Bitter Sugar
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Movie Reviews of Bitter Sugar
Movie Review: Politically a bit simplistic; enjoy with a grain of salt
Summary: 3 Stars
1. This is a good (not great movie)2. To enjoy without bias, ignore the reviews (rhetoric) of ignorant Americans who have never been to Cuba and the "reviews" or better said - EXTREME bias of the ultra-rightist Cuban exiles who wish it was still 1958 when they prostituted themselves and the country to American corporations in exchange for being a national elite (while the MAJORITY of Cuban peasants starved most of the year)
3. Who am I to say this? Someone knowledgable on film, born of Cuban parents - someone who has actually BEEN to and SEEN for MYSELF the situation in Cuba, and someone who did a master's thesis on Cuban development and studied/researched ALL views on the subject for 3 years.
P>PS The Bushes and Reagans have been responsible for killing several thousand times more people than the big bad boogeyman Fidel. You all don't want democracy for Cuba, you want your beach houses and black servants back!
Movie Review: Very disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
If you want to see a totally plastic piece of propaganda, don't miss Bitter Sugar. The two protagonists are not so much actors as models and pieces of the film touched on being soft porn. A far better film to see is the story about Sandoval, the famous trumpet player who, with the help of Dizzy Gillespie risked everything to escape Cuba, in order to play the jazz he loves (even listening to American jazz such as Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, etc is illegal in Cuba, as it is not 'pro-revolutionary'). A few years ago I was traveling and doing aid work in Ctrl America and heading over to Cuba to investigate what Cuban life is actually like. Being from New Zealand I had often heard Cuba romanticised by people, I too had a naive romanticised image of the country. When I arrived it soon became clear that I was in the most controlled, propaganda-driven country I had ever placed foot in. Following my trip to Cuba I met a gay hairdresser in El Salvador who knew Cuba well and joked that Cuba was the only country in the world where one can sleep with a doctor or an engineer for a dollar-a-day. Sadly this joke sounded a disturbing ring of truth. There is no intellectual freedom in Cuba - yes, university is free in a financial sense but only as long as you get with `Castro's program'. When some people spoke to me about Castro, instead of using his name in speech a stroke of the chin was made, in the belief that if people around them heard what they were saying there would be trouble. In Cuba trouble often means jail. I met an old man who spent four years locked up for `eating beef' (only tourists are allowed to eat beef). He used to work in a hotel restaurant and was caught pocketing left-over meat off the plates of customers who had not finished their meals. The film 'I am Cuba' is a fascinating piece of propaganda from the other side, filmed with funding and help from the Soviet Union around the time of the Bay of Pigs crisis. Batista's Havana was hell for the Cuban people but Castro's Havana is no better. Unfortunately the acting done by the two main characters in this film is horrific and the film moves at the pace of a snail. As it is based on a true story that could have made a great film to illustrate a depressing truth about Cuba, it is a disappointment.Movie Review: Lack of depth
Summary: 2 Stars
This dominican telenovela, sorry, "movie", is unfortunately an heavy-weighted political manifesto which lacks of subtility ans psychology. Two parts are typical in this sense: the police scene with the young brother (associating "freedom" and "listening to north american pop music") and the final one, quite ridiculous for me, but certainly fantasmatic when the sun warms some white hairless heads near the playa Giron, sorry, Bay of Pigs monument in the Calle Ocho. A recent cuban movie, Life is to Whistle, was as critical as Bitter Sugar, but expressed its ideas in a more inspired and cultured way. The director seems to ignore that Cuba is not Sweden (or perhaps it's another fantasm), since all the characters, including our "heroes", are blancos como el coco.Movie Review: Bitter SUgar
Summary: 2 Stars
This is my favorite Cuban movie and I ordered two of the same movie and I have only received one to this date...Movie Review: Disingenuous of AMAZON
Summary: 1 Stars
I ordered this film in the expectation that the one or two glowing reviews that came up first in the Amazon reviews were accurate or dependable in some way. After having seen the film, I realize that this is another piece of propaganda from the exCuban fugitive community in Miami. Simplistic, unrealistic, inaccurate, and misinformed did not compensate for the "torrid" scenes of simulated intercourse. Cuba is a catastrophe, of that there is no doubt. The reasons however fall on all of us, the blockade, the abject fear of the spectre of socialism and social justice, and one of the unluckiest political struggles of modern times. I resent, however, that the customer reviews in Amazon.com can be so manipulated by a small group who would willingly starve their own relatives to fit their agenda.