L.A.'s story is complicated, but they got it

-- G.B.

24 "Mi Vida Loca" (1993)

Rather than the overheated drama one might expect of a story revolving around gang kids and drug dealers in Echo Park, writer-director Allison Anders' "Mi Vida Loca" is a surprisingly sweet romance, cannily pitched somewhere between rose-tinted melodrama and wide-eyed realism. The love story is not only between people, but also between people and their neighborhood, the tight-knit affections many Angelenos feel for the specifics of wherever their enclave may be within the larger fabric of the city.

The film is also a snapshot of a neighborhood pre-gentrification, before the coffee shops, boutiques and hip nightspots move in, forever changing the local feel and sense of place. Anders cast her film with a combination of actors and actual kids from the neighborhood, and so there is a tangy authenticity to its dreamy world of low-riders and dances, drive-bys and deals gone wrong. With its emphasis on female friendship and the bonds of a shared sense of place, "Mi Vida Loca" carves a small-town tale out of the urban diaspora.

Cool cameos: The white kids trying to buy dope are played by a young Jason Lee and Spike Jonze, as well as the director's daughter, Tiffany Anders. Salma Hayek also appears briefly in one of her earliest English-language roles.

-- M.O.

25 "Crash" (2004)

Opening with a monologue that declares Los Angeles unlike a "real city" because people spend too much time behind the "metal and glass" of their cars, "Crash" announces itself right from the start as a Big Statement about L.A., which it views as a roiling caldron of racial mistrust and enmity. Directed and co-written by Paul Haggis with all the subtlety of a freeway pile-up, the film may be, notoriously, the winner of Academy Awards for best picture and original screenplay, but you have never seen such a sea of blank faces as when "Crash" was mentioned in the meeting that generated this very list -- the love it/hate it conversation-starter cache the film had when it was in theaters has since collapsed. Nevertheless, the film has had an influence. So we are not being willfully perverse or purposefully contrarian by placing it here at the bottom -- the other pictures on the list genuinely generated more conversation, passion, excitement and insight in our room full of Angelenos.

Jacked up: The idea for the film was sparked from a real-life incident; Haggis had his Porsche carjacked outside a video store on Wilshire Boulevard in 1991. How L.A. is that?

-- M.O.