As Good As It Gets

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

British mercenary Sean Connery arrives in Havana on the eve of the Revolution of 1959, hired by the Batista regime to defeat it. How he assesses the Batista regime is done largely by facial cues to his military guide, but we are (somehow) given to believe he sees the Batista regime is about to collapse. He finds a former teenage lover of his there (Brooke Adams)who is now married to the son of cigar-factory wealth (Chris Sarandon) Does she escape the revolution? Do we really want her to? I liked its brightly-lit brittle realist Havana hotel scenes, but I liked them in HAVANA with Robert Redford even more. In the simplest old-Hollywood terms, winners are winners, losers, losers. Castro obviously wins. You don't have a major star like Connery walk away from the people we ourselves are supposed to sympathize with, but do we really expect him to join the Revolution? Has Lester ever been interviewed about this film anomaly? I wonder where Connery stood/stands on the Cuban Revolution, & Cuba now, likewise Redford.

This movie is set during the build up to the Cuban revolution in 1959.Former British Major Robert Dapes arrives in Cuba.He is there to train the corrupt General Batista's army against Castro's guerrillas.He also meets his former lover, Alaxandra Lopez de Pulido, who's married now to a man called Juan Pulido.But the old love still hasn't died.Cuba from 1979 is directed by Richard Lester.Sean Connery, who turned 80 earlier this week, is brilliant as Robert Dapes.There's a little bit of James Bond in that character, I noticed.Brooke Adams does very fine job as Alexandra.Chris Sarandon is great as her lousy husband Juan.Jack Weston is terrific as Jack Gutman.Hector Elizondo gives a great performance as Capt.Raphael Ramirez.Denholm Elliot is very good as Donald Skinner.Martin Balsam is marvelous as Gen. Bello.Those scenes where there's some bloodshed are the most memorable.In one of them people are dining together in their finest outfits and the gunmen arrive.In the end we see some actual footage of the revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro.Not a masterpiece but a movie worth checking out.

As a connoisseur of very bad cinema, I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. For all involved, this star-studded catastrophe must either have been a desperate misery, or a sad, resigned joke to make.Somehow permitted to be shot on location in legitimately atmospheric locations in Havana, this turkey seems to have been enacted within an alternate universe, where each and every person is, for lack of a more eloquent designation, flat-out stupid.Nearly every shot and line of dialog contains truly jaw-dropping anachronisms, incongruities, and incomprehensible plot gaps.The characters, each the epitome of stereotyping (as well as typecasting) are quite completely air-headed. With the lonely exception of Sean Connery, whose apparently sincere effort sadly amounted to no particular improvement to the results, all the actors as well as the writers and director phoned in their work, apparently via low-fidelity satellite phones.Someday I hope to read someone's memoirs about the making of _Cuba_. Meanwhile I'd actually recommend it to anyone with an appreciation for Bad Cinema. It richly earns my vote for inclusion in the list of 50 worst films of all time; the two stars in my 2/10 rating are due to the true amusement value of pretentious cinematic drek of the very first caliber.

There have been many stories of people going to countries on the eve of a revolution and finding out why there's a revolution. "Cuba" is kept afloat by strong performances. Sean Connery plays Maj. Robert Dapes, sent to Havana to help Batista fight the revolutionary army, but he soon figures out that the revolution is clearly going to succeed. In the process, he meets Alexandra (Brooke Adams), an old flame now married to a philandering cigar factory owner.I guess that overall, there's nothing here that we haven't seen before. But the way that they filmed it gives one the feeling of a society about to explode. Also starring Jack Weston, Hector Elizondo, Denholm Elliott, Martin Balsam, Chris Sarandon, Lonette McKee, and Alejandro Rey (aka Carlos Ramirez on "The Flying Nun"). Worth seeing.One more thing that I have to ask is whether or not Sydney Pollack remade this as "Havana". The two movies don't have the exact same plots, but they're certainly pretty close.