Mi Vida Loca (1993)
"We girls need new skills, 'cause by the time our boys are 21, they're dead, disabled, or in prison."

	© 1993 Cineville All Rights Reserved

"Mi Vida Loca" — "My Crazy Life" for you unilinguals out there — is quite the flipside to your average whiny-white-kids variety teen movie. The film is a series of interrelated vignettes centered around Sad Girl and Mousie, two hispanic girls who grew up together in Echo Park but grew apart when they both ended up having babies with the same boy, a nice little drug dealer by the name of Ernesto. There's no one plot line throughout the whole thing; the two girls are a starting point for lots of tangential stories about gangs, loyalty, violence, and that most dependable of teen movie themes, love.

But it's a not quite the squishy "Pretty in Pink" kind of love we're used to. The interesting thing about this movie is the way in which everyday life of the gang members is presented as completely normal — the unwed teenage mothers, the guns, the drug dealing — and it's a harsh reality for middle class whitebread viewers. But you have to admire the strength of the female characters, no matter how messed up and semi-tragic their stories may be. They take care of business while the boys just sit around polishing their lowriders.

Credits:
Directed by Allison Anders (who also did "Gas Food Lodging" and briefly dated John Taylor from Duran Duran a few years back)

Actors:
Angel Aviles
Seidy Lopez
Jacob Vargas
Jesse Borego (he was in the "Fame" tv show way back when)
Salma Hayek (it's a very small part; look for the supertight very pink dress)

Links:
Internet Movie Database

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