Reeling Backward: "La Bamba" (1987)

Ritchie Valens did not speak Spanish. He sang the lyrics to "La Bamba" phonetically -- which is ironic for the first major Spanish-language rock 'n' roll hit, and one credited with helping launch the Chicano rock movement.

Somehow I grew up in the 1980s without ever seeing the eponymous biopic written and directed by Luis Valdez that launched the career of Lou Diamond Phillips in his first major role. The credits list him as "Introducing," though he'd actually had bit parts in small films and on TV, including playing a detective on "Miami Vice," going back several years.

It's an energetic picture filled with light and music, and Phillips is an easygoing charismatic presence as Valens, who's so sweet-hearted he's almost angelic. He perished at age 17 just eight months into his recording career on the infamous plane flight that also claimed the lives of Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, aka "The Day the Music Died."

Phillips does not sing in the movie, which also does not use dubbings of Valens' original vocals but instead contemporaneous covers by Los Lobos. They also supplied updated versions of Valens' other hits, "Come On, Let's Go!", "Ooh My Head," "We Belong Together," "Framed" and the sugary-sweet heartbreaker, "Donna."

"Donna" was actually Valens' highest chart-topper at No. 2. "La Bamba" only ever made it into the Top 40 for Valens, but Los Lobos' version hit No. 1 in 1987.

Another thing I learned after watching the movie: Phillips is not Latino but Filipino, with some European and Native American ancestry. Nowadays there would have been quite an outcry about a non-Latin playing an iconic Mexican-American.

The story plays it very straight. It starts with Ritchie as a teenager in Southern California, strumming his guitar and dreaming of the big time. Family and friends joking call him "High Tone," maybe as much for his soaring tenor as his goody-two-shoes ways. He falls for the new blonde girl in school, Donna Ludwig (Danielle von Zerneck), but her dad doesn't like him because he's Mexican-American.

Yes, this is the girl who inspired the song "Donna" after one of their breakups, and from what I've gathered the depiction of their relationship is pretty accurate to real life.

Ritchie gets into The Silhouettes, a fairly awful rock group, and is relegated to strumming on the sidelines by the egotistical lead singer. Ritchie basically steals the band from him, plays a few local gigs and gets noticed by Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano), who runs a small record label, Del-Fi. Soon enough he's got a few hit records and is touring the country.

I enjoyed the scene where Ritchie tries out for Keane in the man's basement recording studio. He's put off by the amateurish digs, but is eager to do anything to get noticed. Usually in these movies the managers/producers play the louts -- see "Rocketman" for a particularly nasty example -- but here Keane is a straight arrow who knows how to work the angles without sacrificing the talent to the wolves.

The movies glosses over any unseemly aspects of Ritchie's stratospheric rise. For instance, it's mentioned but never really addressed that he dropped out of high school to go on the road. Or the minute that Keane tells Ritchie he's got to drop the Silhouettes if he wants to make it, he doesn't hesitate to do so. And we never get a scene revealing that confrontation.

He also doesn't make a fuss over adopting the stage name Ritchie Valens from his given one of Richard Valenzuel, even adding the WASP-y "t" to his nickname to help fool the DJs who largely controlled what got played into thinking he was another white boy from the surburbs.

Rosanna DeSoto is a lotta bit over the top as Connie, Ritchie's eternally enthusiastic mother. She doesn't even seem to notice the barely concealed way she favors him over his older half-brother, Bob, played by Esai Morales. Morales was the bigger star at the time after his breakout as the heavy in "Bad Boys" opposite Sean Penn.

I was surprised and slightly dismayed by how much the film features Bob, a drunken motorcycle-riding rebel in a black leather jacket whose open jealousy toward Ritchie colors all of the family dynamics. These scenes play out with a dread sameness: Ritchie's getting accolades for his latest accomplishment, Bob shows up soused and makes a scene, everyone dumps on him and then he leaves in a huff.

Bob impregnates Rosie (Elizabeth Peña), a girl Ritchie had been sweet on, and their non-marital strife plays out constantly in the trailer home next to Ritchie's. There's a couple of uncomfortable scenes where Bob basically forces himself on Rosie, and even uses the word "rape" to describe their love life. Eep.

I get the idea behind contrasting Ritchie and Bob. Valens only was a star for a few short months, and thus there's little built-in tension to give the movie any dramatic momentum -- he sings, he woos a girl, he dies. So Valdez, making his second feature film after starting out as a playwright and stage director, whipped up a classic sibling rivalry.

The instinct is solid but it's just overplayed too much -- to the point Bob is almost a co-lead character. I can just see the conversation at the studio:

"Hey! Let's make movie celebrating the life and music of Ritchie Valens!"

"Awesome idea! But let's devote half of it to his mopey loser half-brother! We can have like 37 scenes of him being drunk and resentful!"

I kid, I kid.

Speaking of the music, it really is the reason to see this movie. I'm not sure how much the name of Ritchie Valens resonated in pop culture before "La Bamba" came out.

In addition I also enjoyed the performances by contemporaneous musicians as other acts of the late 1950s, including Marshall Crenshaw as Buddy Holly, Brian Setzer as Eddie Cochran and Howard Huntsberry as Jackie Wilson. Ghost voices from the radio, brought vividly back to life.

Stephen Lee also shows up as The Big Bopper, though he doesn't sing.

There's a recurring theme in the film of Ritchie having dreams of dying in a plane crash. He says a friend of his was killed at the school playground when the wreckage from two colliding planes rained down on a day he was home sick. (I've no idea if this was actually true.) His guilt is parlayed into the idea he escaped death's grip, but only temporarily.

There's also a strange sequence were Bob takes Ritchie down to Tijuana to "make him a man," although he gets distracted by the musicians performing at the whorehouse and ends up not consummating the deal. The implication, along with the barely-a-kiss relationships with Donna, suggest Valens died a virgin.

He wakes up the next day in the shack of an old Mexican shaman, who gives Ritchie a necklace that's supposed to protect him from bad visions. Later Bob rips it off during one of their tussles, and it's shortly thereafter Ritchie climbs aboard that fateful flight. It plays as a bunch of amateur-hour pseudo-spiritual hooey.

About that plane: Ritchie was on a winter tour with Holly, Bopper and some other stars, consigned to an old bus with no working heat. Many of the musicians, including Ritchie, became sick and a drummer even had to leave the tour because of frostbite(!). Holly was fed up with the conditions and chartered a four-seater plane ride to their next gig.

Waylon Jennings, who was a member of Holly's band, lost his seat to the Bopper, who was among those with the flu. Jennings joked to Holly about hoping his plane crashed, and was haunted by it for the rest of his life. Ritchie won a coin toss for the last seat, sealing his fate.

It really did happen as depicted in the movie that Valens' family found out about his death from media reports, as did Holly's wife. This event, as much as anything, led to the now-ubiquitous policy of civil and law enforcement authorities not revealing the names of the dead to the public until families have been notified.

"La Bamba" is a knockout whenever it focuses on the music of Ritchie Valens (and his contemporaries), though it loses its navigation a bit when it's not.

Reeling Backward: "Bad Boys" (1983)

The title "Bad Boys" has come to be associated with the awful Will Smith/Martin Lawrence buddy-copy franchise, but it has always made me think of this gritty 1983 prison drama starring Sean Penn, which stuck with me from my youth.

It was Penn's first lead role, and after the tremendous success of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" the previous year, he could easily have been typecast in Spicoli-type jobs for the rest of his life. Yet Penn took a hard left turn by portraying Mick O'Brien, a truly depraved teen who, in the opening minutes of the film, busts in a car window to steal an old lady's purse, and then smashes in the face of the good Samaritan who pursued him.

In making this young, remorseless thug identifiable and even relatable, Penn showed the first glimmerings of his potential as a serious dramatic performer. Of course, he blossomed into one of the best actors of his generation, a two-time Oscar winner before the age of 50, and seemingly destined for many more important roles and accolades.

His performance is even more impressive in that the screenplay certainly doesn't give him a whole lot to work with. As written by Richard Di Lello, Mick is gutsy but not particularly intelligent, and is given little impactful dialogue to say. Penn's turn is based more on his screen presence than anything his character says or does.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Longtime petty criminal Mick finally gets nabbed during a drug deal gone bad. He had been attempting to rob Paco Moreno (Esai Morales), a rival from high school, when they were intercepted by a third gang. In the ensuing chaos, Mick's best friend Carl (Alan Ruck, forever Cameron from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off") is slain and Mick runs over Paco's kid brother while fleeing police.

 He gets sent to juvenile prison, which is the usual jungle of barely-controlled outlaw behavior, with various cliques and power centers. Before long, Mick has climbed to the top of the hierarchical heap. At this point, Paco is sent to the same prison for raping and beating Mick's girlfriend. The last 45 minutes or so is one big (over)long buildup to their inevitable showdown.

There are a couple of truly gasp-worthy disconnects from logic in the screenplay. The first and most obvious is that the warden has to house Paco in the same cell block as Mick, knowing full well their violent history, because "all the other centers in the state are full." This is patently absurd. The idea that nowhere in the state of Illinois is a single bed available for a juvenile offender is just ridiculous.

In fact, we are told several times that Mick and Paco are housed in C-block. So what, there was no room in A or B block? If you were certain two inmates are certain to come to murderous blows, one would take every precaution to split them up -- even if that means one of them gets stuck in solitary isolation for a couple of weeks.

The other big plot hole is the nature in which Mick ascends to being the "barn boss" of C-block. When he arrives Mick becomes the target of the two head inmates, "Viking" Lofgren (Clancy Brown) and "Tweety" Jerome (Robert Lee Rush). But he takes them both out in a tremendous brawl where he's armed himself with several cans of soda wrapped in a pillow case. After getting some time in isolation, Mick is named barn boss, receiving all the commensurate perks: assignment of prisoner work details, and a cut of the illicit cigarette trade.

Now think about that -- why would the prison supervisors allow positions of power to be determined by combat? That seems like a pretty laughably lousy way to maintain order. That approach is less rehabilitative than Darwinian.

These quibbles aside, I found the overall level of acting in the film to be as good as I'd remembered. Director Rick Rosenthal, who's spent most of his career in television, gets some very naturalistic, unornamented performances out of his young cast. (Most of whom, I should note, were in their early- to mid-20s playing teenagers.) I should also mention Eric Gurry as Horowitz, a brainy but disturbed kid who becomes Mick's right-hand-man. Gurry had a short but notable run of child acting roles in the 1980s.

What's most notable about "Bad Boys" is the level of authenticity the cast and director bring to the proceedings. These are not cutesy kids doing naughty things. Most of the inmates in C-block are serious offenders who have murdered, maimed and raped. Even the nerdy Horowitz killed three people firebombing a bowling alley. He was targeting some bullies who beat him up, and his only regret is that he killed the wrong three people.

This was the only produced screenplay by writer Di Lello, though he did have a story credit on "Colors," another Penn film. Despite the criticisms mentioned earlier and a certain predictability to the last third of the story, it's still a bold original work that takes the trouble to look at some disturbed teenagers with more than simplistic strokes.

Penn and Morales take on a noticeable change as they transition from the streets of Chicago to the inside of the prison. Penn takes on a thousand-yard stare common among the long-term incarcerated. And both actors swell with prison-forged physiques they did not have before -- the formerly skinny Morales' arms approaching Stallone-esque proportions.

I fondly regard "Bad Boys" among other films of the late 1970s and early '80s that formed deep impressions on me at a time I was first becoming seriously interested in movies. I've enjoyed these occasional visits down memory lane to catch up with these flicks and see how they stand up after so many years.

"Bad Boys" is seen in retrospect as a mostly forgotten but seminal movie that launched a lot of careers.

3 stars out of four