Never go to a movie just because it's early

[ritaxis]

Also, is Andy Garcia actually made of soggy cottonwood? Can Angelina Jolie act if she has a script? How did Andy Garcia talk the money people into allowing The Lost City to be made?

I am not talking about the incoherent politics. I expected worse politics than that, actually, and I was prepared to be an anthropologist about it. I am talking about the fact that this movie is right up there with the most boring movies I have ever had to watch all two and a half hours of (no, no, it's just two hours and twenty-three minutes long, sorry, it only felt like it was six hours and forty-two minutes long). I am talking about the weird loose ends and the talkytalkytalk bits where people were supposedly arguing about the life-or-death issues of 1958 in Havana, people, you want to bet they're not going to actually say some damn thing and not just talk like fortune cookies all night? They weren't doing that indirect kind of communication that black folks used to call "signifying." They weren't signifying nothing.

There's good music all through the movie. If someone offers you the soundtrack album for the movie, get it. Just don't bother with the stupid movie. You'll get a bladder infarction.

So the advertising material for the movie leads you to think it's a love poem for the lost Havana of pre-revolutionary Cuba. So why don't we ever see any fucking Havana? We see the inside of the nightclub (which has some temporospatial properties in common with the tardis), the inside of the rich family's house, the presidential palace, and a prison. Where are the streets? The markets? The parks? The rhythm of daily life? Class and culture? Anybody besides this one frankly dysfunctional family?

And can Andy Garcia actually act? Two and almost a half hours of him sitting around looking depressed. He's handsome, but not handsome enough for that. I gather that some guys think Angelina Jolie is hot enough to tolerate sitting around with saline sprayed on her cheeks and a dull expression in her face but I couldn't see it. It was like watching Ingrid Bergman except without the vivacity. (no, all those words are in that sentence on purpose)

Causality? Somewhere over the rainbow, maybe. This movie makes no sense.

And, here's the 64 thousand dollar question:

What the hell was the Bill Murray character even doing in the movie? Who was he? Why was he in Havana? What was his purpose at the nightclub? Why did the voodoo lady warn Angelina Jolie about him? Why were there upper-class looking voodoo guys in the rotunda of what was that building and why were Andy Garcia and Angelina Jolie even there?

It was like -- psychedelic, only less rational and much less fun.

And why didn't the reading of the "Simple Verses" segue into "Guantanamera" which is, after all, only that poem set to highly recognizable music?

Why was this movie allowed to be so long and do so little?

WHy was this movie allowed to have such a stupid story line? To be fair, if the script were any good the story line would probably have been all right.

Oh my dog, I just read where Andy Garcia originally wrote a three hundred and six page script and they trimmed it to one hundred and twenty pages. You think they trimmed the wrong stuff, maybe? Like the stuff that would have made it a story? Why did they leave in all the Yoda talk and posturing and crap?

On other fronts, I wrote 1.5K words today and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for this thing. Hey Julia, you know how you frequently worry that something is too smutty and it might backfire on you? Well, sometimes I have the opposite problem, with stories like this one.

Comments

[julesjones]

What, it hasn't got enough smut to appeal to the erotic romance markets? :-)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, I thought that was what the story was. Then I realized the characters were teenagers. Bad enough. And then I realized that the POV character has had some seriously bad experiences, and that "erotic romance" is really problematic under the circumstances.

You know that thing where your characters are kind of seriously messed up, but there's a certain light-heartedness they bring to their strange little escapades and romances? I think the thing that makes those stories work is the interaction between those things. Something else has to work here, and I don't know what it is. It's one of the few times I've ever undertaken to write something where I don't know the end, and the others have tended to founder. If I weren't so thickheaded right now I'd be working on better thought-out stuff.