Who is Cary Fukunaga?

Only the hottest young director most snubbed by the Oscars this year. This Asian American (Asian Dad/White Mom, Awe Yeah!) is the director of the best foreign film of 2009 that didn't get nominated for the Oscars. Cary Fukunaga won the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Director's Award with Sin Nombre.

Sin Nombre is basically City of God meets Under Siege II(That's the one on the train right?). There are two story lines. One story chronicles a Honduran family's journey through Mexico as they try to make it to America and the other is about La Mara Salvatrucha, the gang tattoo-face(See above) is a part of.

I was almost stabbed by a tattoo-face once, which may be why I like this movie, keeping it real and all.

I had to do community service for Los Angeles County when I was in college for breaking the law. I got into an altercation with this guy and it went something like this:

Guy: You fat chink.

Me: Smashes guys face

So during my time at community service, I will refer to it as Tree Farm, I was probably the only person there who had ever set foot on a college campus. I was immediately dubbed "College boy" because...I brought a book to read(It wasn't even a textbook, it was A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin and if you haven't read it yet, I suggest you do).

Tree Farm was basically a meeting spot for people to do community service from. Each morning we would arrive at 8:00 am and the men and women would split up into groups. Usually about 50 men and like 4 women(All of whom were they for prostitution, don't women commit any other petty crimes?). As the crew leaders strolled in with vans about an hour later we would each sign up with a crew and he would take us out to perform our community service for the day.

Exactly what you would expect from government employees, they were completely worthless. One guy was actually named Rick James, but looked more like a skinny Hulk Hogan. He had already crashed one of the vans, which is why he was relegated to farm duty. Working for Rick was miserable. One day those of us left at the farm for farm duty had to load a truck with firewood. They gave us a wheelbarrow with a flat tire to transport the firewood. A wheelbarrow has 1 tire, when that tire is flat, it becomes a barrow. Moving a barrow without the wheel is near impossible because there is no way to balance it with a flat tire. Being the College Boy that I was, I suggested since we were moving the wood from one side of the parking lot to the other we should drive the truck across the lot to the wood and load it from there. Rick James freaked the fuck out and asked me if I thought I was smarter than him (of course I fucking did).

There was one guy, Sal, that I loved working for. Sal didn't give a fuck about his government job and spent most of the day on the phone dealing with his landscaping business. Instead of performing community service, most of the time with Sal we'd just run errands for his business and ride in the van.

You've seen people performing community service on television wearing fluorescent vests picking up trash? That was me, except either television is a lie or Los Angeles County is poor as fuck because no one ever had those little trash picker upper things. I actually got laughed at when I was incredulous and asked "We're supposed to pick up trash with our hands?" The response was a box of latex gloves thrown in my face.

So Tree Farm is where I met Tattoo-Face. Tattoo-Face was performing community service for stealing a car and having a loaded gun in his stolen car. He had a great many tattoos, but the most memorable ones for me were the ones on his face. He had two devil horns tattooed on his forehead where devil horns would be if he actually had them. I was there for punching a guy in the face a few times. Tattoo-face was way harder than me. One day while we were performing one of the many great services(today was pond scum cleanup) we do for Los Angeles County Parks, Tattoo-Face and I had a conversation. First, I want to describe this very stupid process of pond scum clean up conducted by the LA County Parks Department, I know the Parks Department was involved because they provided us our "tools", if you could call them that. The tools they gave us were rakes that had empty 2-liter bottles tied to the rakes so they would float. Then some genius decided to tie a rope to the end of the rake handle so they would have a make-shift rake/soda bottle floating grappling hook. The process of pond scum clean up involved throwing the rake as far as you could (Maybe 8 feet) and then pulling in the rope. If you didn't guess, it was rather ineffective.

It was a hot day so I took off my sweatshirt. I was wearing a "Puck Fomona" t-shirt. The shirt is the same principle as "Yuck Fale" or "Huck Farvard" or "Fuck Florida". The shirt referred to Pomona College and not the city of Pomona, I just wished the shirt was more clear on that. As soon as I took off my sweatshirt Tattoo-Face looked at me and said "What the fuck does your shirt say? Essay" I hesitated because I was unsure how to answer the question. I didn't want to offend him and assume he could read so I just repeated what the shirt said "Puck Fomona." He then took off his shirt and he had P-O-M-O-N-A tattooed across the top of his back, assuming that he didn't go to college there, I immediately tried to clarify that my shirt referred to the college and not his fair city of Pomona(Which is actually an armpit). None of this mattered though and he just mad dogged me all day and told me to shut up every time I talked. He treated me like a complete bitch and I took it like a bitch--I just didn't want to get stabbed.

So maybe I wasn't almost stabbed, but then again who's to say he didn't have a knife, you never met Tattoo-Face.