"The Twilight Zone" is often lauded for its social commentary; it condemned things like racism and nationalism and beauty standards, even as the world around it failed to follow suit. It was a bold and innovative show, but it was also churning out up to 37 episodes a season, so a few clunkers were all but guaranteed. Such was the case with season 3's "The Mirror," an episode that is very much not ahead of its time. Instead, it's perfectly in line with mainstream political opinion in 1961, and it makes for a somewhat dull, grating viewing experience as a result.
"The Mirror" focuses on a revolutionary figure named Ramos Clemente, who has just overthrown the previous government of a unspecified Central American country and is looking forward to his glorious reign. Although the episode does not call this man Fidel Castro, he's clearly based on him. He's played by Peter Falk,...
"The Mirror" focuses on a revolutionary figure named Ramos Clemente, who has just overthrown the previous government of a unspecified Central American country and is looking forward to his glorious reign. Although the episode does not call this man Fidel Castro, he's clearly based on him. He's played by Peter Falk,...
- 1/21/2024
- by Michael Boyle
- Slash Film
For those who haven’t visited Havana and traversed seafront promenade Avenida de Maceo from old Havana to the central business district of Vedado and then on to upscale Miramar, taking in the myriad stories of grandeur, genteel decay, resignation, resilience, and optimism, while hearing strains of rumba, jazz, and nueva trova, and seeing the murals of ‘Commandante’ (Fidel Castro) or ‘Che’, there is an alternative.
Books.
There is a wide array of books, both fiction and non-fiction, by authors new and old, known and unknown, that bring Havana, and Cuba, to life from the times of soldier-turned-dictator Fulgencio Batista to Castro and further.
The focus, though, is more on the days of Mafia dominance, Castro and his revolution, and the Cuban Missile Crisis – the first time the world was on the brink of a nuclear war.
And they span genres from gritty stories of life to crime noir and police procedurals,...
Books.
There is a wide array of books, both fiction and non-fiction, by authors new and old, known and unknown, that bring Havana, and Cuba, to life from the times of soldier-turned-dictator Fulgencio Batista to Castro and further.
The focus, though, is more on the days of Mafia dominance, Castro and his revolution, and the Cuban Missile Crisis – the first time the world was on the brink of a nuclear war.
And they span genres from gritty stories of life to crime noir and police procedurals,...
- 3/26/2023
- by News Bureau
- GlamSham
One Way or AnotherTo this day, the iconography of the Cuban Revolution is usually thought of in regards to the polarizing grandeur of its historic political figures and the effervescent popular gatherings around La Habana in the 1960s. Be it in social studies textbooks, historiographical documentaries, or newspaper front covers all around the world, what seemed to be a canonical portrayal of the revolution was cemented early on. This was a carefully constructed version of Cuba built around the values and ideals of the newly established socialist project. But beyond this intellectualized conception of what the island ought to portray, laid a human core: an erratic collection of subjectivities in which the triumphs and limitations of Castro’s Cuba were experienced differently each day. That “other Cuba,” the one rarely broadcasted and always seen from a distance, was precisely the setting around which legendary filmmaker Sara Gomez built her sagacious body of work.
- 11/15/2021
- MUBI
The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.The Battle of AlgiersCommenting on the role of cinema in his native Cuba, director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea once wrote that films should not just add to people’s enjoyment of life, but also “contribute in the most effective way possible to elevating [their] revolutionary consciousness.” Gutiérrez Alea was writing in 1982 (the words are cribbed from his essay “The Viewer’s Dialectic”), over twenty years since Fidel Castro ousted Fulgencio Batista and brought an end to the US-backed dictatorship in the island. But the idea that cinema can serve a higher function that mere entertainment—the belief that films should both educate and agitate spectators—is as old as the medium itself. Lenin once called cinema “the most important of all the arts;” Trotsky “a weapon for collective education.” For Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés,...
- 6/7/2021
- MUBI
After making his debut in 2007 with the impressive drama Shotgun Stories, Jeff Nichols went on a tear in the first half of the following decade with Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special, and Loving. While it’s been a few years since we’ve heard from the Arkansas-born director, he’s now finally returning with his sixth feature.
Variety reports he’ll be reteaming with his Midnight Special star Adam Driver for Yankee Comandante. Based on a 2012 New Yorker article by David Grann (author of the source material for James Gray’s The Lost City of Z and Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon), the story follows the two people who rose to the rank of comandante during the Cuban Revolution, one being Che Guevara and the other William Alexander Morgan, a man from Ohio, who Driver will presumably play.
“Morgan helped Fidel Castro and the Cuban rebels overthrow Fulgencio Batista,...
Variety reports he’ll be reteaming with his Midnight Special star Adam Driver for Yankee Comandante. Based on a 2012 New Yorker article by David Grann (author of the source material for James Gray’s The Lost City of Z and Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon), the story follows the two people who rose to the rank of comandante during the Cuban Revolution, one being Che Guevara and the other William Alexander Morgan, a man from Ohio, who Driver will presumably play.
“Morgan helped Fidel Castro and the Cuban rebels overthrow Fulgencio Batista,...
- 4/30/2020
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Adam Driver will reunite with his Loving and Midnight Special director Jeff Nichols for Yankee Comandante, Deadline has confirmed. The film will be an adaptation of a New Yorker article by David Grann that follows two men who rose to the rank of Comandante during the Cuban Revolution.
The article is about William Alexander Morgan, an American from Ohio who helped Fidel Castro and the Cuban rebels overthrow Fulgencio Batista. He’d reached the status of comandante, the sole foreigner other than Argentinian Che Guevara to be so highly regarded. Soon after, Morgan’s motives became suspect, and he was imprisoned. He faced a firing squad, charged with working for U.S. intelligence. At the same time, his exploits as a rebel soldier led J. Edgar Hoover and everyone else scrambling to sort out his motives and who he was working for.
Yankee Comandante is separate from Focus Features and...
The article is about William Alexander Morgan, an American from Ohio who helped Fidel Castro and the Cuban rebels overthrow Fulgencio Batista. He’d reached the status of comandante, the sole foreigner other than Argentinian Che Guevara to be so highly regarded. Soon after, Morgan’s motives became suspect, and he was imprisoned. He faced a firing squad, charged with working for U.S. intelligence. At the same time, his exploits as a rebel soldier led J. Edgar Hoover and everyone else scrambling to sort out his motives and who he was working for.
Yankee Comandante is separate from Focus Features and...
- 4/30/2020
- by Dino-Ray Ramos
- Deadline Film + TV
Adam Driver is set to re-team with his director on “Midnight Special,” Jeff Nichols, for a film about the Cuban Revolution called “Yankee Comandante,” an individual with knowledge of the project told TheWrap.
Nichols is writing and directing the movie that 30West and Imperative Entertainment are in discussions with studios after the package was shopped to distributors.
“Yankee Comandante” is based on a 2012 David Grann article published in The New Yorker about an American, William Alexander Morgan, who rose to the rank of comandante alongside Che Guevara in the 1960s during the Cuban Revolution that helped bring Fidel Castro to power. Here’s the official logline:
Also Read: Adam Driver Walks Off NPR's 'Fresh Air' to Avoid Listening to Himself Act and Sing
Two people rose to the rank of Comandante in the Cuban Revolution. One was Che Guevara. The other was a man from Ohio; this is his story.
Nichols is writing and directing the movie that 30West and Imperative Entertainment are in discussions with studios after the package was shopped to distributors.
“Yankee Comandante” is based on a 2012 David Grann article published in The New Yorker about an American, William Alexander Morgan, who rose to the rank of comandante alongside Che Guevara in the 1960s during the Cuban Revolution that helped bring Fidel Castro to power. Here’s the official logline:
Also Read: Adam Driver Walks Off NPR's 'Fresh Air' to Avoid Listening to Himself Act and Sing
Two people rose to the rank of Comandante in the Cuban Revolution. One was Che Guevara. The other was a man from Ohio; this is his story.
- 4/30/2020
- by Brian Welk
- The Wrap
It’s a “Midnight Special” reunion! As announced today, Adam Driver and director Jeff Nichols will reunite for the upcoming adaptation of “Yankee Comandante.” According to Variety, the drama is a true-to-life Cuban Revolution story based on the 2012 story in The New Yorker of the same name by David Grann. Nichols is both writing and directing the film, which is his first feature since another true story, “Loving” from 2016, which earned Ruth Negga an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Driver previously starred for Nichols alongside Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Sam Shepard in “Midnight Special,” which, like “Loving,” also released in 2016. “Yankee Comandante” will star Driver as a U.S. citizen from Ohio who fought in the Cuban Revolution. Like Che Guevara, William Alexander Morgan rose to power, helping to drive the Cuban army through enemy lines against then-Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, and helping to secure Fidel Castro’s victory.
Driver previously starred for Nichols alongside Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Sam Shepard in “Midnight Special,” which, like “Loving,” also released in 2016. “Yankee Comandante” will star Driver as a U.S. citizen from Ohio who fought in the Cuban Revolution. Like Che Guevara, William Alexander Morgan rose to power, helping to drive the Cuban army through enemy lines against then-Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, and helping to secure Fidel Castro’s victory.
- 4/30/2020
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Steven Soderbergh's Che (2008), shown as The Argentine and Guerrilla, are playing in June and July in the United States.Half way through Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half-hour epic Che, ABC News journalist Lisa Howard asks the Argentine doctor-turned-revolutionary how he feels about “being a symbol.” The question ricochets off the sleek interiors of a New York room, 1964—the year Guevara addressed the United Nations on the threat U.S. imperialism posed to world peace. But in Soderbergh’s biopic, it plays over images from January 2, 1959—the day Che, having conquered the city of Santa Clara, raced to Havana to reunite with Fidel Castro and celebrate “the end of the war, and the start of the [Cuban] revolution.” It’s a choice that makes for a peculiar dialectic: a man who by the 1960s had already become a global icon...
- 6/15/2019
- MUBI
Film Review: Che
The irrepressibly multi-tasking Steven Soderbergh has now set his roving sights on Latin American revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, with mostly positive results. If this earnest, two-part biopic with a total running time of 268 minutes sometimes lacks cinematic flair, the straight-ahead, chronologically-driven film will inform and, to a somewhat lesser extent, excite viewers everywhere.
It's hard to imagine how the two-parter idea is going to strike distributors and exhibitors, however, and, since the film lacked any opening or closing credits at its Cannes premiere, it may very well be that it is destined for a venue like HBO or Showtime. In any case, ancillary sales should be excellent in all markets.
The two parts are radically different in subject-matter and, a bit less so, in form. It's clear that the overriding structural idea is that of a mirror image: Part One, much more humorous, concerns the victory over Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and is all up, up, up, while Part Two is about Guevara's participation in the failed uprising in Bolivia and is all down, down, down.
In Cuba, Fidel and Che are loved by the peasantry and become god-like figures; in Bolivia, Che, forced to use an assumed name, is frustratingly unable to rally the people to his side and is hunted like an animal by the Bolivian army. In the most powerful segment of the entire film, he is finally murdered after being betrayed by one of his beloved campesinos.
The heart of the film is the robust yet subtle portrayal of the asthma-stricken revolutionary by Del Toro. He is an idealist who obviously really believes in the possibility of equality between human beings, but Soderbergh is mostly content to show repeated examples of his benevolence rather than develop its potentially complex contradictions.
Both parts are organized in a flattening, strictly chronological manner, with dozens upon dozens of intertitles that fix time and place, though Part One is also interspersed with a post-revolution, black-and-white interview with a North American journalist which adds Che's political perspectives. Scenes set in the United Nations, where Che delivers a firebrand speech, are among the best in this part.
Part Two seems to go on forever, with tiny, doomed, most indistinguishable skirmishes following one after the other (this part could use some serious trimming). Yet it's inherently more interesting than its counterpart because it is, first of all, played in a tragic rather than triumphant key, and second, because the story it documents is much less well-known.
Some minor things may annoy some audience members. While Matt Damon's one-minute part as a gringo missionary is serviceable, nevertheless his sudden appearance in a film filled with mostly unknown actors comes as a laugh-producing shock. Franka Potente has a small role as a guerrilla in Bolivia and, dubbed into Spanish, seems utterly uncomfortable in every scene. Latin American sources have told this reviewer that the Puerto-Rican born Del Toro doesn't even attempt to reproduce Che's trademark Argentinian accent in Spanish. But of course these will be slight or invisible flaws for the vast majority of those who will see this film.
All in all, it's a highly worthwhile, professionally-accomplished project, but in its obsessive devotion to precise documentation, the film forgets to inspire.
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Elvira Minguez, Jorge Perugorria, Edgar Ramirez, Victor Rasuk, Franka Potente, Matt Damon. Director: Steven Soderbergh. Screenwriters: Peter Buchman . Producers: Laura Bickford, Benicio Del Toro. Director of Photography: Peter Andrews. Production designer: Antxon Gomez. Costume designer: Bina Daigeler. Editor: Pablo Zumarraga
Production Companies: Laura Bickford Productions, Morena Films
Sales: Wild Bunch
No MPAA rating. Part 1, 137 minutes; Part 2, 131 minutes...
It's hard to imagine how the two-parter idea is going to strike distributors and exhibitors, however, and, since the film lacked any opening or closing credits at its Cannes premiere, it may very well be that it is destined for a venue like HBO or Showtime. In any case, ancillary sales should be excellent in all markets.
The two parts are radically different in subject-matter and, a bit less so, in form. It's clear that the overriding structural idea is that of a mirror image: Part One, much more humorous, concerns the victory over Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and is all up, up, up, while Part Two is about Guevara's participation in the failed uprising in Bolivia and is all down, down, down.
In Cuba, Fidel and Che are loved by the peasantry and become god-like figures; in Bolivia, Che, forced to use an assumed name, is frustratingly unable to rally the people to his side and is hunted like an animal by the Bolivian army. In the most powerful segment of the entire film, he is finally murdered after being betrayed by one of his beloved campesinos.
The heart of the film is the robust yet subtle portrayal of the asthma-stricken revolutionary by Del Toro. He is an idealist who obviously really believes in the possibility of equality between human beings, but Soderbergh is mostly content to show repeated examples of his benevolence rather than develop its potentially complex contradictions.
Both parts are organized in a flattening, strictly chronological manner, with dozens upon dozens of intertitles that fix time and place, though Part One is also interspersed with a post-revolution, black-and-white interview with a North American journalist which adds Che's political perspectives. Scenes set in the United Nations, where Che delivers a firebrand speech, are among the best in this part.
Part Two seems to go on forever, with tiny, doomed, most indistinguishable skirmishes following one after the other (this part could use some serious trimming). Yet it's inherently more interesting than its counterpart because it is, first of all, played in a tragic rather than triumphant key, and second, because the story it documents is much less well-known.
Some minor things may annoy some audience members. While Matt Damon's one-minute part as a gringo missionary is serviceable, nevertheless his sudden appearance in a film filled with mostly unknown actors comes as a laugh-producing shock. Franka Potente has a small role as a guerrilla in Bolivia and, dubbed into Spanish, seems utterly uncomfortable in every scene. Latin American sources have told this reviewer that the Puerto-Rican born Del Toro doesn't even attempt to reproduce Che's trademark Argentinian accent in Spanish. But of course these will be slight or invisible flaws for the vast majority of those who will see this film.
All in all, it's a highly worthwhile, professionally-accomplished project, but in its obsessive devotion to precise documentation, the film forgets to inspire.
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Elvira Minguez, Jorge Perugorria, Edgar Ramirez, Victor Rasuk, Franka Potente, Matt Damon. Director: Steven Soderbergh. Screenwriters: Peter Buchman . Producers: Laura Bickford, Benicio Del Toro. Director of Photography: Peter Andrews. Production designer: Antxon Gomez. Costume designer: Bina Daigeler. Editor: Pablo Zumarraga
Production Companies: Laura Bickford Productions, Morena Films
Sales: Wild Bunch
No MPAA rating. Part 1, 137 minutes; Part 2, 131 minutes...
- 5/22/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Costner Eyes Musical Departure
Hollywood star Kevin Costner is planning to adapt a story about Cuban rulers Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro - for a musical extravaganza. According to New York gossip columnist Cindy Adams, the Open Range hunk will take on producing and writing duties for the Broadway, Manhattan, bound project. Although no official opening date has been slated, sources close to the JFK actor believe the proposed play is already attracting theatrical and public interest. Costner is currently filming The Upside of Anger alongside Joan Allen and Evan Rachel Wood.
- 9/12/2003
- WENN
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