Fidel Castro Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Remember when Sean Penn decided to back away from Hollywood to tend to his family? Well, that didn't seem to go too well. Only a short time later in August, Robin Wright Penn filed for divorce. So much for finding familial focus. With all that freed time, one might think he'd chill with his kids, or head back to acting. Nope. Why do that when you can hunt down dictators?

TMZ reports that Penn has once again put on his part-time journalist hat and flown to Cuba to hunt down an interview with Fidel Castro for Vanity Fair. He hopped on a plane with Diana Jenkins earlier this week in Las Vegas, headed for Havana. (I'm guessing that there's a stop along the way. As far as I know, flying from the U.S. to Cuba is not exactly okay.) But there's a little he-said, she-said among the sources. Barclays contacts say he's going there to meet Castro and talk about how the Obama administration has affected Cuba. Penn's rep told the site that a meeting is possible, but there's no current appointment or plan to meet with the dictator. Methinks that's just evading the topic. One doesn't go to Cuba, have no plans to meet with Castro, yet say that a meeting is possible.

Penn has entered sticky situations before -- most notably with Hugo Chavez, who he thinks is "much more positive for Venezuela than he is negative." But is that enough to make him the first Western journalist to interview the man in three years, since Castro stepped out of the spotlight?

Plenty of people are going to be talking about Steven Soderbergh's Che Guevara biographical films -- The Argentine and Guerrilla, screened at Cannes tonight as one presentation simply called Che -- over the next few months. There will be arguments about the politics of the films; there will be discussions of whether or not the films have any emotional center; there will be questions around, when the films get some kind of U.S. distribution deal, exactly how they should be released -- two films released staggered throughout the last half of the year or cut down to one three-hour film or shown as a long, big double bill that presents the separate films back-to-back. There will be talk of if Benicio Del Toro deserves a Best Actor nomination for his work as Guevara, or if Soderbergh's portrait of Che is too flat to engage us; I can easily imagine discussions of the look and feel of the film, shot in high-resolution digital with all the craft and care Soderbergh usually brings to shooting on film. I can't predict how all of these questions and possibilities will play out, but I can say -- and will say -- what a rare pleasure it is to have a film (or films) that, in our box-office obsessed, event-movie, Oscar-craving age, is actually worth talking about on so many levels.

Fidel Castro might be showing up as a character in Steven Soderbergh's Che flicks, but it looks like his daughter, Alina Fernandez, is getting a bit more involved in the movie biz. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Crash co-writer and Oscar winner Bobby Moresco is bringing her story to the big screen. Fernandez will consult, Moresco will possibly direct it, and the project is currently out to writers. However, this won't be a straight biopic.

It seems that her story will somehow be intertwined with the stories of others, like Crash, to "show the Cuban and American perspectives and ideologies along with Fernandez's story." Basically, she's the product of an affair Castro had while married to his first wife. She "spent her childhood in the country's shadow, only learning at age 10 that the man who visited her at night and whom she saw on TV every day was her father." In the '90s, she disguised herself as a Spanish tourist and fled to Spain, and then the US, where she now lives.

Fernandez is involved to try "to make people be a little more aware of how glorious we are and how many limitations we have." I'm sure that will depend on how the film is portrayed and then perceived by audiences. I happened to really dig Crash, but many people were put off by it, so it'll be interesting to see if this project takes on a different tone to circumvent comparisons.

Back in 2006, Javier Bardem was going to play Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh's double Che Guevara pics -- The Argentine and Guerrilla. But then Mr. Director had to go and make Ocean's 13 first, for whatever reason, which made Bardem move on. For Javier, that wasn't so much of a bad thing. Instead of playing the famous President of Cuba, he's been wowing everyone with his portrayal of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and has a slew of interesting projects on the way. As for Soderbergh, he had to find someone else, and settled on Mexican actor Demián Bichir.

While we won't be able to tell how well Bichir does with the role until the movies hit the screen, AICN did nab some photos of the actor in full Fidel attire. If photos are any indication, Demián is destined to impress. There are three shots -- a close-up on his face, one with a pipe, and a full-body pipe shot that could almost be confused with the infamous Cuban himself -- if the pictures weren't so crisp and new. Between these and the image of Benicio del Toro as Che, which came out in October, I'm pretty excited.

The films also star the likes of Franka Potente, Benjamin Bratt, Catalina Sandino Moreno... the list goes on and on. The Argentine follows Che and a group of Cuban exiles led by Castro who topple the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Guerilla then jumps into the '60s as Guevara makes a trip to New York City to address the United Nations. Both films are set to come out some time this year.

If Andy Garcia should have learned anything from being in The Godfather: Part III, he should have learned to eventually model his directorial debut on the mafia series' earlier installments instead of the one in which he starred. His choice for a debut even sounds like the plot of The Godfather: Part II, as it features a wealthy family broken apart in the late 1950s amidst the Cuban Revolution. Unfortunately Garcia's The Lost City is nothing like Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 Oscar-winner, and is everything like the awkward mess that is Coppola's disappointment of 1990.

The Lost City opens on a lone man playing the trumpet, quickly diverts to an assassination by two men, then cuts quickly again to a mambo performance. Thinking back, I'm still unsure of which characters those two assassins are, and who it is they kill. Could this be a problem with my short-term memory, or could it be a problem with poor filmmaking? All I know is that those first few minutes of unclear focus are a foreshadowing of the abrupt, cursory style with which the film continues to proceeds through story and history.