| | |  | CUBA | Home » » The Lost City [Blu-ray] | | | | | | | Description: | | In 1958 Havana, nightclub owner Fico Fellove (Andy Garcia, who also directed) watches as political upheaval grips Batista-ruled Cuba. While his brothers join Castro's revolution, Fico refuses an offer from American gangster Meyer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman) to help turn his club into a casino and falls in love with his neglected sister-in-law (Ines Sastre), his life commented on by a ubiquitous writer (Bill Murray). Steven Bauer, Elizabeth Pena also star. 144 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks: English DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio, Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles: English (SDH), Spanish; audio commentary; photo gallery; featurettes; deleted scenes. | | | Product Details: | | | Actors:
| Andy Garcia, Inés Sastre, Bill Murray, Alfredo Armenteros, Danny Pino | | Director:
| Andy Garcia | | Format:
| Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen | | Language:
| English | | Subtitle:
| Spanish | | Number of Discs:
| 1 | | Studio:
| Magnolia Home Entertainment | | Run Time:
| 143 minutes | | Blu-ray Release Date:
| May 01, 2007 | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 117 reviews |
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| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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129 of 141 found the following review helpful:
 Beautiful MovieJun 27, 2006
By Henry L. Gomez
In watching The Lost City, you have to evaluate it on two levels. One is the purely cinematic approach, or simply is it a good movie, and the other is from a historical/political statement point of view.
As a movie the best parts are the beautiful photography, locations, costumes and music. It really is a treat for the eyes and the ears. Is it long? yes it's long. But after seeing the film for the second time, I can't see where there was room for a lot of trimming.
Overall the acting in the film was good, with some weak spots. As a movie it's definitely worth seeing and the film doesn't deserve a lot of the negative reviews it's gotten. I suspect those have more to do with the political/historical aspects of the film which I referred to before.
This film will offend a lot of people that have bought into the idea of Fidel Castro as a benevolent dictator and Che Guevara as a righteous revolutionary. This film exposes them for the cruel opportunists that they are/were.
The film makes no bones about the need to remove the (then) dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista but also unequivocally shows that what happened next was far worse for all involved.
Some have criticized this film for not showing "the grinding poverty" of the masses in pre-Castro Cuba. There's a reason for that. There wasn't that much of it back then. The Cuban revolution was one led and funded by the middle and upper classes and supported by intellectuals throughout the island. They wanted democracy not a totalitarian dictatorship.
Cabrera-Infante, the screenplay author does a great job in showing us the differing approaches to getting rid of Batista by putting one of Fico's (Andy Garcia) brothers in the 26th of July movement (Castro's group) and another in the Revolutionary Directorate (a competing revolutionary group). In the end Castro's group seizes power and squashes opposition. In other words, the bad guys won.
You'll need to see the movie to judge it's value as a work of art, but this movie goes a long way toward telling the untold (or rather unlistened-to) story of what happened and is happening in Cuba.
44 of 45 found the following review helpful:
The Lost CityJul 17, 2006
By Nelsn A. Carbonell
"Maria T. Carbonell"
This is an artistic masterpiece, in terms of the story, the plot, the music, cinematography, fashion of that epoc in Cuba, settings sceenery,etc. The blend of the background-forground music with the action is amazing. Even though fiction, the historic value is remarkable: representation of events, sequence of events, magnitud of events, vingnets of issues and characteristics of the process, representation of the Cuban spirit, etc.
I'm a 65 year-old Cuban woman who lived through that historic time. I'm a psychologist, mother of seven children , all successfull college graduates and grandmother of 19 children.
I'm very greatful to Andy Garcia for the gift of this movie.
Maria T. Carbonell, Montgomery Village, Maryland
35 of 37 found the following review helpful:
Finally...telling it like it isAug 16, 2006
By CMorfe
For many of us who have lived through our own "Lost City," watching this film was a bittersweet experience. Andy Garcia has given us an artful, albeit realistic and truthful expression of the tragedy that befell the people and beautiful Island of Cuba. Not only was the movie entertaining and captivating, it was beautifully filmed, evoking images of a time and place we can never go back to. The casting was brilliant and the acting very compelling---you could tell that for many of them the movie was "personal." Amazing that this film made it to the screen given its honest portrayal of the brutal architects of the Cuban revolution, particularly Hollywood's darlings, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. I can't help but laugh (although I should cry) every time I see the blissfully ignorant adulation for Che and company...perhaps if more people see the movie they might think twice before sporting their ugly mugs on their t-shirts....way to go Andy!
19 of 20 found the following review helpful:
A Carribean Dr ZhivagoNov 29, 2006
By Stephen M. Kerwick
Andy Garcia's Lost City is very much a tour de force on the Cuban Revolution of 1958 and how that country "achieved" the condition it's been in ever since. In this respect, the film compares very well with David Lean's treatment of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. Apart from the obvious differences in time and place, Garcia's work centers its setting on the lost Cuban cabaret scene, with musical and dance numbers that will almost certainly never be matched. This fills the same function as Lean's majestic cinematography of Moscow and the Urals in Zhivago and in each case the focal point really is the film.
That isn't to say though that it is lacking in fine performances. Most of the Hispanic actors other than Garcia may not be particularly familiar to North American audiences, but the acting is excellent in a project where many of them worked for scale plus in a labor of love. As might be expected, director/star Garcia leads the way with a performance full of subtleties of expression that I quite frankly thought was beyond him. By way of comparison, the very best aspects of his performance in the last third of Godfather III are distilled to quality and sensitivity a hundred times better than he showed there.
Ordinarily, I would expect such a fine performance to be a launching pad for many more mature roles than he's played to date, but this doesn't take into account the great risk Garcia took in producing a film hostile to Castro and communists. Undoubtedly this puts him at great risk in the Twenty First Century world of Hollywood, where those figures are considered heroes, if not secular saints. In fact, Garcia is quite open in stating that he was forced to go outside of the normal Hollywood funding sources in order to finance The Lost City. One can only hope that such a finely crafted film and performance will be appropriately recognized and not punished in the Marxist milieu of the American film industry. The Lost City is a product of great courage of conviction, which is rewarded in almost every aspect of the performances.
14 of 14 found the following review helpful:
 Strange Mix, But Absolutely Worth SeeingJun 21, 2006
By OPG
"OPG"
The movie is a strange mix of Casablanca, The Godfather, and any number of Hollywood musicals from the 40's and 50's. This makes sense given that the writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (maybe Cuba's greatest writer) was a huge fan of and liked to write about American movies and Cuban music. His stories are a blend of comedy and sex and violence and almost always about Havana, and he loved to use word-play and puns. Supposedly, he is represented in the movie by the Bill Murray character, which sometimes seems jarring and out of place unless you are familiar with Cabrera Infante - I think he would have loved it. Personally, I like that the movie shows that the Castro revolution was not a "peasant revolution" (as people in the U.S., including some movie critics, seem to believe) but was actually driven and financed by the upper class. I like that it shows Batista's regime in almost as bad a light as Castro's. And I like that it shows Ché Guevara not as some romantic hero but as a ruthless killer for whom "the end justifies the means." And, most of all, the vintage Cuban music by artists like Beny Moré and Bola de Nieve is simply wonderful and wonderfully used throughout the film.
The movie might be about 20 minutes too long and in some scenes the characters tend to talk too much in slogans rather than natural speech. But García wanted to be faithful to Cabrera Infante's script because, as he says, "you don't rewrite Hemingway." (Actually, this is not true: William Faulkner changed much of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not when he adapted it for the movie, and it's a great movie - better than the book.) But anyway, what the hell... Thumbs up for The Lost City! (Ebert and Roper agree!)
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