Why would you want to have Ann Coulter photos posted on an Andy Garcia thread? Well, rules are rules...
Here's one of Ann with some guy...
Mark
Posted on 06/20/2006 6:49:48 AM PDT by Dqban22
A must see movie. In Houston on Friday June 23 at the River Oaks Theater, 2009 West Gray. Ph: 713-866-8881 www.landmarktheaters.com
Movie critics aghast at Andy Garcia’s The Lost City
Humberto Fontova* BrookesNews.Com Monday 8 May 2006
Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie The Lost City. He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they’re ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana’s last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba — a grotesque and unforgivable blunder in his industry. He’s now paying the price.
Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin American countries refuse to show it. The film's offenses are many and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray such things? The man obviously doesn't know his place.
And just where did Garcia get this preposterous notion of pre-Castro Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically troubled place, they ask. All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class. Where in his movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving peasants that carried Fidel and Che into Havana on its crest, they ask. Where are all those diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my professors, Dan Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the critics.
Garcia – that cinematic bomb-thrower — has seriously jolted the mainstream media’s fantasies and hallucinations of pre-Castro Cuba, of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general. In consequence, the critics are unnerved and disoriented. Their annoyance and scorn are spewing forth in review after review.
Garcia blew it. If only his characters had spoken with accents like John Belushi’s as a Saturday Night Live killer bee! If only they’d dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they’d behaved like Cheech and Chong! If only they'd mimicked the mannerisms and gait of Freddie Prinze in Chico and the Man! If only the women had piled a roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen Miranda in Road to Rio! If only the cast had looked like the little guy who handles my luggage when I visit Cancun! Or the guys who do my lawn! Everybody knows that’s what Hispanics look like!
If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in salt mines like Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad, or getting lashed by a vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a living like Ratso Rizzo! “In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly fought,” sniffs Peter Reiner in The Christian Science Monitor. “The Lost City misses historical complexity.”
Actually, what's missing is Mr. Reiner’s historical knowledge. Andy Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante knew full well that “the working poor” had no role in the stage of the Cuban revolution shown in the movie. The anti-Batista rebellion was led and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba’s middle and, especially, upper class. To wit: In August of 1957 Castro’s rebel movement called for a “national strike” against the Batista dictatorship — and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The “national strike” was completely ignored.
Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their “liberators,” reporting to work en masse. “Garcia’s tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few,” harrumphs Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice. “Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason — or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.”
What’s “absolutely absent” is Mr. Atkinson’s knowledge about the Cuba Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that “moneyed 1 percent” and especially his “peasant revolution” epitomize the cliched idiocies still parroted by the chattering classes about Cuba. “The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips,” snorts Stephen Holden in The New York Times. “Political dialogue in the film is strictly of the junior high school variety.”
It’s Holden’s education on the Cuban Revolution that’s of the “junior high school variety.” Actually it’s Harvard Graduate School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba are heard in Ivy League classrooms than in any rural junior high school. “It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution,” complains Rex Reed in the New York Observer.
You’re better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth Society, but nonetheless I’ll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by America’s most prestigious academics and its most learned film critics. I’ll even stay away from those “crackpots” and “hotheads” in Miami. In place of those insufferable “revanchists” and “hard-liners” I’ll use a source generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types: the United Nations.
Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” it starts. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S.”
In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933 — five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this till 30 years later.
And get this, Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies: Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930s. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed.
In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S. The anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself).
Here’s the makeup of the “peasant revolution’s” first Cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the anti-Batista fight: seven lawyers, two university professors, three university students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor and a colonel who defected from the Batista army. A notoriously “bourgeois” bunch, as Che himself might have put it.
By 1961, however, workers and campesinos (country folk) made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. And boy, would THAT rebellion make for an action-packed and gut-wrenching movie! If by some miracle it ever got made, you can bet these learned critics would pan it too. Who ever heard of poor country folk fighting against their benefactors Fidel and Che?
The New York Times Stephen Holden also sneers at Garcia’s implication that “life sure was peachy before Fidel Castro came to town and ruined everything.” In fact, Mr. Holden, before Castro “came to town,” Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and Styrofoam for insulation.
None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off hammerheads and tiger sharks. The learned Mr. Holden is also annoyed by “buffoonish parodies of sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders.”
Apparently, Communist apparatchiks should be properly depicted as somewhat misguided social workers, or as slightly overzealous Howard Dean campaign staffers. It's no “parody,” Mr. Holden, that the “apparatchiks” Garcia depicts in his movie incarcerated and executed a higher percentage of their countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his apparatchiks jailed and executed in their first three years. As well complain that the guards and police in Schindler’s List, Julia or The Diary of Anne Frank come across as hackneyed caricatures.
Instead let’s portray them with more “complexity,” as misguided idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working class from its subservience to snooty barons, who eradicated Germany’s unemployment and who ended Germany’s national humiliation at the hands of Europe’s premier imperialist powers.
Andy Garcia shows it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a rebellion, not a revolution. Cubans expected political change, not a socioeconomic cataclysm and catastrophe. But I fully realize such distinctions are much too “complex” for a film critic to grasp. They prefer boneheaded cliches. Garcia might have followed the laudable examples of “historical complexity” and “accuracy” shown in previous movies on Cuba. Take two that these critics compare (favorably) to The Lost City, Havana and Godfather II.
In Havana, the brilliant director Sydney Pollack casts Fulgencio Batista with blond hair and blue eyes. In fact Batista was a black. In Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola, to show Havana streets on New Year’s Eve 1958, casts more people than marched in Los Angeles last week and depicts them in a battle scene right out of Braveheart. In fact, Havana streets were deathly quiet that night.
I don’t presume to the exalted position of a film critic. So I don’t comment on the dramatic and cinematic criticisms made by these august critics. I’m not saying, or even implying, that The Lost City is a better movie than Godfather II. I'm simply criticizing the critics on their criticism of the historical accuracy of The Lost City. In these reviews we see — in all its classic splendor — the mainstream media’s thundering and apparently incurable stupidity on matters Cuban.
Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you'll never forget” by David Limbaugh. David Horowitz says: “Humberto has performed a valuable service to the cause of decency and human freedom. Every American should read this book.”
"the article was about the movie's accurate rendition of Cuban history and why this accuracy infuriates Hollywood lefties."
This is exactly why I asked the question. It sounds like it's worth seeing because it's entertaining AND accurate. I don't want to waste my time watching a movie that's accurate. The Midnight Express eg was accurate and entertaining.
nikos
PS-Does it have a happy ending? :-)
"Guess you're just a whole lot smarter than me."
I agree with you, I tried reading the article and wandered off scratching my head. So I asked some direct questions, and I'm made to feel like an idiot. :-) Glad someone else feels the same way.
If a person can't say what they want in one paragraph in this forum...they better try re-writing it.
Bottom line, sounds like a movie to go see!
Why would you want to have Ann Coulter photos posted on an Andy Garcia thread? Well, rules are rules...
Here's one of Ann with some guy...
Mark
quick profiles of Che and Fidel at The Leftwing Monsters Club:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Leftwingmonsters.asp
Just click on the nice photos
It's one thing to have an off-point lead paragraph that catches readers' attention, followed by 2-3 graphs showing the main point the writer wants to make. After that more exposition is okay once a general point of view is established. This article keeps on backing and backing, giving mostly exposition instead of substance, to roughly the 21st paragraph.
Castro's "revolution" was indeed a rebellion. Its Marxist nature was well concealed, not just by the Castro contingent but by the American media. Once intellectuals and other anti-Castroites were being taken to "the wall" by Che and other killers and shot, the media were forced to tell the truth. But since then we've had almost 50 years of sympathetic media pro-Castro propaganda and lies.
Batista's regime was dictatorial and the U.S. was wrong for supporting it so uncritically. But pre-Castro Cuba wasn't at all the hell-hole of repression the Left claims it was. I look forward to seeing a truthful movie from Garcia's point of view.
Miriam-living in exile
So much truth with so little money!!
by armf67 (movies profile) May 11, 2006
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
For the first time I see a movie about the reality of the so called cuban revolution that is true to the events that took place, despite the limited resources, Andy Garcia was able to discribe what really happened in a simple way, the music is great, can't wait for the soundtrack to become available, it took Andy 16 years to make it, big studios didn't find it "commercially viable", in a way it was better this way so there was not influence from Hollywood "history makers", I could see myself in the scene when Fico was leaving Cuba, only I was just 17 years old and the cuban watchdogs made me empty my pockets and used a metal detector to see if there was hidden jewelery, all of this behind a courtain so other passengers traveling in the same plane couldn't see the ways of the revolution, this movie is a must for Hollywood liberals, this is how movies are to be made, true to reality and without the influence of liberals agenda, it deserves an Oscar, Andy did an excellent job, I admire people like him with the will to make thing right, even if it takes a long time, we need more movies like this one and like Mel Gibson's,
leave fantasy and fiction to Hollywood.
Sincerely, ALex Munoz
Finally a great movie about the real Cuba!
by soypalmalibre (movies profile) Apr 29, 2006
42 of 47 people found this review helpful
I loved the acting, the music and the story...
My mother is 89 years old and has not been at the movies for many years...she is partially disabled. She has waited for years for The Lost City to open, and yesterday she got dressed very early and asked me to take her to see it!...My dad was a very famous comic in Cuba during the 30's, 40's and 50's his name was Adolfo Otero "El Gallego Otero"...
We are Cubans exiled in this great country and Andy Garcia is our hero...THANK YOU ANDY FOR A WONDERFUL MOVIE THAT SHOWS OUR BEAUTIFUL HAVANA AND OUR TRADITIONS AND LOVE FOR FAMILY. MY MOM AND I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO BOND AND CRY TOGETHER AND REMEMBER THE SADDEST DAY OF OUR LIVES...THE DAY WE LEFT CUBA... BRAVO!!!!!
A tearjerker film.
by tugando01 (movies profile) May 1, 2006
37 of 39 people found this review helpful
If you are a Cuban exile, then this movie will make you cry like a baby. Others will find the music and dancing very entertaining.
I saw this movie in Miami, so you obviously realize that there were a lot of Cubans in the theater. Just about everyone wept throughout this movie. It apparently took the older generation back to the beginnings of the destruction of Cuba by Che Guevara and Castro.
Overall, it was a great movie.
One, because he is a liberal who fails to recognize the dangers that liberalism ultimatly causes OR two, he does not realize that it is his own political philosophy that lead to the rise to power of Castro and his regime.........
As I stated above, this is merely a gut feeling and I can't substantiate anything I have said........
The Lost City is currently showing in Austin, TX at the Arbor Cinemas at Great Hills (located at 9828 Great Hills Trail; 800-326-3264).
Movie times are available at
www.austinmovietimes.com/movie-theaters/1576.php?date=0
In regard to additional showings, the movie is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures, which has offices in Austin & New York.
The addresses and phone numbers are:
Magnolia Pictures1614 W. 5th St. and
49 West 27th, 7th floorAustin, TX 78703
New York City, NY 10001512-474-0303
212-924-6701
The web page is www.magpictures.com/contact.aspxBooking inquiries should be directed to: booking@magpictures.com
The addresses and phone numbers are:
Magnolia Pictures1614 W. 5th St. and
49 West 27th, 7th floorAustin, TX 78703
New York City, NY 10001512-474-0303
212-924-6701
The web page is www.magpictures.com/contact.aspxBooking inquiries should be directed to: booking@magpictures.com
And get this, Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies: Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930s. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed.
In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S."
The above well explains why Cuban Americans are one of the most successful immigrant groups in U.S. history.
But I have always understood prior to Castro, Cuba was predominantly a prosperous, middle class country. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I don't doubt Andy Garcia got it right. And he went to bat for Elian and fought to have him remain in the U.S. He is one of the few Hollywood stars I truly admire.
I am rather surprised that Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray agreed to do it, given it's truthful and negative betrayal of Castro.
According to the Castro’s and liberal media propaganda, those who left Cuba were the rich and powerful privileged class. Cuba had 6 million inhabitants in 1959 and 1.5 million left the Island at the triumph and establishment of the Communist regimen. So, the exodus represented 25 % of the whole population. Therefore, according to the communist propaganda, Cuba had highest proportion of rich class in the world. Before Castro there was no Cuban emigration towards EE.UU. even though Cubans did not need visa to come to EE.UU.
Perhaps the article coud have been better written but it was plenty clear and easy enough to understand.
The movie is historically accurate, just inaccurate in liberal terms (revisionist history)
I saw Andrew Garcia on an Hispanic awards program recently in which he was their most honored guest. I actually thought he seemed a bit uncomfortable with some of the comments about illegal Mexican immigrants a subject he ignored and said nothing about. I could be wrong but I think he may be less Liberal than most of his Hollywood friends. This is just an impression I got while watching him on the program that evening.
What is EE.UU., Estados Unidos?
E.U. EUROPEAN UNION
EE.UU. OR U.S.A. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
E.U. EUROPEAN UNION
EE.UU. OR U.S.A. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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