Word: mambos
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Cesar Castillo, newly arrived from Cuba to make his fortune as a bandleader in New York City's thriving Latino music scene, has a prayer for success: "In the name of the mambo and the rumba and the cha-cha-cha." Arne Glimcher, director of the exuberant new movie The Mambo Kings, may have a prayer of his own: In the name of the Cubans and the moguls and the public's whim...
...public? Glimcher can only hope people take to his movie -- based on the first half of Oscar Hijuelos' Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love -- as Cesar takes to America: with love at first sight...
...movie's Mambo Kings become famous in the mid-'50s for one hit album, some saucy nightclub gigs and a fleeting appearance on the I Love Lucy show (reconstructed here with artfully interpolated footage of the brothers, Lucille Ball and, standing in for his dad, Desi Arnaz Jr.). But theirs is a ^ story of wanting, not necessarily getting. In Cynthia Cidre's witty, synoptic screenplay, The Mambo Kings becomes a parable about the intoxication of dreaming of success; it's The Commitments with a Cuban accent...
...almost anything; he can dance a sinfully erotic tango with Nestor's wife-to-be (Maruschka Detmers) and not consider it a promise or a poach. He sees life, in its painful as well as its ecstatic moments, as a wouldn't-miss-it party. And so is The Mambo Kings: an old-fashioned, music-and-dance, brothers-and- lovers fiesta...
...expected to daub some of it on his screen. A poignant scene of Cesar and Nestor in a Times Square photo booth was influenced by Andy Warhol; it replicates a visit Glimcher and his family made to have their snaps taken for a Warhol portrait. Close watchers of The Mambo Kings will also discern the phantom signatures of a few revered auteurs. "I like Bob Fosse's films very much," Glimcher says. "So the strip joint in my film and the close-up of a decrepit stripper's knee give off echoes of Sweet Charity. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull...