The Lost City

I took a quick skim over this movie and found it somewhat interesting and decided to give it a shot. The overally storyline covers the time of the final days of Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel Castro. This movie was actually more education (to me) than entertaining, though it is not unentertaining if I’ve led you to believe that.

Because of this movie, it peaked my interest in Cuba and I started reading up the Wikipedia entries of these individuals. Like all communist leaders that came into power, their ideal was just, but then power leads to corruption and this is what ended up happening. Did you know that Fidel Castro graduated from law school with a Doctor of Laws degree and began practicing law in a small partnership in Havana, mostly representing the poor and underprivileged. And the fact that Batista had actually captured Fidel Castro multiple times, but then releasing him.

Though I’m not sure how much truth is in the movie, but it seems that Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries were fighting for a free Cuba and a democratic government. How it ended up becoming a Communist Country was rather weird and unexplained. Batista fled the country on 1/1/1959 and Castro and his men took over. What was interesting was that they banned the saxophone as it was related to something bad which I cannot remember, but she made it sound like it was a tool from the devil.

Official Site
IMDb: 7.9/10 (1,041 votes)
Yahoo! Movie: The Critics: C / Yahoo! Users: B-
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 22% / Average Rating 4.7/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack

Spoilers: (Show)

The story revolves around a cabaret owner named Fico (short for Federico). The movie shows the time between the final days of Batista and the rise of Castro as how the country dramatically changed. A professor of the Havana University had 3 sons, Fico being one of them. One son ended up getting kill trying to liberate the country by attempting to murder Batista. However, he was clear that he wasn’t aligned with Castro, as he believes Castro has other ideas of how to run the country.

Another son ended up joining Castro’s revolutionaries and somehow ended up causing his uncle to either have a heart attack or stroke when he tried to evict him off his own land as the government was taking over. This caused him so much grief, that he ended up killing himself.

Fico’s the only one left and his father suggested that he leave Havana while he still had the chance. I’m not going to bother bringing in the love story, as it wasn’t that important to the storyline, though it would’ve been better for the movie to distinguish more between Fico and the woman, since Fico was the one that had everything taken away from him, while the woman on the other hand, being the widow of a leader who had lost his life trying to liberate Cuba, was named the Widow of the Year and even recieved the chair of the UN.

The ending was satisfactory, though I still have no idea what Bill Murray was doing in the movie.

Also, who was that old guy that was killed when that guy came around the carousel?