La Misma Luna / Under the Same Moon, and Los Angeles in Movies

I don't watch much TV, but do buy and resell DVDs, and picked La Misma Luna up with a huge bundle of DVDs.

I really enjoyed it. It's about this boy and his mom, who left Mexico to work in America, so he could have a better life. He was left behind in Mexico. His grandmother, his guardian, died, and he trekked up to Los Angeles to reunite with his mother.

It got pretty good review on the various sites, and suffered fair criticism for being sappy, but I suspect the target audiences loved it. It got a long ovation at Sundance. I'm certain that was because many of the people at Sundance lived in Los Angeles, and this story was as much about Los Angeles, as the specifics of the plot.

One of the plot points was about a payphone which Mother used to call Son as a set time, on the same day each week. It's located at the corner of Boyle and 6th/Whittier, but is only described as surrounded by a laundromat, a Domino's Pizza, a party store, and a mural.

The film was made in 2007, and that corner was exactly as it was, even as late at 2016, when a fire burned up the laundromat, shortly after the start of demolition of the 6th street bridge.

Since then, it's been rebuilt, but the party store, which became a little market, was shut, and replaced with a Xipster shop, and again, with a regular little corner market. The mural's been painted over. The Domino's is gone, replaced with a Wing Stop (the Domino's moved down the street), and the laundromat is back, but looking fancy. The donut shop is gone, replaced with a 7-11. There's some gentrification going on.

Another scene in the movie was across from a Pioneer Chicken. Yes, there's still a Pioneer Chicken, and that specific one in the scene is still there. (This isn't a paid placement: go there and support their existence ok.)

The kid says they just need to get to that pay phone, and wait for his mom. Very clever. It's kind of unrealistic, because you figure after all these years, they would know the address... you have to suspend disbelief.

That mini mall is two blocks away from the Domino's. So, when I was watching the movie, and they were saying "how are we going to find this payphone with the mural, laundromat, etc.", I was thinking, "it's down the block! It's down the block!"

That would have ended the movie right there, so they didn't do that. Instead, they walked all over East LA (and Boyle Heights), finding a lot of payphones with a mural, but not the right one. One had a Pizza Loca there, another didn't have any pizza. There's laundromats everywhere, and more murals than laundromats.

It's kind of silly that they didn't just ask someone, and describe the corner. I bet if I did exactly that, I'd find the exact corner after asking maybe 10 people. There weren't that many Domino's Pizzas around East LA. There's a lot of pizza, though.

Also, I suspect the mom would have already started calling that area "Boyle Heights". It's a huge area, of nearly 200,000 people, around 5 or 7 miles across, and people get specific about place names.

They would have got a big jump on the Boyle-Heights-in-movies trend, following on Real Women Have Curves, which had some scenes shot at the hotel on 1st and Boyle, a mile up the street from the laundromat in LML, and Jim's burgers down the street. (That area has changed even more since then.)

There's this newer show I saw once on streaming called Vida, and they filmed that over at this birria restaurant on 4th st., and I think also at some storefront on 1st. That show also took place in BH.

There's another show I haven't seen called Gentefied, and I am not sure where they filmed that, but read that they used La Ronda restaurant in East LA.

It's also been in other movies like American Me, Mi Familia, Blood In Blood Out, and The Crimson Kimono.

The most famous recordings of the area are probably the opening and closing credits from Chico and the Man, a TV show from the 1970s set in the area. I think it has a lot more East LA and downtown footage though.

There's also a bazillion movies that have shot footage at the corner of Soto St and Cesar Chavez Blvd, because, for a long time, it was one of the rare places in LA where a lot of people walked around, so you could see a lot of people. They're walking because a lot of people are transit-dependent.

It's still similar, but, like you might guess from what I wrote, the pressures of gentrification are on, and things are getting pretty stressful sometimes. People are fighting it, and BH is kind of famous for it now, so, there's some kind of magic going on with the place.