Sundance part the 5th

OK, after the Junior’s piece guilt, the factor that makes us act decent, made me decide to fill in Wednesday at Sundance. That and I can use the time to put a few more CDs on the computer to feed my I-pod.
“Quinceanera” (sorry my tildes hate me today) made me cry. It’s the story of Magdelena, a 14, nearly 15-year-old Latina in Los Angeles. Her father is a minister who kicks her out when she becomes pregnant, though she swears she’s still a virgin. Her aging great-granduncle Thomas takes her into his home, he’s already taken in her tough-guy gay cousin Carlos when his family kicked him out. This is a surprisingly happy little family of misfits.
The movie also deals peripherally with Carlos’s homosexuality and his relationship with the gay couple who own the front house on the property Thomas has been renting for something like 27 years. Gentrification is a much a problem for the people in this film as cultural issues and Magdelena’s pregnancy.
The writer-directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer were at the screening and said they based the movie on their neighbors in Echo Park (Los Angeles) and most of the cast is people from the neighborhood.
I cried, yes I’m a bit sappy at times but that really does say a lot. After all the last two movies that made me cry quite that much are probably “The Pianist” and “Long Road Home.”

Hmm, Shawn Colvin and then Clash into the computer. I really need to sort my CDs since that isn’t even alphabetical.

On Wednesday evening I saw a dog. It was a nice dog, with sparks of brilliance, the beer drinking dude part of the audience enjoyed it much more that I did. The movie, “The Foot Fist Way”; the crime self indulgence from a young film maker.
The main character is Mr. Simmons, a Tae Kwon Do instructor in a small town in one of the Carolinas, I believe it was North.
He’s one of those sadly deluded people who is very good at what he does but horrible at who he is, fancy car and fancier wife don’t make anything better. When Simmons discovers that his wife has been fooling around with her boss his life falls off a cliff. He starts to be abusive toward his longtime students and makes a pass at a new student. The scene where he “dumps” her because the wife is back is a riot, after all she’d never been going out with him. Even meeting his hero, Chuck “The Truck” Wallace doesn’t make his life better.
There is a spark of potential genius in this movie, but for now it didn’t follow through.


And after Wednesday, the top four were still “Eve and the Fires Horses”, “No. 2,” “Off the Black” and “The Illusionist”