains why he wants Suavecito, which he says is “A dreadful machine. No class. But this is a matter of honor. The truck is rightfully mine.”

The soundtrack is good. It’s mostly playing in the background on the radio but I heard some Zapp, some James Brown, some Funkdoobiest. “Girls It Ain’t Easy” by Honey Cone works excellently as a theme song, and there’s also a pretty fun remake by an R&B group called 4-Corners. I did not remember that the end credits use the great A Tribe Called Quest b-side “If the Papes Come.” In high school I had one friend who was deeper into hip hop than me, and has since become a very successful producer. I remember needing him to translate it for me: “I love that song, but what the fuck is a pape?”

“Money. Papers,” he said. Duh.

I really like MI VIDA LOCA. Although it has some tragedy in it it doesn’t feel like a traditional gang movie at all – it’s never about shoot outs or anything. It’s more about just depicting these characters non-judgmentally. Their lives and dreams and struggles, presented with sympathy, and without preaching. Anders obviously admires them and wants the best for them. She lived in the neighborhood, heard stories from her daughter, became enamored of her young neighbors and eventually got up the nerve to approach Whisper. I found a pretty good article from the LA Times when it came out, talking with some Echo Park youths about the movie. They had many quibbles (like they didn’t think people would care that much about a car) but they mostly seemed to appreciate Anders trying to understand them.

For whatever it’s worth, it feels very authentic to me. There’s a part where Ernesto does a big monologue about drug dealing that’s a little, uh… audition for the school play. But otherwise everything seems so down to earth and un-sensationalized, it’s more of a day-in-the-life movie than a gang saga.

In subsequent decades, Echo Park has continued to be portrayed on film as a tough neighborhood. In THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, the Torettos live and have their sandwich shop there. They patrol it in TRAINING DAY and the driver lives there in DRIVE. Lady Gaga’s character lives there in A STAR IS BORN.

It’s no longer a gang area. In 2013 there was a permanent gang injunction against six rival gangs around Echo Park to create a “safety zone” in an area that includes the lake and Dodger Stadium. They were able to arrest gang members for talking to each other in public, and give stricter penalties if they’re caught with drugs or guns. At the same time the bad guy from ALLIGATOR II’s dream came true, the neighborhood was gentrified, rent got way more expensive, people had to move out anyway. So my hunch would be there are new generations of Sad Girls and Mousies out there, they just don’t have such a nice park to go to.

MI VIDA LOCA came out a year before DESPERADO, and I never realized until now that I had seen Salma Hayek before. She’s credited as “Gata,” and it’s a small part, but important enough to be on the opening credits. She’s one of the women seen driving around with El Duran – the one who sits in the front with him – and near the end she throws a drunken scene after seeing him dance with another woman.

Someone else who had been around well before DESPERADO but who I hadn’t really paid attention to was Danny Trejo, and he has one really great scene in this one, an unusual one for him. He plays a junkie who approaches Giggles at the park asking her for money, and she recognizes him as an old friend, Frank. They catch up a little and are happy to see each other, he’s clearly embarrassed, keeps gesturing at himself when alluding to his addiction, as if you can just see it by looking at him. When DESPERADO came out he seemed like such a scary looking dude, but after watching him become about 50 times more grizzled since then he just seems so young and handsome here. So you may see a little reflection of the strung out loser he sees himself as, but I think it’s overshadowed by the suave dude he must’ve been when he was known as Casual Dreamer. In the end she tries to give him some money and he turns it down and apologizes for bothering her.

Another little DESPERADO overlap: Los Lobos (who did the score for DESPERADO) are seen playing at a party. And holy shit, that’s why Sad Girl looks so familiar. Not from seeing this 30 years ago, but from Aviles playing Zamira, Bucho’s female goon! I can’t believe I never realized that.

There are a few other future indie film greats in the movie, so young I didn’t recognize them. There’s a scene where three white kids try to trade Ernesto a stack of CDs for drugs. One is Anders’ daughter Tiffany (also in GAS FOOD LODGING) and the other two are Jason Lee and Spike Jonze.

Computer – enhance!

I don’t remember Jonze ever looking like such a baby, and he was probly a young music video directing upstart when he filmed this, but the “Sabotage” video had already been out for several months by the time of its theatrical release.

Lee was a professional skater at the time, this was his first movie appearance, but Jonze had shot skate footage of him for the short Video Days and the video for Sonic Youth’s “100%.” Then MALLRATS came out in 1995 and all the sudden he was an actor.

In the credits I also noticed that Nicole Holofcener plays a warden. Two years later she made her feature directing debut with WALKING AND TALKING, and has since gone on to LOVELY & AMAZING, FRIENDS WITH MONEY, ENOUGH SAID and more. Another warden is played by Abbe Wool, writer of SID AND NANCY and ROADSIDE PROPHETS. And cinematographer Rodrigo Garcia went on to become a director (THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER, PASSENGERS, ALBERT NOBBS).

Vargas was not exactly a rookie, but he was still so young, and he’s gone on to such a long career. A few of the things you may know him from include GET SHORTY, ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION, NEXT FRIDAY, DEATH RACE, BEYOND SKYLINE and KIMI.

Aviles and Lopez were reunited in “Motherhood,” the ER episode that Quentin Tarantino directed, as well as a show called Bloody Maria. Lopez had roles in both the 1997 movie SELENA and the 2020 Selena: The Series. Other credits include SHOWDOWN, SOLO (the Mario Van Peebles one) and TRAINING DAY.

The film is dedicated to Nica Rogers, with a photo and everything. I looked her up and she was a beloved resident of the neighborhood who all the locas looked up to, who Anders befriended during research and who appears in some scenes (at the meeting, I think). She died of a heroin overdose before the movie came out, and Anders actually adopted her young son. His name is Ruben Goodbear-Anders and he’s a photographer now.

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Signs of the times: a WWF Superstars arcade game is seen. A character plays with a Koosh ball.

further reading: this interview with Anders has some good information about how she approached it and how much she involved the neighborhood