cuba Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The new film from Michael Moore won't be here for another month and a half, but the controversies surrounding it are heating up quick. The documentary (say what you want, but it fits the definition of non-fiction film), which is titled Sicko, exposes the problems with the U.S. health care industry. And, of course, that industry is already beginning to slam the film. But so far the biggest attack on Moore, related to Sicko, is coming from the U.S. government. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's seen Fahrenheit 9/11, though the action has absolutely no connection with Moore's speaking out against the government. The Treasury Department is simply investigating a trip Moore took to Cuba back in March, because he allegedly disobeyed our trade embargo with the country (see the whole letter here).

If you remember, we told you about Moore's trip to Cuba last month. Apparently he brought a number of ailing Ground Zero workers there in order to show the advantages of the Cuban health care system as compared to the American health care industry. According to the Treasury Department, if those workers received health care from Cuba, then the treatment may be considered "travel-related transactions involving Cuba", which is against the law. It seems that Moore's okay to go to Cuba was on a journalistic basis, and certainly the trip was journalistic in nature, but he has to realize that if he purposefully broke the embargo while there, that he'll be penalized.

An anonymous source, who supposedly worked on Sicko, has confirmed that about 10 persons received treatment, but so far there hasn't been a statement directly from Moore. Reportedly, though, he has stored a copy of his new film in a safe place outside the U.S. in order to protect it from government interference. Sicko producer Meghan O'Hara has written a response to the investigation, which she accuses of being politically motivated and an abuse of the legal process. She also stated that the current administration will not keep the American public from seeing the film. Unfortunately such a response comes off as just another cheap attack on Bush rather than an intelligent defense or explanation. So much for Harvey Weinstein's hopes for Sicko to unite the Republicans and Democrats.

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.

Did Cuba pay Lee Harvey Oswald to assasinate John F. Kennedy? That's the driving theory behind a new documentary from award-winning German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann. Rendezvous with Death is the result of a three-year investigation, through which Huismann interviewed with former Cuban secret agents, U.S. officials and a Russian intelligence source, and also delved into Mexican security archives. The film alleges that in 1963, Oswald made a journey to Mexico City, where he was paid $6,500 by agents at the Cuban embassy. The film apparently revolves around the damning testimony of a former Cuban secret agent, who claims that Oswald was a "dissdent" who would do anything to harm the United States. "He was so full of hate, he had the idea. We used him ... He was a tool." The Cuban government, the film postulates, wanted to get rid of Kennedy to clear the path for the assendancy of Castro and the Communist Revolution. Whether the country had a hand in Kennedy's death or not, that goal was claerly met: in the documentary, a former CIA official tells Huismann, "[Castro] beat us. He bested us. He came out on top, and we lost."

The film was shown to reporters in Berlin yesterday; there's no word yet on when it'll be made more widely available, but as I'm total conspiracy theory nerd, I'll let you know the minute I hear anything.