Word: cuba
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...Frank Casanova, a resident of Naples, Fla., whose grandfather emigrated from the Canary Islands to Cuba, is applying for Spanish citizenship for the same reason. "I was born in Cuba, but I never felt Cuban; I felt Canarian," he says. "I even preferred Canary's music over salsa. It's something you feel in your blood." (See pictures of Cuban musicians...
...hardly have been a stronger reaction at two early screenings of Che last week if Ernesto Guevara himself had shown up. (The old soldier would be 80, if he hadn't been killed in Bolivia in 1967.) In Miami Beach, a few dozen protesters, mostly pensioners who had fled Cuba after the Castro takeover on New Year's Day, 1959, protested the showing of Steven Soderbergh's bio-epic. "The Jewish community would never allow any kind of film about Hitler like this to play here," Abilio Leon, 65, told the Miami New Times. "It's the same...
...Some people will question screenwriter Peter Buchman's narrow focus on two military campaigns - the successful rebellion that led to the taking of Havana, Guevara's disastrous operation in Bolivia nine years later - while ignoring Che's role in mass executions in Cuba after the revolution and his ill-advised adventures in West Africa (where Egypt's Nasser correctly predicted Guevara would be coming in as Tarzan among the natives). Others will wonder at the odd lack of dramatic incident among all the warfare. But you really can't argue with Buchman and Soderbergh about the movie they didn...
...first half of Che unreels as inspirational history, the second half unravels as tragedy. Part 2 is essentially a remake of Part 1, with many scenes repeated. Guevara has to instill military discipline in his ragtag rebels in Cuba, then in Bolivia. In both places he has to decide whether to accept underage volunteers. In both, he gives his men a chance to quit before the decisive battles, where they are fired on by unseen regular soldiers and suffer the deaths of friends who've made their big speech or sentimental impression moments before. The film suggests that...
...this is an earnest of Soderbergh's doggedly naturalistic, antidramatic approach here, which is admirable but enervating. The conflicts are almost entirely between Che and his men, between the platoon and their forest environment. Spending up to a year in the jungles of either Cuba or Bolivia, the soldiers seem trapped in some tropical Blair Witch Project, stripped of the scary bits. And forgive me for asking, but with all these young men separated from their girlfriends for such a long time, why (with one rapacious exception) do they never express any interest in women? The movie lets you infer...