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Besides the NYT and LAT reviews cited in today's Morning Buzz, the film based in Echo Park is the talk of the free weeklies. Ella Taylor writes in LA Weekly:
A winning tale of sex, real estate and more or less immaculate conception, Quinceañera, as you might expect from a white-made drama about Latino life in Echo Park, threatens at first blush to be all about a pregnant teenager and a prodigal cholo in the hood. Yet this saucy, rowdy, heartfelt and terribly sweet movie — a popular item at Sundance this year, where it won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features — edges as close to a complex view from within as can be hoped for from a couple of gay boys who moved into the neighborhood, got an invite from the neighbors to photograph their daughter’s coming-of-age ceremony and saw the kernel of a movie.
An inspired Weekly feature and cover treatment in the Los Angeles Alternative after the jump:
Chuck Wilson also has a feature in the Weekly on the film's two director-partners, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, meeting up with the similarly partnered makers of Brothers of the Head:
It struck me as a most unusual occurrence: two movies...opening on the same day, each of them directed by two men working together as a team, men who happen to be partners in life as well. I got to wondering what would happen if each couple were to watch the other’s film and then meet to talk as a group about the perils and joys of being a duo, on the set and off. And so it came to pass, after a mad flurry of e-mails...
And in the Los Angeles Alternative, Westmoreland and Glatzer discuss living in Echo Park and the movie with Evan George:
In five years, they say they’ve charted the best dog walks in Elysian Park. They’ve also meticulously renovated their Craftsman house and befriended nearly every family on their block—all Latino, though that is changing.Last year, they put those friendships to the ultimate test by enlisting everyone from the neighbors to their cleaning lady to help with the production of their indie film, Quinceañera. The heavy, coming-of-age drama casts Echo Park as itself—a neighborhood “coming up” and bubbling with class, racial and sexual conflict—and a gay, white couple as the gentrifying villains. Hovering somewhere between documentary and a well-scripted independent gem, the film tells the story of gentrification in a wholly unique voice: the neighborhood’s.
Their own house became that of the film’s gentrifying couple. Some of their neighbors moved out of their houses for weeks to allow the shooting of the movie, others became extras and played bit parts. “I think for most of them, they just thought, ‘Oh, Rich and Wash are nice and they have this little hobby, so we’ll accommodate them,’” says Glatzer.
Of course, LA Observed has its own new Echo Park presence in Chicken Corner.
Photos: Los Angeles Alternative