For a tribute to a lost city, Garcia has made a lost film.
The Lost City (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:82
Fresh:21
Rotten:61
Average Rating:4.7/10
Consensus: Its heart is in the right place, but what starts as a promising exercise devolves into an overlong, unevenly directed disappointment.
Theatrical Release:2006
Box Office: $2,434,066
Synopsis: The Lost City is actor/director Andy Garcia’s bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full... The Lost City is actor/director Andy Garcia’s bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full tropical bloom during the late 1950s. Where Buena Vista Social Club commemorated an era of Cuban music before it slipped away, City captures the moment where performers like Beny More electrified audiences with that rhythm, a rhythm that made Havana the Pearl of the Antilles. Scripted by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whom critic David Thomson likened to Jorge-Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marques, City builds like a vivid tropical fever-dream; a love story and revolution set to music. Centered in El Tropico, a nightclub roughly modeled after Havana’s famous Tropicana, proprietor Fico Fellove tries to hold his family and club together as the dictator Batista’s reign of terror comes crashing down around him. Ultimately, to survive, Fico must leave everything he loves. City is every immigrant’s story—a paean to lost culture. It’s a time and place in history that still lives vividly in the imagination of the exile. And as conjured by Infante and Garcia, this is a land where rhythm can’t be exiled. You can leave the country, but the rhythm will never leave you. Along with its original score, City sings with 40 different songs. Mambos, chachachas, rumbas, toques, danzones, boleros. Together they create an oral history of Cuba. They are love songs to an indomitable culture—a culture that reveals itself in music, but also in dance, in poetry, in Catholicism, in African and European heritages, in Revolution, in tobacco, in Santeria and the azure sky and water that surround the island. These are the residents of The Lost City. -- © Lions Gate Films [More]
Starring: Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Inés Sastre
Starring: Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Inés Sastre, Jsu Garcia
Director: Andy Garcia
Director: Andy Garcia
Screenwriter: G. Cabrera Infante
Producer: Frank Mancuso
Studio: Lions Gate Films
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Reviews for The Lost City
...plays like a confusing and inferior Caribbean analog to The Godfather, without anything like the narrative drive of Coppola's film.
Garcia needed better guiding hands and eyes in the editing room to jettison the many parts that bog down the story.
Somehow simultaneously too much and not enough. At 143 minutes, it well overstays its welcome as a movie, but with a little more fleshing out it might have worked as a miniseries.
Even though the movie is made with an abundance of heart, it's sad to report that the final result has only a weak pulse.
As a director, Garcia is such a sucker for gratuitous crosscutting and glossily elliptical filmmaking that viewers can be forgiven for mistaking Lost City for a 143-minute montage sequence.
It's the sort of epic that aspires to tell Cuba's modern political history and celebrate its people without introducing us to a single believable character.
Our cue that Garcia is acting is when he furiously bats his eyes in his smoldering emotional scenes. Either that, or he's allergic to the smoke from all those Cuban cigars.
... the film seems like a mini-series edited to feature length without time for character development.
There may be a good film here, but it struggles to break free of the cumbersome framework.
The film suggests a dutiful if clunky pastiche of The Godfather and a right-wing Reds, with Fellove and his brothers and parents representing a spectrum of possible responses to the Cuban revolution.
Feels like the distillation of countless conversations and family legends, rehearsed from time immemorial by Cubans who fled their homeland and sought to re-create it in their memories.
Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.
Garcia's overindulgence is punishing but I didn't come to the theatre to be soaked in soap opera sentiment.
Book-ended by fine songs; in between, Garcia offers more than two hours of clumsy Coppola/Scorsese karaoke...
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