Due to reader suggestions, I just lately had the pleasure of looking ahead to the primary time “Boyz N the Hood,” the 1991 coming-of-age story set in South Central Los Angeles.
If you happen to’ve seen the movie, which stars Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Dice and Laurence Fishburne, you understand that it’s not a contented film. It depicts South Central as a spot the place violence is fixed and inescapable. Nevertheless it’s an extremely shifting portrait of the L.A. of that point, when outrage was constructing about racism towards Black People following the beating of Rodney King.
“Boyz N the Hood” is one among six quintessential California motion pictures we’re recommending right now as a part of the newest installment of our Golden State film sequence. You may browse the earlier selections, together with “Chinatown” and “The Massive Lebowski,” right here and right here.
Under are the opposite 5 newly added movies, and a few of what readers wrote in about them, which we flippantly edited:
“The Graduate” (1967)
“‘The Graduate’ must be on the record. It opens with the road ‘Women and gents, we’re about to start our descent into Los Angeles.’ It spans areas from L.A. to S.F. to ‘Santa Barbara’ (the well-known wedding ceremony scene was truly filmed at a church in La Verne). It additionally has a couple of driving location goofs that make Californians giggle. The highest deck of the outdated Bay Bridge went to San Francisco, to not Berkeley. And the Gaviota Tunnel is just on the northbound facet of the 101, not the southbound facet. The goofs simply make it extra pleasing.” — Josh Ashenmiller, Los Angeles
“Quick Occasions at Ridgemont Excessive” (1982)
“Sean Penn leads a Eighties ensemble tour de power of younger actors (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Phoebe Cates, Choose Reinhold, Nicolas Cage) headed for film stardom, with the first-time director Amy Heckerling and the screenwriter Cameron Crowe completely capturing Gen X teen angst. A jackpot of nice characters and quotable traces: What are you, individuals? On dope?’ ” — Mark F. Mauceri, Los Angeles
“The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)
“One other nice John Ford movie, with Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine. Gritty hard-luck tales, however with daylight on the finish. The early scenes are outdoors California, however California is the objective and the dream of the Mud Bowl refugees all alongside.” — Burr Heneman, Level Reyes Station
“Harold and Maude” (1971)
“A lot of it takes place in Marin County and captures the green-gold gentle specific to that space, and there’s a scene on the Sutro Baths in San Francisco and one at sundown on the Emeryville mud flats with the artwork items and sculptures (Wikipedia calls them ‘discovered object buildings’) that started showing there within the Sixties. Quintessential California.” — Kimn Neilson, Berkeley
“Insurgent With out a Trigger” (1955)
“It evokes coming-of-age with all of the drama of the teenager years and luxurious backdrops of Los Angeles, together with the famed Griffith Observatory.” — Chris King, Berkeley
And earlier than you go, some excellent news
A sea otter on the Aquarium of the Pacific in Lengthy Seaside has grow to be a surrogate mom to an orphaned pup and is elevating the pup so it may be launched into the ocean, The Los Angeles Occasions stories.
The otter, named Millie, is a part of a program on the aquarium that seeks to rehabilitate younger otters which were separated from their households. The younger otters are paired with adoptive moms on the aquarium who can educate them to hunt, forage and socialize, with the eventual objective of returning the younger otters to their pure habitats. This system formally started in 2023 as an outgrowth of an analogous program on the Monterey Bay Aquarium that has rehabilitated 70 pups within the final 20 years.
Millie has been elevating the orphaned pup, known as 968, since February, shortly after it was rescued close to Santa Cruz. The surrogacy has been successful, the aquarium stated, and with luck, 968 might quickly grow to be the primary otter within the Lengthy Seaside program to return to the wild, because of Millie.
“It’s all instinctual, and he or she’s doing it means higher than any human ever can,” Megan Smylie, a program supervisor on the Aquarium of the Pacific, advised The Los Angeles Occasions.
