Word: havana
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...Cubans are trying to embarrass us," grouses one official. The U.S. suspects that the dictator plans to repeat the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which he exported malcontents and hardened criminals to southern Florida. "We've been on the blacklist because we don't allow free travel," responds a Havana policymaker. "Now we are doing what they demand, and still we're bad guys...
...Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July) receive a cut of ticket sales as opposed to a hefty up-front salary. "If we don't control costs, we won't have much of an industry left," warns Thomas Pollock, head of Universal, whose $40 million- plus Havana died on impact last year despite Redford's starring role. At 20th Century Fox, executives are trying to keep 1991 film budgets below the industry average of $27 million. "We haven't started telling people to walk to the airport," says Fox president Strauss Zelnick, "but we're trying to produce high-quality...
They may call this movie Havana. But in our hearts we know it is Casablanca. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, for the first hour or so it is a very good thing. For director Sydney Pollack is a living oxymoron, a meticulous romantic. In reconstructing, very persuasively, the life of the Cuban capital as Fidel Castro's revolutionaries prepared to take it in the waning days of 1958, he also recaptures something of the doomy delirium of the film that obviously inspired him. And some of its smartness too: the dialogue -- especially that of its resident cynic...
...this point that Havana starts to go awry. It is not Redford's fault. The years have weathered him handsomely, and he contrives to lose his famous cool with insinuating subtlety. The problem lies with Olin, who never loses enough of her cool, and with Pollack and the writers. Whatever else is going on in their lives, Jack and Bobby need to come to a world-well-lost moment, a rocking, rolling acknowledgment of suppressed desires. That does not happen. We get shadows and tenderness instead. Then the script sends her up- country to join the rebels and sends Jake...
...perhaps, fatally. For it rediscovers its best self, its high romantic spirit, in time for a well-judged ending -- renunciations and not completely quashed yearnings all nicely mixed up. At its least, Havana reminds us how infrequently movies today invoke the romantic spirit. At its height, it satisfies our longing to experience that spirit anew. Put it this way: we can stand more than one Casablanca every 48 years...