VETRANOS had a good word of mouth ever since it was initially released in 1999, and those kind words didn't just come from fans of hip hop and the gangsta lifestyle, but from a number of filmakers, writers, and punks I am in contact with. This is how I first came to hear about VETRANOS. My friend Jake Skate who plays in a local punk band called Blown To Bits asked if I'd ever seen 'that movie' where Jerme Spew played a racist, white drug dealer. Jerme Spew is a writer/publisher who worked security at Gilman for nearly a decade. I was intrigued, and I asked Jake some more about the film but Jake was unable to provide me with any substantial deatails or leads about where I could get my hands on a copy of the film. A year later I was having coffee with the old Northern California scene reporter for MRR, and he made mention of the fact that I should review this film he had watched recently called VETRANOS. I'm always suprised when someone realizes that this column exists, and so I asked him what the movie was about. He told me that it was about these mexican gangstas who go to war with these white supremacist drug dealers, and that Jerme Spew played one of the white gangstas.
"Oh! Cool! That's the film I've been hearing about. Where can I get a copy?" No problem, he told me, the film is available through Dogday Records who recently started another label called F.O.A.D, which is a punk label. F.O.A.D was familiar to me as the label that released the Christ On Parade discography, and more recently part one in the Hellbillys trilogy of blood series (er..whatever). Anyway, the owner of Dogday has old punk roots she made before turning to hip hop, and so my friend said he would get me copy for review in my MRR column. VETRANOS it seems was destined to make an appearance at Punk Movie Night.
VETRANOS is not unlike the plays put on by Victory Outreach, which is a church who's membership is made up of mostly ex-convicts, drug dealers, and gang bangers. Victory Outreach plays usually bombard their audiences with a two hour story based on the realities of life in the barrio or ghetto or hood,and that could be anything from gang banging to drug dealing to murder, but the plays always end with a heavy dose of morality that the church hopes will cause some of the gang bangers and drug dealers in the audience to turn to god to escape their current lifestyles. I don't know if the actors involved in VETRANOS are current or former gangbangers and drug dealers, but I would suspect that at least some of them were at one time, and as a result VETRANOS portrays many aspects of life in the hood with an uncanny level of reality. Not that this hasn't been done before in slightly better films than VETRANOS, and as reality films go VETRANOS has none of the in your face shock value of a film like say MENACE TO SOCIETY, but as an underground film it does hold it's own from a script standpoint, not to mention the deft direction by Jose and Ed Quiroz.
One of the problems I had with VETRANOS was that although the writing was concise and well thought out in terms of putting the all important three acts together without any noticeable lag in the second act, there is a sense that there was enough skill in the writing department to base the conflict on something more than overt racism. Even if that meant putting more of an emphasis on the economic standpoint of one gang invading another gang's territory, and maybe even a bit of backstory into how these very loyal characters ended up in such a bloody street war. I'll admit that there is nothing too original about those suggestions, but how many chances have we had too see them handled by filmakers that are still as close to the streets as the Quiroz brothers? Instead of hitting you over the head with a Victory Outreach style morality lesson, VETRANOS leaves you with probably the most honest piece of information contained in the entire film. The old school gangsta played by Jesse Borrego (You know, the guy who played that piece of shit who started a knife fight with the great Esai Morales' character in MI FAMILIA), turns out to be not only more rational than the younger hip hop influenced latino gangstas, but he also has many more connections. I don't want to divulge too much of the story, because after all you still have to watch these films yourself, but let's just say that there was a time of men that no longer exists on our current society.
Many punks missed eighties hip hop completely, and a lot of the comments I heard about VETRANOS were about how the filmakers captured certain aspects of Bay Area urban life in a way that they hadn't ever witnessed before on video. An example of which are the music videos that accompany the film, one of which is shot on a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train. Of course anyone who was paying attention knows that Too Short shot a video at a BART station almost a decade ago, and that the best of underground Bay Area hip hop grew up just down the block from many of these same punks. Crews like Hobo Junction and the Hieroglyphics sold homemade tapes on Telegraph Avenue many years previous to the release of this film, and maybe most importantly, those crews were not at all most known for their gangsta affiliations. That said, VETRANOS doesn't have to pay attention to some other group's reality because this film is, I suspect, a reflection of the world and the type of mentality these filmakers are still wedded to today, creatively speaking. It is yet another voice that deserves to be heard at every stage of it's artistic development.
(Dogday Records, 4432 Telegraph Avenue #72, Oakland, CA 94609 - www.dogday.com or www.darkroomfamilia.com)

How great was Spin magazine's 20th anniversary of punk issue? Spin's editors were even more clueless and misinformed than I could have imagined. It's so inspiring to watch as the real punks continue to network with one another, transforming the underground, and doing it all under the corporate mainstream's radar. That's why we are still able to laugh at that Jello Biafra rant of a few years back about Green Day and Offspring stumbling into mainstream success. It's just too bad that punks like Darby Crash and Sid Vicious aren't alive to spit big toxic loogies in the waspy faces of Spin magazine's editorial staff. And I just want to add that it was really cool to see MRR's name used as a counterpoint to Rancid's crossover success. That's cool.
In a previous Punk Movie Nights column, I wrote about a warehouse in Oakland which used to have shows that not only featured music, but film showings as well. I expressed my desire to book shows like the ones held at the 40th Street warehouse in years past. Since the warehouse has ceast to be a viable option for such a show, I knew that I'd have to find a new space before I could even begin to put something together. After that issue of MRR came out, I discovered that I wasn't the only one that missed attending those old warehouse shows. One person in particular decided to work with me to get the ball rolling, and now thanks to Jake PUNK (People Under No KIng zine) we will be having a night of film, art, and music at Gilman on September 8th. You can find updates about that show, and of course past Punk Movie Nights columns, at my web site - www.wethepunx.com.
Please send any underground propaganda of relevance to: Punk Movie Nights c/o Jay, PMB 419, 1442A Walnut Street, Berkeley, CA 94709.