Decisions, decisions: Do we go with Saturday night's 8 p.m. screening at the Frida in downtown Santa Ana of Hecho en Mexico, director Duncan Bridgeman's documentary on some of contemporary Mexico's most iconic artists and performers, or wait an hour for Neil Norman's The Seeds: Pushin' Too Hard, which chronicles one of my favorite mid-'60s, fuzzed-out, proto-garage bands?
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Hecho en Mexico is said to showcase the richness of Mexican music and artistry through poets, singers, actors and cultural leaders speaking about their craft, their homeland and what it means to be Mexican. Among those who appear on screen are Carla Morrison, Alejandro Fernandez, Chavela Vargas, Natalia Lafourcade, Molotov, Kinky, Diego Luna, MIS (IMS) and Amandita.
Here is the trailer:
Oh, yeah, it's subtitled for those of us who don't speak the spinach.
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The Seeds: Pushin' Too Hard features interviews with members of the Sacramento band as well as Iggy Pop, Kim Fowley, Rodney Bingenheimer and the Bangles. (If memory serves, all of them except the Seeds were talking heads in that dozen or so Sunset Strip documentaries a few years back. Well, it felt like a dozen.)
Here is the trailer for this one:
I'd give the edge to the Seeds movie because director Neil Norman is going to be there for a post-screening Q&A, but Hecho en Mexico will be preceded by a music performance from Orange County Children's Therapeutic Arts Center, which presents the film along with Frida Cinema and the Santa Ana Arts N Culture Commission's “Investing in the Artist” grant program.
DAMN YOU LOGAN CROW FOR SHOWING TOO MUCH GOOD SHIT!!!
Hmm, at $5, the Hecho en Mexico tickets are half the price to get in to the Seeds flick. And if you get there early there are free tacos. Sold! But if the movie drags a bit and/or I get too sleepy reading subtitles, I'm totally theater hopping.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.