Because of reader recommendations, I recently had the pleasure of watching for the first time “Boyz N the Hood,” the 1991 coming-of-age story set in South Central Los Angeles.
If you’ve seen the film, which stars Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube and Laurence Fishburne, you know that it’s not a happy movie. It depicts South Central as a place where violence is constant and inescapable. But it’s an incredibly moving portrait of the L.A. of that time, when outrage was building about racism toward Black Americans following the beating of Rodney King.
“Boyz N the Hood” is one of six quintessential California movies we’re recommending today as part of the latest installment of our Golden State movie series. You can browse the previous choices, including “Chinatown” and “The Big Lebowski,” here and here.
Below are the other five newly added films, and some of what readers wrote in about them, which we lightly edited:
“The Graduate” (1967)
“‘The Graduate’ has to be on the list. It opens with the line ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles.’ It spans locations from L.A. to S.F. to ‘Santa Barbara’ (the famous wedding scene was actually filmed at a church in La Verne). It also has a few driving location goofs that make Californians giggle. The top deck of the old Bay Bridge went to San Francisco, not to Berkeley. And the Gaviota Tunnel is only on the northbound side of the 101, not the southbound side. The goofs just make it more enjoyable.” — Josh Ashenmiller, Los Angeles
“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982)
“Sean Penn leads a 1980s ensemble tour de force of young actors (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Nicolas Cage) headed for movie stardom, with the first-time director Amy Heckerling and the screenwriter Cameron Crowe perfectly capturing Gen X teen angst. A jackpot of great characters and quotable lines: What are you, people? On dope?’ ” — Mark F. Mauceri, Los Angeles
“The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)
“Another great John Ford film, with Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine. Gritty hard-luck stories, but with sunlight at the end. The early scenes are outside California, but California is the goal and the dream of the Dust Bowl refugees all along.” — Burr Heneman, Point Reyes Station
“Harold and Maude” (1971)
“Much of it takes place in Marin County and captures the green-gold light particular to that area, and there is a scene at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco and one at sunset at the Emeryville mud flats with the art pieces and sculptures (Wikipedia calls them ‘found object structures’) that began appearing there in the 1960s. Quintessential California.” — Kimn Neilson, Berkeley
“Rebel Without a Cause” (1955)
“It evokes coming-of-age with all the drama of the teen years and magnificent backdrops of Los Angeles, including the famed Griffith Observatory.” — Chris King, Berkeley
And before you go, some good news
A sea otter at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach has become a surrogate mother to an orphaned pup and is raising the pup so it can be released into the ocean, The Los Angeles Times reports.
The otter, named Millie, is part of a program at the aquarium that seeks to rehabilitate young otters that have been separated from their families. The young otters are paired with adoptive mothers at the aquarium who can teach them to hunt, forage and socialize, with the eventual goal of returning the young otters to their natural habitats. The program officially began in 2023 as an outgrowth of a similar program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that has rehabilitated 70 pups in the last two decades.
Millie has been raising the orphaned pup, called 968, since February, shortly after it was rescued near Santa Cruz. The surrogacy has been a success, the aquarium said, and with luck, 968 could soon become the first otter in the Long Beach program to return to the wild, thanks to Millie.
“It’s all instinctual, and she’s doing it way better than any human ever can,” Megan Smylie, a program manager at the Aquarium of the Pacific, told The Los Angeles Times.
