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Life & Times Transcript

04/06/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

According to Megan's Law, it's once a sex offender, always a sex offender, but is that always the case?

Paul>> People don't even know if you did it one time or if you did it ten times, so they have no way of knowing if he's a problem or not. If they see you on the website, they assume that you're the same type of person that attacked and killed Megan.

Val Zavala>> And then, ever wonder why you see Our Lady of Guadalupe everywhere? Meet the go-to guy for the answer on all things Mexican.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> There isn't much sympathy out there for sex offenders and, these days, their criminal records are easily available online, but what about low-risk offenders like the man you're about to meet? A single offense twenty years ago makes him very unlikely to offend again. Hena Cuevas takes a look at how the Megan's Law website has impacted his life.

Hena Cuevas>> It takes only a few clicks and the information of more than sixty-three thousand registered sex offenders is available for all to see. This is the Megan's Law database which became available on the internet in 2004. Its main goal is to help parents protect their children by tracking the whereabouts of sex offenders. They can search by name, address, zip code, county or school, but the site has also created havoc for some of those listed here, like this man. He's a registered sex offender who asked us not to use his real name, so we'll call him Paul.

Paul>> About two weeks after I'd moved here, my landlord came to me and said that someone was moving in and they saw my face on the Megan site. They knew that I lived here and they refused to move in here because of that.

Hena Cuevas>> Paul's first and last offense happened back in 1988 when he was high on drugs.

Paul>> I was walking to the bathroom. I was living in a home with a single mom and her daughter. Her daughter was sleeping with the door open and I thought to myself that I could touch her without her knowing because she's asleep. I didn't do anything to hurt her, but I just touched her improperly.

Hena Cuevas>> How old was she?

Paul>> She was fourteen.

Hena Cuevas>> The mother kicked him out of the house. He says he was so distraught that he turned himself in to the police.

Paul>> I began to think about it and I realized you got a problem, man. I said this is stupid. This is sick.

Hena Cuevas>> Was that the first time it had happened or the first time that you had gotten caught?

Paul>> No. The absolute very first time it ever happened, the last time that that ever happened. I was very clear after that that I had crossed some boundaries.

Hena Cuevas>> His offense happened almost two decades ago, but like all the entries on the Megan's Law website, his doesn't have a date.

Paul>> People don't even know if you did it one time or if you did it ten times, so they have no way of knowing if he's a problem or not. If they see you on the website, they assume that you're the same type of person that attacked and killed Megan.

Hena Cuevas>> Megan's Law was established nationwide in 1994. It was named after Megan Kanka who was killed in New Jersey by a twice-convicted sex offender. According to Scott Ciment of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, having the information online has created some unintended consequences.

Scott Ciment>> There are a lot of people who have convictions back when they were teens or in their early twenties who are now in their fifties and their sixties. This information is coming up on the database and they haven't had any problems in the last thirty years.

Hena Cuevas>> After Paul's twenty year old secret was out, his landlord asked him to move.

Paul>> She didn't think it was right, I didn't think it was right, but she was up against it and she said the pressure was insurmountable. It wasn't just the realtors, but the company that she works for.

Hena Cuevas>> As it stands, a landlord can't evict someone because of information they found on the Megan's Law website. In fact, they're even barred from using the site during the application process or they could be fined up to twenty-five thousand dollars. However, they're still responsible if something were to happen to a resident because of a known danger and one such danger would be having a sex offender living on the premises.

Debra Carlton>> So they're in a catch-22 situation.

Hena Cuevas>> Debra Carlton represents the California Apartment Association. Her group is trying to change the law so that landlords can use the information.

Debra Carlton>> What we're asking the legislature to do is basically give us the ability to make decisions through the application process or through the eviction process when it comes to high-risk sex offenders.

Hena Cuevas>> The restrictions became a problem for apartment manager, Ronda Kerwin, after a high-risk sex offender moved into her complex earlier this year.

Ronda Kerwin>> We were actually told by the police department that this is a really bad man and you don't want him living in your community.

Hena Cuevas>> But there was nothing she could do. She couldn't notify her residents and she couldn't kick the guy out.

Ronda Kerwin>> It became almost as if he became the protected resident when, in fact, I felt this overwhelming obligation to protect the hundred fifty-seven children and the nine hundred ninety-nine residents that lived on my property.

Hena Cuevas>> She eventually reached a settlement with the tenant, offering him six thousand dollars to move. In Paul's case, just two months after he moved in, his landlord also offered him money to leave, but the amount was much higher.

Paul>> I said I don't know when I move from here where I'm going to go and how much it would take for me to maintain my family until I did find a place. I said I don't think your people are ready to hear what I'm about to say, but fifteen thousand is what comes to my mind.

Hena Cuevas>> When you hear the number of fifteen thousand dollars, that's quite a bit of money. It could be either considered -- is it extortion that you're working the system?

Paul>> I don't want to move, but at the same time, what would it take to make me move or would I be willing to move for? That would be an encouragement, but even now at that point where I'm going to be moving tomorrow, it's not enough money.

Hena Cuevas>> So basically, something to make it worth your while.

Paul>> It has to be worth my while, but at the same time, it's not enough money because what you're buying is my right to live anywhere I want and I don't know if I can find another place equal to or better than the place I'm at right now.

Hena Cuevas>> And knowing that it may happen again.

Paul>> Oh, that's almost a given now.

Hena Cuevas>> This is actually the second time Paul has been forced to move. At his previous address, neighbors plastered these flyers all over the complex.

Paul>> They're not educated enough to even understand what they're given, so they take this mob mentality and turn you into an object and say, "Oh, yeah, whatever you do with him is fine with me" because the person deserves punishment.

Hena Cuevas>> Paul is considered a low-risk offender, but he hasn't been able to get off Megan's list and there's no way of knowing the details of his offense just by looking at his profile. Low-risk sex offenders like Paul are lumped in with high-risk ones. In working on the story, the reaction has been, "I don't care. I do not feel sorry for these people. It serves them right that we know where they are" and there's just no love lost.

Paul>> If I hadn't done what I did and I wasn't in this situation, I almost feel like I understand that. But what they don't know is that this is another person just like you that made a mistake, that actually in this case requires this type of punishment.

Hena Cuevas>> If there is a tightening of the law or a change in the law, then where would sex offenders live?

Debra Carlton>> We usually say, "Where shouldn't they live?" Our answer to that is they shouldn't live next door to a five year old. Apartments are very unique in that you have high density, where you have playgrounds, you have family swimming pools, you have shared facilities. Our answer is, "Not there."

Scott Ciment>> You can create a powerful disincentive for them not to maintain their registration requirements. You're going to create a whole class of homeless people.

Hena Cuevas>> Paul has a steady job, is married, and drug-free, but finding a new place to live may prove difficult.

Paul>> I didn't realize it would be a lifetime punishment. I didn't realize it would go to the levels it has.

Hena Cuevas>> Although the Megan's Law website offers important information, it's not enough to distinguish between the truly dangerous and those who, like Paul, only want to live out their lives peacefully. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Admit it. All of us at one time or another in the back of our minds have had that politically incorrect question we would love to ask about an ethnic group and, in southern California, that often means about Mexicans. Well, now there's a person who has the brains and the guts to answer anything.

He lives and works in Santa Ana, or Santana, as he calls it, population three hundred forty thousand and a whopping seventy-six percent are Latino. But not one of them is like Gustavo Arellano.

Gustavo Arellano>> "We try to make ourselves so spic and span and, all of a sudden, here comes this young loud-mouth."

Val Zavala>> Gustavo is a reporter for the O.C. Weekly. He writes a column called "Ask a Mexican". Yes, he's the Mexican and there's no question he won't answer, like "Why do Mexicans paint their houses such bright colors?" "Why do they throw their toilet paper in the wastebasket?" And "Why do they display the Virgin of Guadalupe everywhere?" On his way to work, Gustavo passes an immigration office, a bit ironic, considering his father crossed the border illegally in the trunk of a car, a bit of personal history he doesn't hesitate to tell.

Gustavo Arellano>> My great-grandfather actually came here to pick in the orange groves, but he would always go back to Mexico. He was always back and forth. My father was an illegal immigrant who came here in the trunk of a Chevy. But with my parents --

Val Zavala>> -- a Chevy.

Gustavo Arellano>> A Chevy. That's actually an "Ask a Mexican" question. "Why does a Mexican pronounce shower as chower, but chicken as shicken?"

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> The questions he gets range from the sincerely interested to the racist to the absurd.

Gustavo Arellano>> Like "What's the Mexican obsession with midgets?"

Val Zavala>> Mexicans are obsessed with midgets?

Gustavo Arellano>> Absolutely. We love midgets.

Val Zavala>> I didn't know that. You mean on Mexican television?

Gustavo Arellano>> Yeah. You see Mexican television or Mexican films and you always have these small little midget men running around chasing after big-bosomed women. Who doesn't love them?

Val Zavala>> What is with that?

Gustavo Arellano>> I read that question and I started laughing. I said, all right, it's an easy question and the easy answer is for me to say that everyone loves midgets. But then, I did my research and it turned out that the Aztecs considered midgets to be holy people, that they were children of God and they held up the sky. Irony of ironies, they held up the sky. So much of our psyche comes from conquests and Aztecs and all that. That must have been one of the things that trickled down, our obsession with midgets.

Val Zavala>> Gustavo graduated from Chapman University and has a Masters in Latin American studies from UCLA. You can hear the academic side emerge in his answers, though not for long.

Gustavo Arellano>> There was one of "Why do Mexicans have so many babies?" That's always a classic one. So I would say, okay, if we want a theological response, the Catholic Church is opposed to contraception, so maybe many Mexicans don't use contraception. The anthropological response is that, when you have poor societies, poor societies tend to have large families so they can have more wage earners. But I said that the real reason is because there is no prophylactic in the world that could hold back the Mexican spermatozoa. They just go through the condoms and, you know, nothing could really stop them.

Val Zavala>> Gustavo is also the food editor and an investigative reporter for the O.C. Weekly, all without any formal journalism training. How did that happen?

Will Swaim>> He was a film studies major, I think, at Chapman University and he was a senior then. He wrote us this wonderfully sardonic letter to the editor and I thought this is a guy who has a lot of potential as a writer. He was sort of disrespectful of authority and I thought perfect for a weekly.

Val Zavala>> Will Swaim is the O.C. Weekly's editor. So how did this come about, "Ask a Mexican"?

Will Swaim>> Well, I think the real trajectory of the column began with me driving up Seventeenth Street and seeing a sign in Spanish that I completely could not translate. I thought, you know, I got to ask Gustavo what that means. It's got to be some sort of play on words. It's about a guy on a radio show or something.

Val Zavala>> Yeah, a radio DJ, yeah.

Will Swaim>> Right. I asked Gustavo, you ought to write a column at least once to just sort of explain something to a complete ignoramus Gringo. He said, oh, we don't even call them Gringos. I said, well, their column too. So he did this thing as a joke the first time and he's brilliant. As soon as he wrote the first one, people didn't take it as a joke. They took it quite seriously and was suddenly like the Miss Manners of all things Mexican.

Val Zavala>> Well, I don't know if you'd say Miss Manners, considering his biggest influence is The Simpsons and Howard Stern. But his outspoken expertise on Mexican culture is certainly propelling him into the national -- actually international -- spotlight.

Gustavo Arellano>> "I think I told you that the largest news weekly or news magazine in the Netherlands is doing a profile on me too. I'm doing that. I'm doing a television show tomorrow in the morning and I'm going to do another radio show for NPR as well. Not day to day, but . . ."

Val Zavala>> One of the most questions is "What ever happened to the lazy Mexican?" That's an easy one for Gustavo.

Gustavo Arellano>> And my response is "Really? Mexicans are lazy? You know, go over to a street corner and you have all these fifty men trying to get a job pulling weeds for five dollars a day. That's lazy?" One of the great questions was "Why do Mexicans sell oranges on the side of freeways?" I say, "Well, what do you want them to sell? Steinway pianos?" They know it's something that you can sell easily, you can transport easily and you can make pretty good profits off of it. Five thousand dollars a year and you don't have to report it to INS.

Val Zavala>> Okay, he meant the IRS, an understandable slip. Gustavo is always in high gear. Today he'll put in fourteen hours. He's got a regular radio appearance tonight on KABC.

Announcer>> "There it is, music to walk out by."

Gustavo Arellano>> "We need happy music right now."

Announcer>> "Or protest by."

Gustavo Arellano>> "I reward all of you with happy music."

Announcer>> "Yes, Gustavo Arellano, the author of "Ask a Mexican" in The Orange County Weekly, and he's become now a national figure. You'll be the most famous Mexican before long in all of America."

Gustavo Arellano>> "More famous than the Frito Bandito?"

Announcer>> "Well, maybe not quite that famous."

Val Zavala>> This was the week when half a million Latinos marched in Los Angeles for immigrants' rights. There was plenty to talk about.

Caller>> "I see these people willingly flaunting the law, rubbing it in my face."

Gustavo Arellano>> "How do they rub it in your face?"

Caller>> "Well, I think the flag exhibition and the fact that --"

Gustavo Arellano>> "So if they waved the American flag, then that would be okay?"

Announcer>> "Well, it would be better. Let 'em be American. If I wanted to be American, I'd be waving the American flag and say this is the country I love, I want to stay here, I want to work here and I want to raise my family here.

Gustavo Arellano>> "I'm sure since you saw the demonstration, you saw a lot of these immigrants waving American flags."

Announcer>> "I didn't see that."

Gustavo Arellano>> "Oh, really?"

Announcer>> "Oh, you did? Well, I'll take your word for it."

Gustavo Arellano>> "So, go ahead, caller?"

Caller>> "Well, there was a few burning American flags."

Gustavo Arellano>> "Yeah, those people are idiots and, frankly, they shouldn't be here."

Val Zavala>> Gustavo has been answering questions like these ever since his column started back in November 2004.

Gustavo Arellano>> There is always going to be questions about Mexicans. Again, Mexicans have been the obsession of Americans for a hundred fifty years. If I never received another question ever again, I have enough material to last me at least five years.

Val Zavala>> What do your folks think of this column that you have?

Gustavo Arellano>> (Laughter) My mom always reads it and she says, "You know, Gustavo, maybe you don't want to say some of these things because people get offended by the truth." So my parents, the most Mexican people that I know, love the column. They like the fact that I do discuss some things.

Val Zavala>> But they're a little concerned, it sounds like.

Gustavo Arellano>> Well, they're concerned because they have that traditional Catholic propriety and shame and think, oh, you can't cuss on the air or you can't cuss in print. You can't talk about Mexicans hating Black people or Mexicans hating gay people. You can't talk about that. But at the same time that you're talking about it, you're right, it's true.

The big fear with Mexicans is that somehow we're the exception to the melting pot. We're the society that just won't marinate, that won't dissolve into all these clich�s. But give me a break. Assimilation is inevitable in this country and I always tell people don't worry about it. You know, we're going to be as American as everyone else, if not more so, and we're also going to hate Mexicans like you do.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is "Take the Lead". It stars Antonio Banderas as a New York public school ballroom instructor.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Jean Oppenheimer of New Times and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Henry, what did you think of "Take the Lead"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, this is almost like the sports movie. It's inspired by the tale of Pierre Dulaine and, when we see the phrase "inspired by", we mean this is not a true story. Pierre Dulaine was a man who became a ballroom dance instructor in an inner city high school in New York and inspired a lot of other dance classes through the school system and across the country.

Unfortunately, this story is set up, you know, like a sports story. He takes a bunch of rag-tag semi-delinquents and whips them in shape in time to win a big ballroom competition. Along the way, they have their usual likes and loves, minor interactions that don't get into too much. Antonio Banderas is very charismatic as the teacher and all that, but, you know, you've seen this before. It's like "Rocky" on a ballroom dance floor.

Larry Mantle>> (Laughter) All right, Jean?

Jean Oppenheimer>> Well, the film didn't wow me, but I didn't think it was painful particularly in light of the other films that I've been to the rest of the week. It does have a very by-the-book plot and the characters are a very predictable diverse group of kids and all the obstacles that you would expect in a film like this. But I do think there's a real audience for it and I must say that Banderas, who earned my eternal affection playing Puss 'N Boots in "Shrek 2", I thought was really charming and sweet. I mean, he really did something with this part which, I think, helps the film immeasurably.

You know, it's a film the whole family can go to in a way. I mean, I think that probably most teenagers will want to go with their friends. It's got a lot of hip-hop music which I don't really get. It's got ballroom dancing which I also don't get, but it wasn't painful.

Larry Mantle>> "Lucky Number Slevin" is a mob-based comedy drama that stars Josh Hartnett, Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Jean, your thoughts on "Lucky Number Slevin"?

Jean Oppenheimer>> I think the audiences will really be divided on this film. I think there will be some people who really love the labyrinthine plot and the fact that you're trying to make all the connections between the characters and how they know each other, and there will be those who really dislike the film for exactly those same reasons. I liked it for about the first forty-five minutes. It sort of kept me entertained and going and then it just lost me completely. It goes in directions that I don't think work at all in the context of the first part of the story.

It opens with a rapid-fire succession of murders, then the story jumps forward twenty years and becomes this comedy about mistaken identity. And then it tries to sort of merge the two a little bit and I just don't think it works. I must say, however, that I did find Josh Hartnett quite endearing for the first half of the movie in the part, and I did think that he had great chemistry with Lucy Liu who plays sort of his girlfriend in it.

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think?

Henry Sheehan>> I thought this was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I've never had to exert so much will to sit through a movie as I did about from ten minutes into this one. Every step it takes is a misstep. I mean, there's nothing worse than someone who's trying to be clever who just doesn't have it because he just sounds inane. That applies to visual strategies and the direction of the actors. I mean, you rarely see so much bad acting in one movie. Usually you have to watch a television series over the course of a season to see so many bad performances.

It's one thing to be labyrinthine. It's another thing to be incoherent and dishonest, and that's what this movie is. It's a post-"Pulp Fiction" film which I don't think there's anything wrong with, but everything that "Pulp Fiction" did right, its cleverness, its manipulation of tones and the just-right pitch performances, this movie does not.

Larry Mantle>> Finally this week, we have a film from writer-director, Nicole Holofcener. "Friends with Money" boasts a very strong female cast and is set on the west side of Los Angeles.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "Friends with Money", Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> This is the third movie from Nicole Holofcener who directed "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely & Amazing" and it's the first movie by her that I kind of liked. It's not well directed, but it has a very clever script. It's about four old friends played by Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand and Catherine Keener -- she's been in all of Holofcener's films and I think is kind of the identification figure.

Three of them are very well-to-do members or even wealthy members of Los Angeles's west side bourgeois, but Jennifer Aniston's character has been on a downward slope. She's working as a maid, a housekeeper, now while her friends are like screenwriters and designers. But really, it's just a bunch of character bits that work very well, I thought.

Frances McDormand is absolutely brilliant as a really difficult woman and just so funny. She's married to a guy played by Simon McBurney who everyone he meets thinks he's gay and the movie kind of plays with that. It's a very, very clever notion. Everybody is very good. It doesn't really go anywhere and it has its slow bits, but it's a generally amusing film.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Jean?

Jean Oppenheimer>> I hate to say it, but I agree completely with Henry on this. I do think that there's nothing terribly exciting about any of Holofcener's films. They're really very much about sort of day-to-day life things. Very real, however. They're sort of comedy-dramas. Nobody ever really changes. The plot does go forward. There might be something like bickering couples separate, but in terms of emotions, the characters sort of make lateral moves.

This is probably very much in keeping with real life. Nobody really changes, they don't get rid of their problems, they never venture too far from the characters they are. You sort of feel like it's a slice of life where you're all of a sudden just getting into the story and then all of a sudden at the end, you're exiting. It's not like you've learned a lot. But the acting is what makes this one so great and I agree with Henry that Frances McDormand is just terrific, as is Simon McBurney.

Larry Mantle>> Great to have you with us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC for our critics Jean Oppenheimer of New Times and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com inviting you to join us next week at this same time for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> And, of course, you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek on KPCC Friday mornings at eleven a.m. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

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