Benjamin Bratt and his filmmaker brother Peter Bratt toured around the Mission with a NYT reporter for a Style section piece this weekend. They're pimping Peter's film La Mission which premiered here last year during the SF International Film Festival. (See the trailer here.)
La Mission opens in a dozen cities later this month, and tells the story of Che (played by Benjamin), a low-rider-loving ex-con who finds out that his only son is gay. For the NYT piece, the Bratt brothers cruised around in "a 1964 cherry-red Chevrolet Impala with a pearl-white convertible top and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe across the trunk" and took the reporter out for a taco at La Taqueria, all the while spouting off poetic generalizations about the glories of the Mission, e.g. "The Mission has art, culture and food, but there’s also real-life struggle, with family being the center of focus," and, "Walk down one block, and there’s a West African beat, a Latin American cumbia, and a Brazilian samba. Turn down another, and you might hear a Buddhist chant or a Native American prayer song." What, no mention of the Shakira songs drifting out from the drag show at Esta Noche?