Claes Bang in THE SQUARE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.  by Katherine Vallin and William Alexander Yankes The Square, winner of Cannes’ Palm D’Or in 2017, is a feature film by Swedish writer/director Ruben Östlund with actors Claes Bang and Elizabeth Moss. He: Shall we step into The Square? She: I’d rather view it from the edge. He: Unlike the title of this Oscar-nominated foreign film from Sweden, there are no right angles, nor straight lines in this feature production. She: The story hinges on a charismatic, womanizing museum art curator’s conundrums. He: Can you blame him? Women flock to him in droves. He doesn’t even have to really pursue them. She: This journey starts when a journalist confronts him with his own intellectually obscure commentary on art. Befuddled, he finds himself barely capable of making sense of it. He: There’s a comedic moment when the camera focuses on their respective facial expressions in reaction...

Abuelita wields the almighty “chancla ” with experience and fortitude in COCO. Photo: Disney-Pixar   Review by Alci Rengifo Coco is that kind of family film that manages to tackle a tricky subject with heart and sensibility. Disney and Pixar have scored yet another visual achievement here, but this one is particularly notable for the way it uses Latin American culture to explore themes of death and memory. Visually, it is an enrapturing movie. The iconography of Mexico’s Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) tradition is used with elegance and fun, capturing the tradition’s unique mixture of remembrance and celebration. The kind of romance associated with Latin folk culture is beautifully celebrated with dramatic energy. But this is a warm-hearted movie that probes deeper into the meaning of family and independence. It dives into Mexican culture with infectious gusto and joyous music, but its central narrative has a universal power. The story is set in the rural Mexican to...

L. - R.: Mrs. Potts (Jacqueline Schofield ); Belle (Andrea Somera); Beast (Omar Mata). Photo by Ed Krieger by Abel M. Salas The Disney-Pixar animated blockbuster Coco has undoubtedly demonstrated that Hollywood can successfully deliver entertainment steeped in traditional Mexican culture. Banking on the widespread stateside popularity of the Día de los Muertos tradition—thanks, in large part, to a preceding generation of Chicano artists who came of age in the 1960s, added their own creative flourishes before generously 0 their take on the celebration with the rest of nation 40 years ago—the studios scored big with Coco . They scored so big, in fact, that taking the film world-wide was a given, and its record-setting reception in Mexico as the country’s highest grossing film of all time was not a surprise. With a resplendent Boyle Heights reprisal of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast —the Broadway musical adaptation of the studio’s 1991 Academy Award-winning animated feature film...

by Abel M. Salas Once the capacity crowd has spilled out of the Tom Bradley Theater at the iconic Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC), Richard Montoya joins them in the ornate, marble-floored lobby. The seasoned performer is—with Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas—a co-founder of Culture Clash, the renowned three-man comedy troupe the evening’s throng of patrons had come to see. With the faint residue of stage make-up still evident on his face, the veteran actor-writer-director is being unduly modest. “Hey, man,” Montoya says, rolling his eyes slightly under raised eyebrows and flashing a sheepish, almost apologetic grin. “Guess you could tell we were working without a net up there.” In the aftermath of the acclaimed trio’s second-ever, full-blown staging of Culture Clash: An American Odyssey , an original new production premiered at the “Encuentro de Las Américas: Embracing Our Voices” international theater festival, Montoya is fretting over kinks and glitches—perceptible to him a...

by Victor Griego, Jr. Bonn, Germany —I am fortunate to be attending the 23rd Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), or “COP23,” here. Since my arrival to this historic old-world, yet still very modern European city, I’ve learned a great deal. I have had the opportunity to reflect on those learnings and have come away feeling positive and hopeful about our earth’s future. That hope I’m carrying within me now has been sparked by those I’ve encountered at the conference, among them people from all corners of the globe as well as several hailing from various municipalities across our own great state of California. The COP23 is the United Nations committee of 197 nations assembled to address the effects of global Climate Change. Its first agreements—negotiated in a multi-national effort to confront the reality of global warming—were signed in Kyoto, Japan at a similar gathering convened in 1997. Although the United States w...

Tim Miklaucic (l.), Germán Vázquez Rubio, and Armand Arnazzi. Foto: Armand Arnazzi by Fabiola Prieto On the final day of one of Hollywood’s largest industry conferences, the D23 Expo—known to the legions that attend as the definitive all things Disney mega-event—one man stood there, alone and anonymous among the roughly 100,000 assembled fans. He was one of the entertainment industry’s biggest celebrities, if only briefly. German Vázquez, 65, a man of old-world formality who speaks broken English, blended easily into the overflow crowd as just another aging senior. Yet his story has the makings of a film that you will never see. He was born into poverty—though he would never call it that—in a Mexican pueblo as one of seven children. His father picked corn, and his mother was a homemaker. He came from nothing. Now, here he was, appearing in a video prepared by Disney’s massive storytelling team. It was the hand-crafted guitar of his own making, lovingly created in a worksh...

by Alan R. Diamante President Trump proclaimed October 9, 2017 as Columbus Day and he made no mention of Native Americans. Being more sensitive to the plight of the indigenous American than the President, multiple cities and counties have replaced Columbus Day with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” including Los Angeles. Christopher Columbus’ accidental discovery of the Americas in 1492 sparked one of the greatest genocides in human history: The indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced massacres, torture, systematic oppression, and forced relocation. Some scholars believe that 75-100 million indigenous peoples were killed through the centuries by Europeans and their descendants. Is Columbus to blame? Perhaps he is because he did report to Queen Isabella of Spain that the natives “ought to make good slaves.” And that is precisely what happened to the survivors of the conquest. In addition to its historical significance as the year in which an explorers folly launched mass genocide,1...

by Luís Reyes Having nothing else to do is the way a lot of shit begins. Some of it regrettable, unfortunately. But not everything. Sometimes it’s fun and memorable. Like the time we went to the Beverly Lanes for the first time. (It wasn’t everyone’s first time there.) That turned-out to be a fun trip. We would eventually learn that we didn’t even have to bowl. We could just sit at the bar and drink cheap pitchers of beer. The bowling excuse had been kinda fun, I guess, but none of us were any good at bowling anyway. Plus, it cut into our drinking budgets. So we just ended up on the other side of the wall, watching whatever sport the barkeep had on. But this new found knowledge wasn’t what made the trip memorable. What made it memorable was that the visit began with weed smoking in the parking lot. There’s no memory of whose weed it was or what method we used to light it up, but we did get high as soon as we got there. Right there in the car with shame obligating us to feel we ...

  Editorial by Alci Rengifo When Hurricane Maria decided to lay her wrath on Puerto Rico, she had no idea that her winds would lay bare the cruel face of both American capitalism and American imperialism. Though far away in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico’s history is closely linked to the Latino experience in America, for we are all the children of empire, especially in L.A., which is a city marked by the imperial acquisition of Mexico in the 19th century. As Trump bullies Puerto Rico, so the system has treated its Spanish-tongued subjects everywhere. “Imperialism” is a dirty word in the halls of American political discourse, whether Republican or Democrat, because the Norman Rockwell view many cling to cringes at the idea that we are (gasp!) an empire. Our countless bases overseas, our base in Guantanamo, Cuba, our continuing presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and parts of Syria are all driven by the hand of manifest destiny according to the cultural daydream. We refuse to believe we...

Día de Los Muertos Altar dedicated to los perdidos en Tlatelolco '68 and the 43 in Ayotzinapa. Courtesy of J.A. Aguirre. by Abel Salas To most Angeleños* and roughly two million visitors from across the city, the state, the country and abroad who visit annually, Olvera Street is little more than a touristy relic, an antique collection of structures and buildings that once functioned as the city’s bustling center. For them, it provides a portal to a quaint, picturesque and romantic—if reductive and grossly idealized—vision of an idyllic colonial pueblo once home to the original 44 Native American, African, European and Mestizo settlers who founded Los Angeles along the banks of the Río de Porciúncula (Los Angeles River) in 1781. Declared a state park through the efforts of preservationist and persistent civic booster Christine Sterling, the cradle of Los Angeles had already fallen on hard times by the 1920s when she turned her attention to its shuttered adobe and early brick...