Buena Vista Social Club (1999, documentary) - Havana veteran musicians celebrated in Wenders' uplifting documentary

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A man walks on a street in Havana on this inviting poster for Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club

An American record producer has gathered a group of otherwise forgotten Cuban musicians, who despite their advanced age give sound to impressively soulful music, which takes the world by storm.

 

Buena Vista Social Club is written and directed by Wim Wenders (Summer in the City (1971)), with Nick Gold contributing to the concept.

This is a pleasant and very picturesque music documentary. It features incredibly lovely camera work (by Jörg Widmer (Bach in Brazil (2015))), which heightens the episodic, fragmented, plotless presentation. The music is beautiful, - but the portrait also nearly sainctifies the musicians.

 

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: Unknown

Box office: 23.1 mil. $

= Uncertain - but likely a mega-hit

[Buena Vista Social Club premiered 17 February (Berlin International Film Festival) and runs 105 minutes. Shooting took place in Havana, Cuba, New York and the Netherlands. The film was likely made for a limited budget of 1-2 mil. $, which would rank it as a mega-hit with a return of 11.55 - 23.1. The film opened #32 to a 127k $ first weekend in 15 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #20 and in 74 theaters (different weeks), grossing 7 mil. $ (30.3 % of the total gross). The film was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, lost to One Day in September. It was also nominated for 3 BAFTAs and won a European Film Award and a National Board of Review award, among other honors. Roger Ebert gave it a 2/4 star review, translating to 2 notches under this one. Wenders was not involved with the follow-up documentary Buena Vista Social Club: Adios (2017, documentary). Wenders returned with The Million Dollar Hotel (2000). Buena Vista Social Club is certified fresh at 92 % with a 7.50/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Buena Vista Social Club?

Sicko (2007) - Moore beats the US health care insurance system to a bloody pulp

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A less than desirable health care system gets an unflattering characterization on this satirical poster for Michael Moore's Sicko

The USA has the world's most expensive health care system, but 50 mil. of its populace do not benefit from it, since they are uninsured; and the majority who are insured can easily end up getting catastrophically bad or no treatment at all.

Sicko is a documentary from great Michigander documentarian Michael Moore (Roger & Me (1989)).
As usual, Moore acts as insistent man-of-the-people himself in the film, and he is in top shape intellectually here with a topic that has his full interest, namely the comparison between the US insurance health care system and the universal health care systems that he portrays in Canada, Cuba and France.
Sicko is an - especially for Americans - exceedingly depressing watch, because it exhibits how atrociously awful the state of affairs are for such a central area of every American's life. SPOILER Emotionally the film peaks with the section of how the weakest US patients are dumped on sidewalks. Another strong segment shows sick 9/11 heroes finding treatment in Cuba.
Luckily Sicko also has loads of welcome humor, especially coming from Moore himself, who plays his assumed naive Moore-American role to perfection. The filmmaker is thorough, passionate and a bit didactic, - but he has a hell of a strong case in Sicko, which may be his best film. It is role-model activist documentary filmmaking.

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 9 mil. $
Box office: 36.1 mil. $
= Big hit (returned 4.01 times its cost)
[Sicko premiered 19 May (Cannes Film Festival, out of competition) and runs 123 minutes. Shooting took place in Havana, Cuba, Ontario, Detroit, Michigan, New Jersey, Los Angeles, California, London, England, New Mexico, New York, Paris, France and Kansas City, Missouri. The film reportedly received a 17-minute standing ovation after its Cannes premiere. It opened #31 to a 68k $ first weekend in 1 theater in North America, where it peaked at #9 and in 1,117 theaters (different weeks) and grossed 24.5 mil. $ (67.9 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Italy and France, each with 2 mil. $ (5.5 %). The film was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, lost to Taxi to the Dark Side. Roger Ebert gave the film a 3.5/4 star review, in line with its rating here. Moore returned with Slacker Uprising (2007, documentary). Sicko is certified fresh at 92 % with a 7.71/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Sicko?

Che: Part One - The Argentine (2008) - Soderbergh's sober depiction of the Cuban revolution

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+ Best Political Movie of the Year

A tense moment from the film on a poster for Steven Soderbergh's Che: Part One - The Argentine

QUICK REVIEW:

When 'Che' Guevara in the late 1950s decides to go for a coup d'etat of the American-supported president Bautista's Cuban government, he starts a spreading, violent revolution.

Master film-maker Steven Soderbergh (Haywire (2011)) here gives an external portrait of the legendary man and his Marxist-Communist politics. He remains, in my view of the film, an unreasonable, - albeit fascinating, - commander.
The film, which continues in a Part Two, is not awfully engaging, but it is technically second to none: Soderbergh's command of the digital formats, colors and the music (by Alberto Iglesias (The Constant Gardener (2005))), - together with Benicio Del Toro's (21 Grams (2003)) performance as the title lead, - are outstanding.
Soderbergh is taking a break from directing after completing 20 episodes of the hospital show with Clive Owen, The Knick (2014-15), and I for one really hope he'll return to the feature director's chair sooner rather than later.

Related reviews:

Steven Soderbergh: Side Effects (2013) - Modern people screw up in excellent thriller 
Behind the Candelabra (2013) - Restraint and extravagance 
Magic Mike (2012) - Soderbergh and Tatum score big with cheeky male strip romp 

2008 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III] 

2008 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II] 
2008 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2008 in films - according to Film Excess
Solaris (2002) - A suffering space question mark 

Watch the trailer for the two films here

Cost: Estimated 35 mil. $
Box office: 40.9 mil. $ (Che: Part 1 and Che: Part 2 together)
= Huge flop
[The joint budget of the films were 58 mil. $, which were gathered with much difficulty. Theatrically, the films have been a flop, doing best in Spanish-speaking countries (controversially, Soderbergh maintained that the films had to be shot in Spanish). Che: Part 1 only made 1.7 mil. $ in the States.]

What do you think of Soderbergh's Che-films, individually and as a whole?
What image of Che did you get from it/them?

Thirteen Days (2000) - Electrifying Cuban Missile Crisis thriller

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Electrifying poster for Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days

Thirteen Days is Australian director Roger Donaldson's (Cocktail (1988)) historic thriller drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
In case you don't know history well, that crisis was about the Soviet Union deploying nuclear missiles on Cuba, which was very close to starting World War III, had it not been for the calm reasoning and exhaustion of every possible alternative by the U.S. administration under John F. Kennedy, while his military generals were hot for war.
The movie focuses completely on the American side, perhaps because we really don't know what happened in the Soviet offices of Khruschchev's Soviet Government. So what we see is the Americans dealing with the crisis, which is well-documented and therefore historically accurate. 
Thirteen Days instead choses to take its fictional license with its lead character Kenny O'Donnell. Kevin Costner (Dances With Wolves (1990)) plays this special assistant to the President, who is a historical figure, but who didn't play the part during the actual crisis that he does in the film, where he is a key person who pep-talks, motivates and puts things in perspective for the Kennedy brothers and seems a total equal to them. Costner is mostly good in the film, which he also was a producer on, but Thirteen Days becomes long somewhere well into its 145 minutes playtime, and it is Costner-scenes that could have been cut, especially the scenes with him and his family, in which we are obviously supposed to feel that he and they are the emotional anchor of the film, which doesn't work, and we perhaps don't even need. It is a shame to say it, but Costner is the main component, who is in the way of 'his own' film.
It detracts only mildly, though, because Thirteen Days portrays such an incredible historical event that most audiences, and especially us who are historically interested, will sit on tenterhooks almost throughout the film, regardless that we know the outcome. And thank God that reason and self control and peace prevailed in those fateful offices in '62!
Bruce Greenwood (Flight (2012)) and Steven Culp (James and the Giant Peach (1996)) are both brilliant as President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the film sports an exciting, solid secondary cast of men in suits and uniforms being extremely serious, from Dylan Baker and Bill Smitrovich to Michael Fairman and Kevin Conway.
The Cold War grew red hot within hours and stayed so for these climactic 13 days, and the film successfully portrays this maddening time in world history.

Kevin Costner, Steven Culp and Bruce Greenwood in Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days

The details:

It is well-produced, - and well-scored by Trevor Jones (From Hell (2001)).
Another small detractor, however, is a device that the film uses again and again, which at first made me think that I was seeing flashbacks. B/W-scenes, which are just continuances of the story, but just suddenly in B/W. I guess it is used to underline the historic aspect of what we're seeing, - or perhaps as an 'artistic' idea of pointing to the artifice by Donaldson, (though I don't think so, knowing him through some of his other films.) At any rate, it doesn't elevate the film but does put a space between the story and the audience, which is a shame.
Because this is a really good film.
Unfortunately, the slow release of the film (first limited in the U.S., which seems crazy for this type of event picture) and poor marketing made this a box office bomb, wildly undeserved.
Another sad end note is that O'Donnell, Costner's character, who was very close to the real Kennedy's, was so devastated by the assassinations of first JFK in '64, where he was very close to him and later blamed himself for his death, and then Robert Kennedy in '68 that both he and his wife languished in alcoholism, which killed them both eventually.

The trailer is the single most important piece of marketing for a movie. This one didn't make the business it should. Why? It is over-crowded and political, when it should have presented the one clear, shocking concept that is close to happening in the film: Annihilation

Budget: 80 mil. $
Box office: 66. 5 mil. $
= Big flop

What do you think of Thirteen Days?

Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961) - Cheap, fast, amusing spoof/spy thriller/creature feature

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Fetching poster, although nothing of the kind visualized here happens in Roger Corman's Creature From the Haunted Sea, where the monster has a normal human-sized hand (because it's a human in a terrible monster suit)

QUICK REVIEW:

Creature From the Haunted Sea presents a really far out story about an undercover agent, a Cuban treasure and a homicidal sea monster. - It's a strange film!
Creature From the Haunted Sea is a hopelessly primitive genre hybrid, part horror, part spy movie, and part spoof comedy (of gangster and monster movies). It is made in an irreverent tone that makes a good deal of what happens amusing for people who are familiar with these genres and/or with filmmaker Roger Corman's (The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)) body of work.
This film has many weird and funny elements in it: A murder with a plunger. Two leading roles who throughout the movie communicate in animal sounds. The 'shocking' monster, which mostly looks like a person in a bad Halloween suit, (because that's what it basically is.) Underwater scenes with a lot of animals. And then of course the extensive dialog in Spanish, which is very funny.
Some may sit back after watching Creature From the Haunted Sea with a feeling of 'why?'. Corman probably would answer, 'why not!?!' - If you can make money making a movie like this, why the heck wouldn't you?!? (A very good point, I think.)
The film is in public domain now and available for free and legal watch here.
After a gif of the "unspeakable secret of the SEA OF LOST SHIPS", some hysterical trivia about the movie will follow:

The monster suit, on terrifying display up here, was reportedly devised from a wet suit, some moss, lots of Brillo pads, tennis balls for the eyes, ping pong balls for the pupils, pipe-cleaners for claws and oilcloth for slime effect.
Apart from the funny Spanish in the film, a lot of the English dialog is hilarious as well. Examples:

Sparks Moran: [as Carmelita embraces and kisses him] As a trained espionage agent I could tell that she was attracted to me. 

Sparks Moran: [narrating] The first move in the great conspiracy had been made. The Cuban treasury was now in the gentle hands of Renzo Capetto, the most trustworthy man ever to be deported from Sicily. They thought they were home-free, but little did they know that I, Sparks Moran, was an American agent. Luckily, I had managed to work my way onto the crew by posing as a notorious gun machine burglar from Chicago. My real name is XK-15.

This often narrating character 'Sparks Moran' is played by Robert Towne, the later in life screenwriter legend of Chinatown (1974), The Firm (1993), Mission: Impossible II (2000) etc. (Towne is credited as 'Edward Wain'.)

The movie was written in three days, based on a script that Corman had already filmed twice before, as Naked Paradise and Beast From Haunted Cave. The film was shot back-to-back between The Last Woman on Earth and Battle of Blood Island, two films that Corman was shooting in Puerto Rico for tax incentive reasons.
The film was shot in 5 days, with Mexican extras being paid 1 $ to participate. The score for Creature of the Haunted Sea is by Fred Katz, another wild-man, who allegedly sold Corman the same score for seven different films, including Creature From the Haunted Sea, A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman and The Little Shop of Horrors.

Related reviews.

Roger Corman:  Philadelphia (1993) - AIDS and homosexuality acknowledged in great drama (actor)
The Wild Angels (1966) - Young biker rebels deliver a counter-culture punch in Corman's hands
House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher/The Mysterious House of Usher (1960) - Corman's exuberant first house pf Poeish horror

Watch the self-parodying, strange trailer here

Budget: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown

Did you see Creature From the Haunted Sea?
What did you think?
What do you think of Roger Corman and his cheap, fast movies?

Blow (2001) or, Cocaine Comes to America

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Two sex-cat Hollywood stars are lounged with money against a rustic red backdrop on this poster for Ted Demme's Blow

 
George Jung is a small town American who starts a major cocaine import into the United States in the 1970s from Pablo Escobar in Cuba, becomes very rich in the process - and then loses it all.

 

Blow is written by Nick Cassavetes (Alpha Dog (2006)) and David McKenna (Bully (2001)), based on Bruce Porter's same-titled 1993 non-fiction book, and directed by Ted Demme (Who's the Man? (1993)).
The 1970s 'snowfall' is portrayed with exuberance in style here: The production design by Michael Z. Hanan (Pet Cemetery (1989)) and the costumes by Mark Bridges (There Will Be Blood (2007)) revel in the flamboyance of the times and characters. The key words are 'over the top'.
Johnny Depp (Sherlock Gnomes (2018)) acts well as drug-smuggler Jung, but ultimately, his irresponsible, selfish character cannot carry the film. David Nusair of Reel Films have put it more bluntly in his review: "The biggest problem with Blow is that Jung is such a complete moron." The best true crime biopic that Depp has played in remains Mike Newell's excellent Donnie Brasco (1997).
Ray Liotta (Goodfellas (1990)) is also good as Jung's concerned father, who tries to help his son, and the music of Blow is wonderful, including tracks from Lynard Skynard, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Bob Dylan, Link Wray and others.
The plot of Blow regrettably never attains real importance for its spectators, and it may be that the film is simply a tad too preoccupied with its own 70s smoke and style. The kind of film Blow tried to be has been done better before, most notably by Martin Scorsese with Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995).

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 53 mil. $
Box office: 83.2 mil. $
= Big flop (returned 1.56 times its cost)

[Blow premiered 29 March (USA) and runs 124 minutes. Depp was paid 4 mil. $ for his performance. Shooting took place from February - May 2000 in California, including in Los Angeles. The film opened #3, behind holdover hit Spy Kids and fellow new release Along Came a Spider, to a 12.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another weekend in the top 5 (#5), grossing 52.9 mil. $ (63.6 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 4.2 mil. $ (5 %) and Germany with 2.9 mil. $ (3.5 %). Roger Ebert gave the film a 2.5/4 star review, equal in rating to this one. Demme died in 2002 of a cocaine-induced heart attack. - He almost finished his last project before this, A Decade Under the Influence (2003, documentary). Depp returned in From Hell (2001); Penélope Cruz (Official Competition/Competencia Oficial (2021)) in Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001). Blow is rotten at 55 % with a 5.80/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

 

What do you think of Blow?